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Mar. 4th, 2004 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mojosmom#26
The Deserter, Jane Langton
A Homer and Mary Kelly “mystery”. Mary Kelly’s ancestor, Seth Morgan, fought at Gettysburg. His name had always an aura of shame in the family. Why? Was he killed at Gettysburg, or was he a deserter? Mary sets out to find out. As she and husband Homer are fond of spending their vacations visiting libraries, the prospect of the research involved daunts neither of them. Langton alternates the story of their investigation with the story of what really happened, 140 years earlier, at Gettysburg, in Washington, D.C. and Concord, Massachusetts. Her fictional characters blend with historical ones as she gives us a graphic picture of the battle, the bravery and cowardice of those who fought, and those they left behind.
Langton has used the real histories of several Harvard alumni who fought at Gettysburg as a springboard for her novel. As usual, she illustrates the book with her own drawings of places where events occur. But this time she also uses old photographs. As she describes it, ”The fictional characters -- soldiers, family members, a surgeon, a nurse, an unhappy farmer and a landlady -- turned up among the cartes de visite bought from collector Henry Deeks in his antiquarian bookshop in Maynard, Massachusetts. Roaming among hundreds of faces, I bought a small population of unidentified men, women and children.”
Though I always enjoy Langton’s work, I found this even better than most.
#27
Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, María Rosa Menocal
Menocal, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, tells the story of Al-Andalus, that lost period of time in the history of Spain when, under Arabic rule, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in a truly multi-cultural society. Not “multi-cultural” in the sense we think of it, cultures living side by side but separate, but a true blending of literature, of architecture, of style, each culture taking what it found of beauty and value in the others, and adapting it. Not a paradise of tolerance, by any means, and the relationships were often uneasy and threatened by fundamentalists of all religious stripes, yet each had a respect and appreciation for the other which lasted over several hundred years. Sadly, this came to an abrupt end during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492, as the monarchs heeded the advice and warnings of the Catholic Church over what may have been their own better instincts.
The story of Don Quixote begins with the finding of a lost manuscript about to be sold as rags to the papermakers in what had been the old Jewish quarter of Toledo, but a Morisco must be found to translate it, as it is written in Aljamiado, Castillian written in the Arabic alphabet. At the time Cervantes wrote this masterpiece, in the early 1600’s, there were no Old Jews, no Old Muslims, left in Spain, and few converts, yet the memories remained, despite the book burnings.
Menocal tells the story of another book burning, and a book saved from burning.
On August 25, 1992, the Serbian army began shelling the National library in Sarajevo. On purpose. Over a million books and more than a hundred thousand manuscripts were deliberately destroyed. Three months earlier, the same army had attacked the Oriental Institute in that city, with its magnificent collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, and over five thousand of these were burned. Why? Since when are libraries strategic military targets? But wars are, of course, fought on many fronts, and the attack on those Sarajevan palaces of memory took place for reasons not unlike those that led to the burning of so many books in sixteenth-century Spain, and to the destruction or mutilation of any number of the memory palaces of al -Andalus . . .
A handful of treasures were saved from the terrible destruction of 1992, which fell, uncannily, on the five-hundredth anniversary of the capitulation of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews. Little survived in the ruins of the whole of the magnificent library and museum of Sarajevo, but among the most precious of the items that did is a famous manuscript called the Sarajevo Haggadah. A Haggadah is a book of prayers and stories: tales to be told and prayers to be said on Passover, in remembrance of the Exodus. Despite the name, this gorgeous illuminated manuscript, considered the best of its kind anywhere in the world, is not “Sarajevan” at all but, like the two surviving synagogues of Toledo, a child of the mixed marriage that was the politically Christian but culturally neo-Islamic world of the Middle Ages in Spain . . .
The book’s first rescue from the bonfires of oblivion was when it was taken out of Spain in the Exodus of 1492 by Sephardic Jews who then settled in the Ottoman empire. There the Haggadah was cherished an protected, for nearly five hundred years. But then the precious book had to be rescued a second time during World War II. It was well known in intellectual circles that a certain Muslim curator in the library in Sarajevo had saved that Sephardic Haggadah from the atrocities of the Nazis, who were also inclined to burn it. For several years, whenever I spoke on this subject, I would note, at the end of the story, that the Muslim -- whose name I did not know, and who I assumed was unknown -- had saved that beautiful book no doubt in part because he knew its provenance. Like many Muslims to this day, he would certainly have had a special place in his heart, and in his memory, for what was once al-Andalus . . .
On May 2, 1999, I discovered that he was not, after all, anonymous. Some seven years after the book had been saved from the violence in Sarajevo, the front page of the New York Times ran a remarkable piece of true history that Cervantes himself would not have been embarrassed to tell. One of the thousands of “ethnic Albanians,” a commonplace euphemism for those European Muslims who were herded out of Kosovo in early April of 1999, was a woman who, like most others, was able to take with her only a handful of belongings. As refugees are wont to do, what she chose to take into exile were tokens of purely sentimental value, among which the most precious, since she kept in on her person rather than in one of her two bags, was a piece of paper in a language that, as Cervantes would say, she could recognize but not read. All she knew, vaguely, was that it was some sort of prize that her father had once received and had cherished greatly. on the other side of the Macedonian border, after a harrowing trip, the woman thought to show her precious paper to the members of the local Jewish community, a group involved in the relief efforts for the Kosovars. She took the piece of paper to them because she knew it was Hebrew ad she sensed it might well be the key to some story worth translating at that trying moment.
Indeed it was. The document was as precious, for her, as the discovery for Cervantes’ narrator that the Aljamiado manuscript was the lost story of Don Quixote. The paper was the commendation her father had received from the Israeli government for saving not only the Sarajevo Haggadah but, as it turned out, Yugoslavian Jews from the Nazis. The Muslim librarian, who was a hero in book circles for having rescued that token of hundreds of years of medieval tolerance from the depredations of twentieth-century barbarism, had also hidden fellow Sarajevans, Jews, in his apartment during World War II. What was revealed in May of 1999 was that he was the father of one frightened an desperate woman, one of the victims among the thousands of such victims, in camps created by yet more twentieth-century barbarism. The daughter, who had known little about just what her father had done, was grateful for the special refuge she and her family instantly received at that hour of their greatest need. She was taken out of the camps and out of the war zone in Eastern Europe to Israel. She was met at the Tel Aviv airport and taken home by a man who greeted her as a long-lost relative, since he is the grown child of a woman among those saved by the good librarian, along with the great book of Passover prayers. “My father did what he did with all his heart, not to get anything in return. Fifty years later it returns somehow. It’s kind of a circle.” The circle goes back further in both time and space than the librarian’s daughter perhaps imagines, and it is intricately intertwined with any number of the stories that can be found inside our half-excavated Andalusian palace. There, in both the ruins and in the surviving beauties of that edifice, in books destroyed and in books saved, lie so many layers of our own cultural memories and possibilities.
The Deserter, Jane Langton
A Homer and Mary Kelly “mystery”. Mary Kelly’s ancestor, Seth Morgan, fought at Gettysburg. His name had always an aura of shame in the family. Why? Was he killed at Gettysburg, or was he a deserter? Mary sets out to find out. As she and husband Homer are fond of spending their vacations visiting libraries, the prospect of the research involved daunts neither of them. Langton alternates the story of their investigation with the story of what really happened, 140 years earlier, at Gettysburg, in Washington, D.C. and Concord, Massachusetts. Her fictional characters blend with historical ones as she gives us a graphic picture of the battle, the bravery and cowardice of those who fought, and those they left behind.
Langton has used the real histories of several Harvard alumni who fought at Gettysburg as a springboard for her novel. As usual, she illustrates the book with her own drawings of places where events occur. But this time she also uses old photographs. As she describes it, ”The fictional characters -- soldiers, family members, a surgeon, a nurse, an unhappy farmer and a landlady -- turned up among the cartes de visite bought from collector Henry Deeks in his antiquarian bookshop in Maynard, Massachusetts. Roaming among hundreds of faces, I bought a small population of unidentified men, women and children.”
Though I always enjoy Langton’s work, I found this even better than most.
#27
Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, María Rosa Menocal
Menocal, professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, tells the story of Al-Andalus, that lost period of time in the history of Spain when, under Arabic rule, Muslims, Christians and Jews lived in a truly multi-cultural society. Not “multi-cultural” in the sense we think of it, cultures living side by side but separate, but a true blending of literature, of architecture, of style, each culture taking what it found of beauty and value in the others, and adapting it. Not a paradise of tolerance, by any means, and the relationships were often uneasy and threatened by fundamentalists of all religious stripes, yet each had a respect and appreciation for the other which lasted over several hundred years. Sadly, this came to an abrupt end during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492, as the monarchs heeded the advice and warnings of the Catholic Church over what may have been their own better instincts.
The story of Don Quixote begins with the finding of a lost manuscript about to be sold as rags to the papermakers in what had been the old Jewish quarter of Toledo, but a Morisco must be found to translate it, as it is written in Aljamiado, Castillian written in the Arabic alphabet. At the time Cervantes wrote this masterpiece, in the early 1600’s, there were no Old Jews, no Old Muslims, left in Spain, and few converts, yet the memories remained, despite the book burnings.
Menocal tells the story of another book burning, and a book saved from burning.
On August 25, 1992, the Serbian army began shelling the National library in Sarajevo. On purpose. Over a million books and more than a hundred thousand manuscripts were deliberately destroyed. Three months earlier, the same army had attacked the Oriental Institute in that city, with its magnificent collection of Islamic and Jewish manuscripts, and over five thousand of these were burned. Why? Since when are libraries strategic military targets? But wars are, of course, fought on many fronts, and the attack on those Sarajevan palaces of memory took place for reasons not unlike those that led to the burning of so many books in sixteenth-century Spain, and to the destruction or mutilation of any number of the memory palaces of al -Andalus . . .
A handful of treasures were saved from the terrible destruction of 1992, which fell, uncannily, on the five-hundredth anniversary of the capitulation of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews. Little survived in the ruins of the whole of the magnificent library and museum of Sarajevo, but among the most precious of the items that did is a famous manuscript called the Sarajevo Haggadah. A Haggadah is a book of prayers and stories: tales to be told and prayers to be said on Passover, in remembrance of the Exodus. Despite the name, this gorgeous illuminated manuscript, considered the best of its kind anywhere in the world, is not “Sarajevan” at all but, like the two surviving synagogues of Toledo, a child of the mixed marriage that was the politically Christian but culturally neo-Islamic world of the Middle Ages in Spain . . .
The book’s first rescue from the bonfires of oblivion was when it was taken out of Spain in the Exodus of 1492 by Sephardic Jews who then settled in the Ottoman empire. There the Haggadah was cherished an protected, for nearly five hundred years. But then the precious book had to be rescued a second time during World War II. It was well known in intellectual circles that a certain Muslim curator in the library in Sarajevo had saved that Sephardic Haggadah from the atrocities of the Nazis, who were also inclined to burn it. For several years, whenever I spoke on this subject, I would note, at the end of the story, that the Muslim -- whose name I did not know, and who I assumed was unknown -- had saved that beautiful book no doubt in part because he knew its provenance. Like many Muslims to this day, he would certainly have had a special place in his heart, and in his memory, for what was once al-Andalus . . .
On May 2, 1999, I discovered that he was not, after all, anonymous. Some seven years after the book had been saved from the violence in Sarajevo, the front page of the New York Times ran a remarkable piece of true history that Cervantes himself would not have been embarrassed to tell. One of the thousands of “ethnic Albanians,” a commonplace euphemism for those European Muslims who were herded out of Kosovo in early April of 1999, was a woman who, like most others, was able to take with her only a handful of belongings. As refugees are wont to do, what she chose to take into exile were tokens of purely sentimental value, among which the most precious, since she kept in on her person rather than in one of her two bags, was a piece of paper in a language that, as Cervantes would say, she could recognize but not read. All she knew, vaguely, was that it was some sort of prize that her father had once received and had cherished greatly. on the other side of the Macedonian border, after a harrowing trip, the woman thought to show her precious paper to the members of the local Jewish community, a group involved in the relief efforts for the Kosovars. She took the piece of paper to them because she knew it was Hebrew ad she sensed it might well be the key to some story worth translating at that trying moment.
Indeed it was. The document was as precious, for her, as the discovery for Cervantes’ narrator that the Aljamiado manuscript was the lost story of Don Quixote. The paper was the commendation her father had received from the Israeli government for saving not only the Sarajevo Haggadah but, as it turned out, Yugoslavian Jews from the Nazis. The Muslim librarian, who was a hero in book circles for having rescued that token of hundreds of years of medieval tolerance from the depredations of twentieth-century barbarism, had also hidden fellow Sarajevans, Jews, in his apartment during World War II. What was revealed in May of 1999 was that he was the father of one frightened an desperate woman, one of the victims among the thousands of such victims, in camps created by yet more twentieth-century barbarism. The daughter, who had known little about just what her father had done, was grateful for the special refuge she and her family instantly received at that hour of their greatest need. She was taken out of the camps and out of the war zone in Eastern Europe to Israel. She was met at the Tel Aviv airport and taken home by a man who greeted her as a long-lost relative, since he is the grown child of a woman among those saved by the good librarian, along with the great book of Passover prayers. “My father did what he did with all his heart, not to get anything in return. Fifty years later it returns somehow. It’s kind of a circle.” The circle goes back further in both time and space than the librarian’s daughter perhaps imagines, and it is intricately intertwined with any number of the stories that can be found inside our half-excavated Andalusian palace. There, in both the ruins and in the surviving beauties of that edifice, in books destroyed and in books saved, lie so many layers of our own cultural memories and possibilities.
