Here Where We Live Is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund by Molly Crabapple

    I have to fully own that I was somewhat biased against this book from the beginning, and that I never overcame that bias while reading it. It was highly recommended to me, but I felt that a book about the Bund, while interesting, would never convince me that the Bund was "correct" or anything but misguided. I feel like history proved that Bundism was a failure in Poland and Russia. Moreover, the book was really more of a vehicle for anti-Zionism. While I am sympathetic to criticism of Israel, Here Where We Live Is Our Country started with a quote from Mahmoud Darwish, which was the first indication that this book was not really about the Bund. Moreover, it didn't really deliver on the author's tie-in to the Bund through her great-grandfather, Sam Rothbort, who moves from Volkovysk to the United States long before the Holocaust. I think the "right answer" for the Jews of Poland was probably just to get the heck out, or that there was no right answer at all.

    I think that the biggest strength of the book is Crabapple's contextualization of the Jewish situation in Russia/Poland in the 19th century, when she briefly goes over the history and delineates three competing ideologies: assimilationists, Zionists, and socialists/Bundists. However, she mostly ignores the religious political parties that were also influential Jewish interest groups. The Bundists were similar to the assimilationists in that they believed in staying put in Europe, and similar to the Zionists in that they supported socialism. You could make a venn diagram. The book is similarly strong into the early 20th century, discussing the 1905 Revolution in Russia and the 1905 strike in Lodz. Crabapple points out that the people of Lodz still don't like Jews very much, and rival soccer fans call each other "Jews" as an insult.

    As the book gets deeper into the 20th century, it gets harder to follow. Crabapple introduces countless names of leaders to remember, and they became impossible for me to tell apart, so I just had to glide through the book, letting them replace each other in my head since I didn't dedicate the concentration to keep them apart. What was clear was that the Bund peaked around 1906, when it had 30,000 members, whereas it dropped to 609 by 1910 due to state repression in Russia and emigration. The Bundists who were left in WWI come off more like spoiled rich kids than a real movement. Crabapple doesn't really explore this, even when she discusses Sophia Dubnova: "She agitated in small towns under false identities, smuggled pamphlets between cities by taping them to her body to mimic a pregnant belly, and incited mutiny in the Grodno army garrison. (Her soldier boys were later shot.)" I found that line to be very careless. It romanticizes the life of the anarchist upper-class girl (her dad was a historian) and throws away the lives of the people who she hazarded in her little adventure. I don't doubt Sophia Dubnova's sincerity, but I think that was something that should have been explored more. I know that if I convinced someone to mutiny and they were killed for it, I would feel horrible after. Crabapple keeps it light.

    By 1920, the Russian Bundists were trapped in an impossible situation, and dissolved to join the Bolsheviks. It's easy to call this a bad choice now, but Poland didn't want the Jews, especially not socialists, and they didn't know what was coming in the USSR. But the result was that the Bund was dissolved in Russia. In Poland, the Bund continued, but never became a serious contender in national because the Polish Socialists wouldn't work with a Jewish party. The Bund did get lots of votes in local elections, becoming the majority Jewish party, but not a majority in government. This was probably just a feature of Jewish parties cannibalizing votes from each other. 

    The whole irony of the book is that over and over again, events prove that the Jews needed to escape from Poland and Eastern Europe, and the situation was getting bad. Even moreso, it shows how there were not many options besides Israel--Crabapple goes straight from championing the Jews staying in Poland to wondering what they should do after the Evian Conference ends with no country willing to take Jewish refugees. Israel was left as the only option for Jews to escape as the world closed its doors in the 1920s. But Crabapple can't really criticize the rest of the world when her favorite Bundists agreed with them and wanted the Jews of Poland to stay put. Even where Bundist socialism won--the USSR--the Bund was dissolved into Bolshevism and then Jews were systematically purged from the party in the following decade.

    My biggest ugh moment with this book was towards the end. Crabapple describes the fall of Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania, to the Nazis on June 25, 1941, and how the Nazis sawed through the neck of a famous rabbi. Visiting near the site, Crabapple has this thought: "The only thing that lifted my mood was a bright little dosa shop that an Indian immigrant had opened. I bought five packs of cigarettes to support him. Only you can fix this place, I thought. It needs new blood. Please, bring your cousins." This was so weird. First of all, random Indian immigrants are not responsible for improving the imagined moral degeneracy of the grandsons of people who collaborated with Nazis. It has been 80 years and the people of Kaunas are not responsible at this point for what happened in 1941. The Indian immigrant also definitely isn't responsible for somehow making them better, as if he would even be aware that is it job. And then the whole "bring your cousins" comment is just bizarre, and is literally implying that there should be a replacement of people, feeding into the worst conspiracy theories. She had completely lost me by this point.

    I'll just finish by saying that even though I strongly disagreed with the argument of the book, I think that it is creative and that emphasizing the role of the Bund in European history is a good thing, since it is often forgotten. We will just have to agree to disagree. For Crabapple, the Bund is a morally righteous organization, and for me it is more of a cautionary tale. 

Miscellaneous:

• I thought this quote by Meyer London, who became a politician in New York, was interesting: "Are you aware that in Russian Poland, thousands of our Jewish boys and girls are giving their lives ... for liberty? They ... pray to God, not to lead them again out of Egypt, but to help them to free Egypt."

Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician

    I got a pretty random urge to read something about Cicero's life, and I'd had this on my shelf for a while waiting for the right time. I would say that Everitt's book is a good resource on Cicero's life, and does a good job as a biography, but it falls short. On one hand, there are a lot of materials surviving about Cicero's life, but they must not be enough to give a really good analysis of his personality. Everitt doesn't get deep into his mind, and really only hypothesizes briefly about Cicero's inner life. And then, Cicero's biography isn't enough to learn about the fall of the Roman Republic. Sure enough, Cicero's son-in-law is Dolabella and briefly a tutor to Octavian, but his interactions with some of the big players aren't enough to tell the story of the fall of the Republic, so Everitt has to sideline Cicero several times to get that story in a way that a biography of Julius Caesar doesn't have to do. Now maybe that's not the purpose of a biography of Cicero, but because the inner life wasn't coming through, it left me with a feeling of something missing.

    That said, Everitt does really interesting discussions of why the Republic fell. Above all, attributes to the Republic the property of being "a state without most of the institutions needed to run a state." There was no civil service, so governors needed to have their own people on payroll, necessitating corruption to pay for them. Without a police force, mobs could take over the capital. There was no public prosecution service, and private individuals had to being lawsuits. Without prisons, penalties had to be execution, exile, or a fine. There was no banking system, and the government had no bureaucracy to collect taxes, selling the right to collect taxes to the highest bidder. Over the centuries, Rome's "constitution" accreted new layers, much like the British constitution did approximately two millennia later. This created institutions a mile wide and an inch deep, capable of conquering the lands around the Mediterranean, but also fragile enough to be overthrown by its own armies, or mobs in the capital.

    Rome was also a victim of its own success. Sooner or later, everyone has to do land reform. Either the country isn't expanding and everything is gobbled up by large landowners, or the country is expanding, and needs to decide how to parcel out newly acquired land. Rome faced both issues in the second century BC, with Italian lands turning into large ranches, forcing peasants into Rome, and new lands being acquired on the borders. That distribution of lands created the major political issues of the fall of the Republic, for about a century from 146 BC, when Rome finally conquered Carthage as well as Corinth, until 31 BC, when Octavian defeated Marc Antony and became the emperor.

    Sulla's Civil War, fought in 83 and 82 BC, dominated the young lives to Cicero (20 years old) and Caesar (18 years old). The war culminated in Sulla's victory, reforms to strengthen the Senate, and proscriptions that went way over the top and led to killings not due to any criminality, but just to seize the property of the proscribed. Sulla became dictator, and set a new precedent for the use of force in public life against Romans (although he hadn't been the first or last). While Cicero took away the idea that Republican traditions must be jealously guarded, Caesar felt that radical reforms were needed. Maybe this was because Caesar had been proscribed.

    Cicero rose to become a Consul as a conservative, more on the side of the optimates than the populares as Rome became increasingly polarized. Catilina, who tried to stage a coup, was on the side of the populares, and championed land reform. I hadn't realized that Cicero was a conservative. But he was not strictly ideological. He was mainly in favor of preservation of the Republic, and as long as that was in reach, he would play all sides. He regularly corresponded with Caesar, and later Octavian, even though the assassins of Caesar championed Cicero as a hero of the Republic. So he was very confusing to read about since everyone had this simultaneous respect for him but also disdain for the fact that he didn't come from an old family and was always bragging about himself.

    Cicero had two periods of great power: the first, when he defeated Catiline as Consul, and the second, when he held no office, but led the Senate for about six months after the assassination of Caesar. In that time, he attempted to divide Octavian from Marc Antony, keeping them apart so that Brutus and Cassius Longinus could defeat Antony and save the Republic. But it was not to be. Octavian and Marc Antony formed the Second Triumvirate with Lepidus and overthrew the Republic before casting Lepidus aside. The critical problem is that both sitting Consuls, Hirtius and Pansa, were each killed in the First and Second Battles of Mutina against Marc Antony, and left the Senate without leadership. The Senate was divided on naming the 19-year-old Octavian as a Consul, and when they did not do so, Octavian turned against them. While Cicero had a chance to join Octavian has consul, he didn't, and Octavian allowed Marc Antony to proscribe Cicero, and he was hunted down on the Southern Italian coast. He told his assassin, "I am stopping here. Come here soldier. There is nothing proper about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly."

    The final chapter, "Postmortems," contains the best analysis of the book. In it, Everitt identifies that the turning point in Cicero's career was his decision not to join Pompey, Caesar, and Crassus in their political alliance in the 50s. Cicero never sold out his values/ideals, but he rightly acquired a reputation for vacillation, always sitting on the fence. He knew that was a powerful place to be, since everyone had to win him over. Ultimately, he fell off the fence. He didn't understand what was necessary to save the Roman Republic, only that he wanted to save it. But maybe there was not way of saving it--after all, no one did. Cicero thought that everything needed to be put back the way it is, but Caesar understood that, to borrow a line from another Italian, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change." Caesar understood the necessity of a completely new means of government, but didn't live to implement it, so we will never know what he would have created. Instead, his grandnephew Octavian turned Rome from a city of bricks into a city of marble, and the rest is history. Everitt ends the book very appropriately, quoting Octavian, who had been tutored by Cicero, and who had also signed Cicero's death warrant. After seeing his grandson reading from a book of Cicero's, decades after Cicero's assassination, the now-Augustus said of Cicero, "an eloquent man, my child, an eloquent man, and a patriot."

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Roman life was "lived in daylight hours," because there were no public streetlights. People needed to carry torches to get around the city. This can't be unique at all, but is a fact about premodern life that really colors my entire perspective.
• Cicero had a career as a very successful "advocate" (read: lawyer), who would have been crushed by any judge following the Federal Rules of Evidence in 2026. The stuff he was saying in court was waaaaayyyy out of order by modern standards. But it was a different time, and so he could tell the jurors that if they voted to convict, then everyone would know that they must have been bribed.
  
• The Senate would sit to hear trials in Republican Rome, which was actually still going on in the American colonies in the 1700s, when the legislatures of the colonies would handle judicial business like King Henry VII in the Star Chamber centuries before.
• Ancient Roman texts are written without differentiation into capital and lowercase letters, without spaces between words, without paragraphs, and without punctuation. Absolute madness. 
• Cicero's first wife, Terentia, lived to be 103 years old.

Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know by Emily Oster

    Expecting Better was a great book highly recommended by multiple friends that I read to learn more about pregnancy (since my wife is pregnant). Most of the book is about researching the facts about pregnancy to find out how pregnant women can best assess risk without resorting to hard rules. Emily Oster is a really valuable writer because she is a trained economist who has applied her economics background to pregnancy and parenting. I previously read Cribsheet, but didn't do much of a reflection on it--it's crazy to think I read it seven years ago!

    Oster is very nonjudgmental, which is really good since pregnant women are faced with tons of judgments about their decisions to have a glass of wine, rest, exercise, you name it. So the book is filled with tons of things like her analysis of drinking coffee, which basically shows that there is really no clear evidence of any effect of caffeine intake on pregnancy health for mother or child. It is likely difficult to conduct studies because nausea during pregnancy is correlated with a low rate of miscarriage, and nauseous women usually don't crave coffee. But the hard rule of 200mg of coffee a day doesn't seem necessary. With alcohol, it appears that the real factor is speed of drinking that overwhelms the liver. Seven drinks a week may actually be safe as long as they're spread out--drinking a glass of wine slowly is unlikely to have any effects on the baby. Problems only arise when significant amounts of alcohol get into fetal tissues, but after mom's metabolization of the alcohol, that's usually not happening if it's just a little. She also does a really good analysis of raw fish: eating raw fish may make pregnant women sick, and it's worse to be sick when pregnant. But the real risk is mercury, which requires that women know the mercury levels of fish they are eating and reduce exposure by eating less fish with high mercury levels, but doesn't require full abstinence to stay safe. In fact, the mercury levels of many fish may reduce baby's IQ, but the omega-3s they have may increase IQ, so who knows?

Miscellaneous Facts:

• During the first half of a woman's cycle, her body temperature is below 98 degrees, then, the day after ovulation, it increases by about half a degree or more.
• Almost 90% of women have nausea during pregnancy, usually peaking between 8 or 9 weeks and falling off after. 50% of women report vomiting at some point in weeks 5 to 8 of pregnancy, but less than 15 to 20 percent by 17 weeks. At the worst point in pregnancy, 13% of women report throwing up 3 or more times a day.
• Airplane travel is unlikely to create enough radiation exposure to be a danger. It takes three round trip flights from New York to Tokyo to reach 1% of the level at which there is a demonstrated risk of birth defects or miscarriage. This can be relevant for women who work on airplanes, but not for the most frequent of frequent flyers.
• Kegels during pregnancy are highly effective at reducing urinary incontinence post-partum. Randomly assigned women who did 3 sets of 8 kegels twice a day for 6 seconds each had significantly lower urinary incontinence before and after delivery. Prenatal yoga also had beneficial effects, but not nearly as significant.
• Lying flat seems to have no effect on fetal health unless it makes the mother uncomfortable. Otherwise, there don't seem to be significant effects from sleeping position. The mother's discomfort may be a sign of blood flow constriction. A small minority of women feel faint from lying flat, but those who don't feel faint experience no negative effects that have been observed.
• Queen Victoria was one of the first women to use anesthesia during childbirth--inhaled chloroform for her seventh child. In the 20th century, women were sometimes given a combination of morphine and scopolamine that put them in "twilight sleep," where they experienced some pain, but forgot it. In the turn of the century, doctors administered cocaine to women in childbirth.
• Epidurals were used in two-thirds of births in the United States in 2008, although they often require use of more instruments due to the fact that epidurals make pushing harder. This can cause more tearing.
• Women who were randomly assigned a doula were half as likely to have a C-section and less likely to use an epidural.
• Eating and drinking during labor is usually prohibited, but probably doesn't need to be. The prohibition came from a time when women were put under full anesthesia, and the prohibition on eating was to avoid them throwing up during surgery and choking to death without anyone noticing. This was rare even in that situation, and today, thanks to epidurals, even less frequent. However, most women aren't hungry during the later stages of labor anyway, but if they are, they probably shouldn't be stopped from eating. Clear juices and Gatorade are a decent compromise.

Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans by Michaeleen Doucleff

    Hunt, Gather, Parent was a really cool parenting meets anthropology book. I would not call it a parenting guide by any means, although chapters end with bulleted lists of techniques. But it is an entertaining read of different parenting styles across the world in hunter-gatherer societies compared with our more Western ways of parenting. A good recommendation from my wife, who I already discussed this book with, so I don't have a lot of motivation to write it all down here.

    A lot of the advice in the book boils down to regulating parent and child emotions. She recommends that parents do things with their kids, but not for their kids--so no activities that are fun only for the kids. Instead, kids become part of the family by doing things with parents. This is especially useful when kids learn to do chores, or at least watch parents do chores. That way, they expect chores to be a part of their lives, and the parents and children are sort of on the same schedule having done the chores together and then being ready to rest together. Other themes of the book are about giving kids more autonomy, and really picking battles whenever possible. Parents shouldn't argue with children, and lessons are best learned after emotions are passed, and at a lower volume. All in all, a cool book, and I'm jealous of this mom and daughter who got to travel the world together to do the research for it.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

    What. A. Book! Lonesome Dove is an absolute epic, and reading it right after Moby Dick makes it feel like an amazing foil to Moby Dick. But on its own merits, Lonesome Dove is this incredible collection of events on a big cattle drive from Texas to Montana, and I definitely want to watch the miniseries, which is apparently amazing as well.

    I couldn't stop thinking about the Moby Dick comparison. The two books are both set around the same period, just a few decades apart in the mid-19th century. Both of them are stories of men going on a journey, but one is on land, and another is at sea. In Moby Dick, everything builds towards an absolutely massive climax, but in Lonesome Dove, the feeling you're left with over and over is anti-climax. Almost no one achieves their goals in Lonesome Dove. Almost everyone dies. The language is also very different in each book. Moby Dick is highly stylized and rich language, while Lonesome Dove is bare bones, especially in dialogue. McMurtry likes to go one for paragraphs or pages about a character's internal thoughts, but then make their dialogue almost nothing. Lonesome Dove is filled with characters not telling each other how they feel or what they think. But the characters are similar to Moby Dick in that they are all on the frontier, having few opportunities for good conversation.

    The best character in Lonesome Dove is The West. The West is like The Whale in Moby Dick, except no one can be mad at The West since none of the cowboys are as insane as Ahab. Except that in Lonesome Dove, by the end of the book, Call can't stop going north, getting a little hint of the madness that struck Ahab from the beginning. There are all these confrontations with nature itself in lightning storms, sand storms, flooding rivers, thirst, etc. Then you have all these intermittent confrontations with other men in the west, a lot like in Cormac McCarthy's books.

    In sum, this book was excellent, one of the best I've read in a very long time.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

 Little Women is a classic and I’m so glad I read it after being introduced by my wife to the newer movie by Greta Gerwig. I love that movie and I came away appreciating it way more after reading the book. The book is fantastic and I really appreciated how well the movie updated it and reinterpreted it for a modern audience. The original book is very old fashioned in a lot of ways, and it was interesting to think about how Gerwig changed the timeline and a little bit of the tone. I think she did especially well with Amy’s character. I was surprised that this monologue wasn’t in the book:

“Well, I’m not a poet. I’m just a woman. And as a woman, there’s no way for me to make my own money. Not enough to earn a living or to support my family. And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is. It may not be for you, but it most certainly is for me.”

In the book, the conversation with Amy and Laurie in Nice plays out a little differently, and Gerwig is really inserting the opposite of what Marmee teaches in the book- life isn’t as simple as just being virtuous all the time. Marmee is always giving the best advice and teaching the girls, but in Gerwig’s movie, she’s a little deemphasized and the problems they face are a little more morally complicated.

Little Women is also very funny, and has a great narrator. I loved this line:

“There are many Beths in the world, shy and quiet, sitting in corners till needed, and living for others so cheerfully that no one sees the sacrifices till the little cricket on the hearth stops chirping, and the sweet, sunshiny presence vanishes, leaving silence and shadow behind.

If anybody asked Amy what the greatest trial of her life was, she would have answered at once, ‘My nose.’”

I like that Jo isn’t so much the heroine and Amy not so villainized in the book as in the movie. In the movie Amy isn’t necessarily the “bad guy” but it has you rooting a lot more for Jo than for her in order to build up her redemption in the end. I didn’t feel that way in the book. For example, in the book, it was Jo’s fault she didn’t get invited to France, since she went on a diatribe in front of Aunt March about not needing anything from anyone. I don’t remember that in the movie.

There’s also an interesting Germanophile streak in the book. Louisa May Alcott makes all these references to Goethe and Germany and Germans, and that got left out of the movie. I’ll stop here, I don’t have the time to write this post anymore.

The Book of Czestochowa edited by M. Szucman (and a committee)

    This is another yizkor book made up of a compilation of individual survivors' recollections of their time in Czestochowa before and after the war. I found it thanks to the World Society of Czestochowa Jews, which maintains incredible resources on the Jewish community that existed there. A concept that this book introduced me to, although I haven't confirmed it's truth, is that Czestochowa was the "last remaining large Jewish community in Poland." Natan Eck, who wrote one of the longer chapters in the book, recalls saying that to other Jews after a meeting of the Judenrat to discuss the possibility of mass exterminations, in which most couldn't believe what was going on. In a similar vein regarding the uniqueness of Czestochowa, Aron Gelbard recalls that proportionately, more people from Czestochowa transports survived than from other cities, due to a high requirement of laborers.

    The strength of the book is obviously its personal stories. Szlojme Waga, who wrote another yizkor book, tells the story of a local man whose daughter had married a German and lived in Berlin. That daughter had written a letter home to her parents in Czestochowa advising them to commit suicide and naming the drugs they should take. The letter was warped from her tears, and she described how committing suicide would ensure that they would have graves for some survivor to visit after the war. Apparently the letter was shared widely and contributed to a sense of panic in the ghetto. In another story recounted by Szlojme Waga, he met the former city Chazan (cantor), who bitterly told him, "I have become a bachelor," because his wife and seven children were all deported. His beard was shaved off and he was thin. He suddenly straightened up and his face reddened, and he yelled, "The murderers! They've made me young! Turned me into a bachelor! Annihilated my seven children! Murdered my wife!" The same Aron Gelbard above recalled how he worked at Treblinka for 19 days, and in that time, would help throw naked people into piles of baggage, and then secretly pull them out later and give them clothes to escape. Unfortunately, some of the people they threw in didn't understand what they meant by doing so, and jumped back up and continued running.

    I always hope to find some mention of my family in these yizkor books, but nothing found in this one. What is interesting is the addresses. Like ul. Nadrzeczna 71, the home of the kibbutz that resisted the Nazis (although I also see reference to a kibbutz at Garncarska 72). At ul. Nadrzeczna 66, there was another house of resistance, known as the "66 Group." In December 1942, Mojtek Ziberberg started to try to unify these groups into one resistance. He would be killed in the uprising and ghetto liquidation on June 25th, 1943. I think I will try to put together a little map of the relevant addresses of the resistance.