Flight to Survival: Wloclawek - Warszawa - Czestochowa ... Eretz Yisrael by Peninah Cypkewicz-Rosin, translated by Sarah and Mordehai Kopfstein, and Josef Rosin

    This was my favorite of all the yizkor books I've read, mainly because it continues onward until she makes it to Israel and has a family there, so it is a very happy ending. In her memoir, Peninah recalls how no one had any idea in 1940 and even 1941 what was in store--it was generally thought that there would be pogroms and killings here and there, but no one at the time imagined the scale of slaughter that was coming. Peninah arrived to Czenstochowa at the end of 1941, about a year and a half after my grandpa's family. She says that Czenstochowa had a population of about 28,000 in 1939, of which one in five were Jewish. When she arrived, the Judenrat was already up and running, and the ghetto was still physically open to the rest of the city, and while it was forbidden for Poles to stop and shop at Jewish stores in the ghetto, that rule was often broken.

    Like my grandfather, Peninah attributes so much of her reason for survival on luck. In one case, she was at selection on September 22nd, 1942, when she was un-selected as "not needed," Yet moments later, Degenhart, the commander of the "action," called her back and said to the SS man that perhaps they would need her. It was impossible for Jews to understand what was real and what wasn't. Around the time of her selection, Peninah recalls that the Jewish intelligentsia were gathered and told that a deal had been reached to send them to Israel. Instead, they were taken to the Jewish cemetery and shot.

    The most amazing part of the book for me was Peninah's description of an event I already knew about from my grandfather. He had told us about how he had been digging a tunnel through a bunker to reach outside the walls of the ghetto. But that while he was at work with his brothers, the Germans surrounded the Jews in the bunker, who tried to use the tunnel. The Germans knew about it and were waiting at the other end, where they massacred the Jews as they came through the tunnel. Peninah provides a date for that event: June 25, 1945, as the ghetto was liquidated. She even writes the address of the bunker: Nadzhechna 88. Apparently, Avraham Zilberstein told Peninah that 40 people had gathered in the bunker and planned to throw a grenade at the Nazis while others escaped through the tunnel to the Polish side of town that connected into a deserted shop near a German sentry post, which they would then attack, taking the sentries' guns and break into the ghetto and set everything on fire. But at about mid-day, after the day shift and the night shift switched, the Germans came and killed nearly everyone involved in the plan. This is detailed on pages 88-90 and 137. On the earlier pages, she writes:

On June 25, 1943, Germans surrounded the ghetto. This was preceded by two weeks of tension, alarms and standbys in the underground. On that morning a standby and call up of the members had also been declared. About 40 people gathered in the central bunker at Nadzhechna No 88. The plan, according to Avraham Zilberstein ... was that in case of an Action or detection of the bunker, the Germans were to be stopped by throwing a grenade at them. At the same time we were to get into the passage and crawl through the tunnel to its exit at the Polish side of the town that was camouflaged in a deserted shop of light drinks near the house of the German sentry post. We were to then attach the post by taking the sentries guns, and breaking through into the ghetto from the outside, setting fire to everything possible and urging the ghetto population to escape....

 Suddenly, at about 10:00 AM, we heard footsteps and knocks at the door above. It was clear the Germans were looking for the entrance to the bunker. Tenson was great and we waited to see what the Germans' next step would be, but then at 11:00 AM it became quiet. Our guards reported that the workers from the nightshift had entered the ghetto, the dayshift went out to work, and that the Germans had left. We were relieved and waited until 1:30 PM, at which time the standby state was cancelled."

At that point, Peninah describes hearing the outcry from her point of view, and picks it up from the action in the bunker on page 137 from the point of view of Avraham Silberstein:

 He said that on June 25th and 26th of 1943, the day of the liquidation of the Small Ghetto, one group of underground members went to the bunker at Garncharska St. 40. Their plan was to leave through the tunnel in this bunker, to the polish side, and then continue on to the partisans in Konitspol. Avraham was in that group. When, after crawling to the outside, he suddenly heard shots. At that moment he realized they had been betrayed and that the Germans knew all about the exit of the tunnel and were waiting for them. Since he was last in line, he stayed put, clinging to the wall beneath the exit, so that the Germans could not see him. They also lit up the tunnel and shot into it, but fortunately Avraham was not hurt. 

Outside a battle raged with unequal forces with most of the underground members killed. In that battle one German was killed and a few wounded. Only one member of the group managed to escape to Konitspol under a smoke screen from a grenade he threw. Avraham stayed in the tunnel until he was sure that the Germans had left and then went out to the Polish side and continued to Zharky." 

 My grandfather said the following about the same tunnels:

... so me and my brothers and some other people were very seriously considering to dig in a big tunnel, and this was a long tunnel, so went into another house where the other people lived, and went in downstairs, in the cellar, and we started to dig a tunnel. We had no--we're not prepared to dig tunnels. We needed materials to support the earth, and that they're done. And we dug pail by pail of sand every time we came home from work, at first, we went to HASAG every day to work until they made it permanent. So whenever we came home from work, after an afternoon, we went into the--or Sunday or Saturday, dig the tunnel. We dig the tunnel, and we hoped that when we have the tunnel finished, if something happens, we knew that sooner or later, they're going to liquidate it. They're going to liquidate that ghetto. So when we find out that they're going to liquidate the ghetto, we were going to start make use of that tunnel. That tunnel led us to what's more, called the manhole, you know, was covered with a [garbled].

So when we heard that they're going to liquidate together, we're going to do that. In the meantime, they got a hold of us, and they put us into the HASAG to work. But when they liquidated the ghetto later, after we were already at work, we heard from other people that came later, that other people made use of that tunnel, not us. But everyone that was in a tunnel, the Nazis were standing with a machine gun from the distance, and didn't say nothing, and they made everybody come out bang, like rats coming out from the tunnel everybody was killed. Had we not been stuck, put to work there first, maybe I wouldn't be talking to you today. You could never plan nothing you didn't know. So luck played for us in this way, you can call it.

The summer of 1943 would mean the end of the Jewish ghetto and the transfer of all Jews to concentration camps, including Hasag, also located in Czestochowa. On July 20, 1943, all the Jewish policemen and their families were taken to the Jewish cemetery and murdered.

    Peninah was transferred to Hasag, where my grandfather was forced to work, and also described Director Luth as a more or less decent man. He apparently stopped the prisoners from being forced to wear striped pajamas like in other camps, and that conditions were bad, but better than in other camps. She describes different departments of the camp on pages 97-98. Unlike my grandfather, Peninah was lucky to be liberated from Czestochowa instead of deported into Germany. However, they both would have experienced the arrival of SS men weeks before liberation who took everyone out to run around the yard several times each morning, and generally escalated the mistreatment of the prisoners.

American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750 - 1804 by Alan Taylor

    American Revolutions was a creative telling of American History from 1750 to 1804, which told the story of the split of the Thirteen Colonies from Britain in chapters like "land," "allies," and "wests" that sought to thematically cover the Revolution while also moving chronologically. That was cool. Otherwise, the book was just a solid survey of the American Revolution period that was pretty good. It felt like a very undergraduate book, and, at least for the purposes of this unit I was doing on the American Revolution, it worked as a reminder book to reorient me to what I already knew, but was otherwise pretty basic.

    One thing that is clear about the American Revolution to me is that it is in large part an issue of the victors not getting the spoils they expected. American colonists fought the French and Indian War, but didn't get what they expected. They thought that victory would mean new lands to settle west of the Appalachians and in Canada, but they were deemed outlaws for settling that land. But British law failed to stop them. New York's population doubled from 80,000 to 168,000 from 1761 to 1771, mostly growing on the frontier. North Carolina's population grew sixfold from 1750 to 1775 and Georgia grew by a factor of fourteen. Colonists were having lots of babies and creating a huge demographic pressure that pushed up against the Appalachian boundary that was once a physical boundary, later a diplomatic boundary with the French, and by the mid-1760s, was just a flimsy internal boundary that could no longer be enforced.

    While most American focus is on why the Thirteen Colonies rebelled, it is just as interesting to learn about why the other colonies in Canada and the Caribbean didn't rebel. In Canada, it was mainly because Britain granted the French new liberties that had never been granted before in the Protestant empire: allowing Catholics to own land and serve in government. They also enlarged Quebec to extend south to the Ohio River and west to the Mississippi. With so many fewer people (so no demographic pressures to settle), the French-Canadians didn't have much reason in rebel. Their lives got better when they entered the British empire, since they entered a republic where they could participate in government and were enriched by entering a larger, freer trade zone. In the Caribbean, they didn't rebel mostly because they still needed the Redcoats to provide security to keep down the slave population. Whereas slaves made up about 40% of people in the southern portion of the Thirteen Colonies, they made up over 90% in the Caribbean, well past the threshold that the slavers could manage without government help.

    So, it looks like there were six big laws that connect the post-French and Indian War revenue-raising attempts to the Revolutionary War protest against "taxation without representation." They are the Sugar Act, the Currency Act, the Quartering Act, the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and the Intolerable Acts. After the French and Indian War, the British intended to maintain a 10,000-strong army in North America. In order to raise the revenue to pay for that army (as well as to pay down the national debt that had ballooned during the war), the British taxed sugar exports from the Caribbean. This hit at the same time as a post-war economic downturn in North America, and led to boycotts.  At the same time, Britain his the colonies with the Currency Act of 1764, which more tightly controlled the production of paper money, exacerbating the economic downturn by essentially doing the 18th century version of a modern-day Fed raising interest rates. Then, in 1765, the Quartering Act required colonial authorities to pay the costs of housing and feeding British soldiers, and was resisted and circumvented in all colonies except Pennsylvania. In the same year, the Stamp Act directly taxed Americans and required that basically all printed materials be printed on specific paper from London that was embossed with a stamp. This was also extremely unpopular and spawned the "no taxation without representation" outcry, since no American consented to the tax. In 1773, the Tea Act was passed. This one was interesting because it actually reduced the tax on tea in order to undercut tea smuggling from the Dutch East Indies. But colonial merchants, who saw that they were being undercut, were angrier than tea consumers were made happy, and everyone joined a conspiratorial mindset that this was part of a plot to take away American liberty, leading to the Boston Tea Party. Finally, in response to the Boston Tea Party, Britain passed the "Intolerable Acts," also known as the "Coercive Acts," which were five punitive laws that closed the port of Boston, removed Massachusetts' charter (brining it under direct British control), allowed trials to be removed from Massachusetts to Great Britain, brought back quartering (which had lapsed in 1767), and dramatically increased the size of Quebec (thus restricting the frontier). These acts combined to inspire the colonists to hold the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1764.

    I would love to get deeper into more military history. But for now, the American Revolution can be described as this: in 1775, British forces attempted to impose control in Boston. They failed to do that at Bunker Hill. In 1776, the British occupied New York City, the Americans declared independence, and George Washington crossed the Delaware to win victories that did not win the war for the Americans, but prevented the British from winning the war. After a cold winter at Valley Forge in 1777, the French (and to a lesser extent the Spanish) joined the war in 1778, which required the British to focus forces elsewhere. As the war went on, support for the Patriot cause increased, and the British were unable to recruit loyalists to form militias. While the classic divide is one-third Patriot, one-third Loyalist, one-third neutral, Taylor says it was more like one-third Patriot, one-tenth Loyalist, and the rest were neutral. Without local support, and forced to deal with old rivals, Great Britain was basically not able to win the war by 1778, and fought the Battle of Yorktown in 1781, lost, and signed a peace treaty recognizing American independence in 1783.

    The result of the revolution, according to Lord Macartney, was that without America "the building not only looks much better but is a great deal stronger." It worked out for Britain to lose the Thirteen Colonies, since it subordinated the rest of the empire in India, Africa, and the West Indies to taxation. The empire was now less ethnically British, but had gained many more people--for example, Bengal had 20 million, more than double the population England and more than seven times the population of the Thirteen Colonies. These people wouldn't be so troublesome in "demanding their rights as Englishmen." The British made good on a 1778 pledge to no longer tax colonists purely for revenue, so in the time immediately after the war, Americans paid higher taxes than Canadians, and dealt with a period of near-anarchy under the Articles of Confederation until the Constitution was ratified in 1787. Westward expansion proceeded, at the great expense predicted by the British, but the Americans were willing to make the investment since they could have the reward. Western warfare would drain revenue for years, and even cost up to five-sixths of all federal expenditures under Washington, but would obviously yield big gains in years to come.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• The Seven Years' War brought British national debt from 74 million pounds to 133 million pounds, and servicing the debt in the mid-1760s cost five million of the empire's annual eight million pound budget.
• In 1764, the British Empire transferred smuggling cases from colonial courts to vice-admiralty courts, which took away jury trials that regularly favored the accused.
• I thought this was a good quote from the loyalist perspective, Mather Byles, 1774: "Which is better--to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants not a mile away?"
• The English landed on Staten Island on July 2nd, 1776, and brought enough ships over the coming years to require participation of half the Royal Navy, two-thirds of the British army, and 8,000 Hessian mercenaries.
• The women who were camp followers of the Continental Army actually drew rations and pay and were subject to court-martial.
• Deborah Sampson used a fake name to serve for nearly two years in the Continental Army before she was discovered after being wounded. She later got a veteran's pension (paid to her husband) and publicly reenacted her time in uniform to make money later in life.
• In January 1778, Washington boosted recruitment, which was faltering, by endorsing plans to recruit the enslaved in New England states (this plan was stopped in the South), and by the end of the war, Blacks made up a tenth of the Continental Army, double the rate of proportion in the northern population. Southern states considered and shot down similar plans.
• Rhode Island remained independent until Congress barred its trade with the United States in May 1790.
• The early American republic had one of the highest literacy rates in the world with about three-quarters of free American adults being literate. There was just one American magazine in 1785, but 28 in 1795. There were 100 American newspapers in 1790 and nearly 400 by 1810. There were 69 post offices in 1788 and 903 by 1700.
• In 1807, Thomas Jefferson said, "Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper... The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them."
• In New Jersey, women who owned property had the right to vote from 1776 until 1807, when Democratic-Republicans rewrote the law.

The Destruction of Czestochowa by Shlomo Waga, edited and translated by Gloria Berkenstat Freund

    This one was not as good as Resistance and Death, but as a yizkor book, it is just a memoir of someone's time, so my criticism is not with what their memories were, it is just that Resistance and Death had several authors, whereas Destruction was just one person's memory. Some things that I thought were interesting were descriptions of ID cards for Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the five aktsias in September-October 1942, and the description of a Jew named Fajner initiating resistance in 1943 that led to the liquidation of the ghetto. Also, I am noting that certain individuals like Degenhardt, Linderman, and Kurland are mentioned by many people, and it might be interesting to compile a "who's who" list of notable people in the ghetto.

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

    I was shocked at how much I disliked The Odyssey after reading The Iliad. As a kid, I loved Odysseus and the children's version of The Odyssey with pictures. I never had that much exposure to The Iliad besides the movie, Troy. But reading both of them now, I liked The Iliad way more. I think that the most interesting parts of The Odyssey, the tricking of the cyclops, the passing between Scylla and Charybdis, are actually just way shorter as parts of the book than I realized. A huge amount of the book takes place back in Ithaca before and after Odysseus' return. 

    The best part of the book was really Emily Wilson's introduction, which artfully explains the history of the composition of The Odyssey, the Greek Epic Cycle, the importance of these works to the Greeks themselves and the Western canon, and how she translated it. Her introduction to The Iliad was equally good. I came away liking Odysseus less than I did when I enjoyed the children's book version of The Odyssey. He's not quite as heroic in the modern sense. End of the day, it's still a good story, and an interesting view into the world of the Ancient Greeks.

Crucible of War: The Seven Years' War and the Fate of Empire in British North America 1754-1766 by Fred Anderson

    Crucible of War is a hell of a book about Britain's attempt to build its empire in North America through war with the French and Indians as well as in Europe. The Seven Years' war is a confusing name since the war lasted nine years. The French and Indian War isn't much better since there was a lot of fighting with the Prussians and Austrians. This is an amazing book because it does what all amazing works of history must do: it connects huge geopolitical movements, which are beyond the decision-making authority of any one person, and connects them to the individuals on the ground, who sometimes played a part in causing, say, the war between England and France, or felt the effect, say, of the Iroquois selling out the Delaware.

    Of critical importance to the start of the Seven Years' War was the diminution of Iroquois power in the borderlands between the French and English. This covered the Ohio Territory (west of the Appalachians) and the Pays d'en haut, surrounding the Great Lakes in modern day Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, etc. While the Iroquois maintained independence of action, they could balance the two empires against one another. But by the mid 18th century, the English had grown far more powerful than either the Iroquois or the French and were beginning to exert pressure on their borders. The Iroquois had come to power by the mid-seventeenth century, and their access to Dutch firearms made them a force to be reckoned with. The Five Nations, originally the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca (with the Tuscarora added in the 18th century), formed at some point before European contact in order to end the Mourning Wars, which referred to the constant wars to gain captives as compensation for those lost in raids. So war begot war, and it was useful to come together to agree not to raid one another. That said, they still raided non-joiners, and those outside the Confederacy, like the Eries and the Hurons, suffered for it. Iroquois power peaked in the 1660s, when the Dutch, their main supplier of weapons, were forced out of New Amsterdam, which was renamed New York, and the Iroquois exhausted themselves out of constant war.

    

    The Iroquois supported "half-kings," sort of viceroys or smaller leaders who could govern allied tribes. One half-king of Mingoes (Iroquois allies living in the Ohio Valley) was known as Tanaghrisson. His crossing of paths with a twenty-one-year-old George Washington and French Ensign Joseph Coulon de Jumonville would change history. In short, Washington led two expeditions on behalf of the Governor of Virginia into the Ohio Territory. In the first, he led his freezing men to a French fort in December 1753 in order to deliver a letter ordering the French to vacate a fort they had built in modern-day Pennsylvania. In May of the following year, Washington returned to the Ohio Country with Tanaghrisson, and fought a battle with the French at Jumonville Glen, modern-day southwestern Pennsylvania, which resulted in a slaughter of Ensign de Jumonville and many of his men who had surrendered. But how? Anderson does a good analysis. First, he points out that a massacre certainly happened, despite those who claim that the French casualties were actually the result of battle. While shots fired in battle at that time "almost invariably" result in 2-4 times as many wounds as deaths (and indeed there is a three-to-one wounded to dead ratio among the Virginia men), the French suffered thirteen dead and only one wounded. I didn't take good enough notes on this, but my recollection of what happened is that England wanted the colonials to take a harder line on French fort-building west of the Appalachians, but not necessarily to start a war. Dinwiddie, the Virginia governor sent Washington to deliver that message to the French, but to strike at them if they were taking offensive measures. The French actually planned on having a diplomatic meeting with the Virginians they knew were coming their way. But Tanaghrisson, sick of the French for his own reasons, manipulated events to cause a battle, and after Tanaghrisson and Washington had won by surprising the French, he scalped and killed those who surrendered to cause embarrassment to the French.

    

    As the war progressed, it required greater English investment in the colonies and greater interference with the English colonists, who were unable to successfully coordinate the war effort amongst themselves. The confrontations that resulted from this are especially interesting for how they foreshadowed issues in the American Revolution and the War of 1812, especially with regards to military justice and contracts. Whereas English officers, coming from a world of immense class differences, were used to instant obedience by their enlisted soldiers, Americans were more contractually minded. Americans weren't desperate to fight the war. They signed contracts to do so, and if not landowners in their own right, they had greater social mobility than was available in England at the time. When the contracts they signed weren't respected, English soldiers tended to acquiesce, while American soldiers would eventually mutiny or desert. Similarly, the English were confronted, in the summer of 1756, with colonial governments that refused to provide adequate housing for their troops. To the English, it was hard to understand why Americans would not house the soldiers sent to protect them, but to the Americans, who had lived under "salutary neglect" for so long, the idea of supporting soldiers at their personal expense was shocking, and after all, it wasn't like the individual housing the soldiers would see the benefits of victories in Canada and Ohio. The French and English were ultimately both dealing with similar issues: convincing their colonists and the nearby Indians to fight for them. Initially, the French were more successful, but the Marquis de Montcalm alienated Indian allies later on, and the English would eventually overwhelm the French not only with Indian allies but way larger armies made of colonials (the English colonial population was far larger than the French).

    

    Different states had different reasons for not supporting the war effort. Maryland did not support the effort at all due to a small western border that gave them little reason to support. Virginia supported more due to a theoretical state western boundary all the way on the Pacific Ocean. Pennsylvania is an interesting case. Pennsylvanian politics had been deadlocked since 1740 over how to tax "proprietary" lands, that is, lands owned by the Penn family. Pennsylvania's governors had long refused requests from the legislature to raise funds by taxing Penn family lands, which provided most of the incomes for the Penn family, and in response, the legislature would not levy any tax on the population without also taxing the Penns. Meanwhile, the Quakers in the assembly, being pacifists, refused to appropriate any funds for war. There was no breakthrough until German settlers who had been attacked by Mingoes came through the streets of Philadelphia carrying the mangled corpses of their relatives and Scots-Irish settlers threatened to take up arms against the assembly itself. This actually caused the end of Quaker participation in politics in protest of the war funding, and the few Quakers who remained were excommunicated.

    I had planned to write a lot more about the actual specifics of the war itself--battles, tactics, etc.--but looking at that now is a lot of work. In short, the war was basically a war of attrition in the end. The decisive English victory began with several losses, since the French used maneuver warfare and irregular warfare with Indian allies to exact significant losses on British columns and fortresses. However, because the English had far more colonists in the area by an order of magnitude, and because the English were able to recruit Indian allies (or at least keep them from fighting for the French), the English won. As an illustration, the campaigns of 1758 featured 50,000 Anglo-American troops, which was a number that would be two-thirds of the entire population of Canada. The French had 6,800 regular troops, and 16,000 total if you count the untrained militia. A difficulty for the French was how to use their Indian allies. They were most useful to the French at the beginning of the war. But they were unreliable allies since (1) they didn't care about French territorial gains, and (2) were more interested in war prizes, so they would leave a campaign after just one battle when they took a captive, or a scalp, or some treasure. I definitely can't blame them. The whole war was just to decide which colonial power would dominate them, so it didn't make sense for them to tie themselves to any one power. The knockout blow of the war, according to Anderson, was not the Battle of Quebec, when the English took the French capital, but the Battle of Quiberon Bay, when the English gained the naval supremacy in the Atlantic and cut off any French resupply.

    The parts about military justice were especially interesting to me. The culture shock between the Englishmen in the English Army and New Englanders who had served in provincial militias and armies were huge. The New Englanders were used to serving as civilians in arms. Anderson writes of the New Englanders, "A soldier who insulted his captain could expect to bear the consequences, which--depending upon the officer--might range from being knocked down on the spot to being placed under arrest, being court-martialed, and receiving ten or twenty lashes with a cat-o'-nine-tails. But under regular military discipline, insolence to an officer was a crime that carried a penalty of five hundred lashes; the theft of a shirt could earn a man a thousand; and desertion (no uncommon act among New England troops) was punishable by hanging or a firing-squad execution." New Englanders also had a superiority complex about being sons of freeholders and descendants of religious dissenters, and they certainly didn't have the inferiority complex that was found among the lower classes that made up the English Army.

    Part of what made the English so dominant in this period was sort of an economy of scale that came from rolling up all of North America into one market. Since France, England, and Spain were only permitting their colonies to trade with the mother country's network, there was a snowballing effect from building a bigger network. The result was that, instead of being made poorer by being conquered, the people conquered by the English in the Seven Years' War all across the world would have seen more economic activity after the conquest than before. This secured cooperation from the conquered, instead of resistance. But while this was true for the conquered, the conquerors (the Americans) were then asked to pay the price of that conquest with The Sugar Act, The Stamp Act, and so on. These acts that imposed greater taxes on Americans are described in detail in the book, but I won't get into them here, since I think they will be covered in my other books on the Revolution. All in all, I think that distinction between the conquered and the conquerors sort of reversing roles is important in understanding why the Revolution would happen among those who felt like they should have reaped more rewards for defeating the French.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• In 1756, it cost nearly sixpence a milt to move a two-hundred-weight barrel of beef from Albany to Lake George, but by the end of 1757, the same barrel only cost less than twopence a mile on the same route. This illustrates the massive development efforts on roads into the frontier during the war.
• I'm pretty sure "habanero" like the pepper also means it comes from Havana a.k.a. Habana.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

    Not many books are so hard to put down. I thought this was amazing, and it's the second book I've enjoyed by Patrick Radden Keefe, the other being Empire of Pain about the Sackler family dynasty. It deserves more of a post than I'm going to give it due to being busy and behind on these posts, but I'll just say that it was awesome. The book weaves together the lives of the people it covers so well, and they all come from different perspectives on The Troubles. Everyone is humanized, and I don't think that anyone is let off the hook. Radden Keefe makes you sympathize a lot with the Irish car bombers and assassins, but doesn't make them appear any less culpable for their crimes. It seems that way for a while in the book, but by the end, he's connected them to the murder of another "character" in the book, which should make the reader understand the human cost of the movement to unify Ireland.

    Part of the reason I don't feel that into writing a big blog post is because I've already talked to so many people about this book. It blew my mind and is going to be one of the best books I've read all year I bet.

The Iliad by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

     I decided to read the Emily Wilson versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey because Emily Wilson's versions struck me as easier to read. I am not looking for a challenge. Iambic pentameter and short words sounded a lot better than flowery language. Maybe I'll graduate up to Lawrence or Fagles one day, but this was perfect. Wilson also starts the book with a great explanation of the book itself and the themes the reader will encounter, before an editor's note about how she did the translation. Both were really good prep for the book itself.

    I didn't just read The Iliad; while I was reading it, I did a bunch of reading about Homer and his works. The Iliad is not an oral story. It is the written distillation of an oral tradition that lasted for hundreds of years before being written in the eighth century BC, at which point it became a standard part of Greek education. For millennia afterwards, Homer remains the epitome of literature in the Greek world. Plato, Alexander, and every Greek with an education was brought up reading about the Trojan War, and was told stories of Greek mythology. Something I didn't realize is that The Iliad ends before Achilles is killed and before the Greeks take Troy with the Trojan Horse. The story is neatly framed around what can't be more than a few days or maybe weeks sometime towards the end of the war, when Achilles refuses to fight, Hector goes on a rampage and kills Patroclus, and Achilles decides to rejoin the fight to avenge him (in short).

    It sounds like there was no such person as Homer. Homeric Greek, Wilson writes, is a mixture of Greek spoken at different places in times, such that it is clear to Classicists that it must have been a distillation of works created by different poets. It would be like a single speaker of English using Chaucerian, Californian, Australian, and Victorian voices in one work of literature. Instead, it was the result of an oral tradition, developed after the Greeks lost their system of writing developed in Mycenae, and then written down hundreds of years later, when they re-adopted writing from the Phoenicians, who had adapted an alphabet from Egyptian hieroglyphics.

    The Iliad occupies an interesting point right in the twilight zone between history and mythology. Historically, Troy existed, and has been discovered, although something like eight or nine cities have existed on that spot over thousands of years. The Greek states referenced in the book existed, and much of what is described is real. The Greeks who read The Iliad in the fifth century BC must have understood it to be real and in their world. Yet it is set not as a creation story, but a story uniting various creations about two to five generations later. Many, many, characters are the sons or grandsons of gods, and, of course, all the best characters are loved by different gods and directly interact with them or are controlled by them. There's a son of Heracles here, a grandson of a river there, and at one point Aeneas informs Achilles of his own lineage (right before facing him in battle, which is pretty common to do for these guys), and explains that he is not only a cousin of Hector, but that he is a son of Aphrodite and a 5x-great-grandson of Zeus. Most characters are human, but they are often described as "godlike" or an "equal of the gods," although a clear lesson of the book is that no mortal is equal to a god.

    I think my favorite thing about the style of The Iliad is its pacing, clearly meant to be delivered orally. I actually tried to read it out loud, but gave up because it was just so much reading out loud and there are a lot of places where you look like a crazy person. I listened to some of it on audiobook to get the effect, however I preferred to read it in my head in Dan Carlin's voice. If you know, you know. But the pacing. The pacing is awesome because the book is filled with encounters between major, named characters, and minor, also named characters. We basically always know that our named characters won't have a bronze spear put through their eye socket, so the narrator build the tension by telling us all about the lives of the people they are killing, and the way they do it. So the book is filled with personal encounters between two individuals where we get a lot of details. Here's one from book four:

So spoke Athena, and her words persuaded
the mindless mind of Pandarus. At once
he took the cover off his polished bow,
made from a nimble wild goat's horn, which he
had hunted. He had lain in wait and watched
till from behind a rock the goat jumped out.
Pandarus hit his chest right through the heart.
The goat fell backward on the rock. This horn
was sixteen palms in length. A master
    craftsman
had smoothed it down and polished it all over
and set a golden hook upon the tip.

All of that is an aside to just say that this guy, who never appears again, took out his bow. And then the description continues to tell the reader how Pandarus whispered a prayer to Apollo as he strung the arrow and took aim at Menelaus, but that Menelaus was saved by Athena, who brushed the arrow away "as when a mother strokes away a fly to keep it from her baby, sweetly sleeping." In a more typical example, in which Homer tells us all about the life of one of the men killed, it is written:

Then Telamonian Ajax struck and wounded
young Simoesius, Anthemion's son,
A healthy boy who had been born beside
the streames of the Simoeis when his mother
had gone to see her parents' flocks of sheep
upon Mount Ida. On the way back down
she gave birth by the river. That was why
they named him Simoesius. That boy
would never pay his loving parents back
for taking care of him. His life was short,
because the spear of Ajax cut him down.
The young man stepped in front, and Ajax struck his
chest by his right nipple, and the bronze
pierced through and came out by his shoulder blade.

The text is really humanist in this way, where the glory that comes from fighting in war and killing does not override the value of each human life killed. Those individuals are remembered by The Poet. Not only that, but the glory that a man gets for killing is gotten because of who he has killed. The listeners and readers of The Iliad probably could not tell you how many people Telamonian Ajax killed, but they could tell you who he killed.

    As someone who has read a lot and learned a lot about The Iliad before reading it, something that still surprised me was the manner of Hector's death. At least in this version, his death is basically an execution, rigged by Athena. She has Hephaestus make for Achilles a godly suit of armor. Fine. Achilles chases Hector around the city walls and is too fast for Hector to escape. Fine. But then, in the climactic moment, Hector, who has laid waste to the Greeks and just slaughtered and slaughtered them as far and away the best warrior in the battle, is just executed. Achilles throws a spear at Hector, and misses. Then Hector throws a spear, and Athena brushes it away. Then, Athena magically restores Achilles' spear to his possession while tricking Hector into thinking his buddy was there to hand him another. So it's not even a fight, let alone a fair fight. Athena just uses Achilles to clumsily kill Hector. That makes me think that it is Hector who is the greatest warrior in the Trojan War, not Achilles. Achilles, to me, feels like a villain throughout the whole book.

    This was an absolutely fantastic way to finish the last year and start the new year of reading. I don't know what took me so long. Next, I will be starting the Odyssey, which I was more familiar with growing up since I had a children's version of it. 

Miscellaneous:

• The Greek Iliad often uses "untying" or "unraveling" as a metaphor for death. People are stabbed by a sharp, bronze spear, and their limbs become undone.
• The Iliad was not always as popular as it is today. For a long time, Virgil's Aeneid (written in Latin) was the most popular work about the Trojan War. The Iliad was not translated into English until the 17th century.
• There's a random part in the book where a horse talks to Achilles. I just think its funny that at no point in this story does an animal ever talk until more than three-quarters of the way through, when a horse makes sure Achilles knows he is going to die.