Oached Pish

The End of the World and Beyond by Avi

The word history comes from the Ancient Greek ἱστορία, meaning "inquiry", "knowledge from inquiry", or "judge".

The Greek word was borrowed into Classical Latin as historia, meaning "investigation, inquiry, research, account, description, written account of past events, writing of history, historical narrative, recorded knowledge of past events, story, narrative".

Note that the words story and narrative were part of the definition.

Acto Wikipedia, history slipped into Old English as stær ('history, narrative, story'); elsewhere, as Latin became Old French (and Anglo-Norman), historia branched with new developments in the meaning: "account of the events of a person's life (beginning of the 12th century), chronicle, account of events as relevant to a group of people or people in general (1155), dramatic or pictorial representation of historical events (c. 1240), body of knowledge relative to human evolution, science (c. 1265), narrative of real or imaginary events, story (c. 1462)".

Note the ‘real or imaginary events.’

It wasn’t until the time of Francis Bacon in the late 1500s, when science was getting its start that ‘history’ was beginning to stake its claim in ‘reason’ and ‘facts’ as it jettisoned fancy, fantasy, poetry, legends, and the old meaning of romance. So ends the Wikipedia quotes.

When I was young history texts were killingly dry recitation of “facts” such as “The United States of America never started a war,” and then going on to kings and battles, lists of trade goods and their percentage of gross national product, and finally lists of presidents and prime ministers.

Meanwhile in science we were tested on undisputed “facts” such as there being only sixteen brain chemicals (by college I believe it was twenty-four), people do not dream in color, and dogs have no emotions. Uranus was not a planet, was a planet. You get the idea.

These days, with fake news spewing most from those who howl the loudest about everyone else’s fake news, facts have become unreliable. Their entertainment is debatable. Meanwhile, fictional history has become more sophisticated than ever before—which is convenient, as for a great many people, this is all the sense of history they are ever likely to get.

I want to make it clear that I’m not turning up my nose at people getting their history from fiction. That’s certainly how I first got interested in history: by reading historical novels for kids. The first one that forever lured me in was Mara, Daughter of the Nile, by Eloise Jarvis McGraw, read midway through grade school. When I discovered Geoffrey Trease’s delightful historical adventures (in which the girls actually got to adventure, too) and Rosemary Sutcliff’s more serious, and detailed, novels, there was no going back.

In later years, when I taught history to fifth graders, I discovered all the details of little discursions I sometimes offered about what life was like for kids in this or that station of life during such-and-such a time made it wholesale onto my tests, even if dates of battles and kings’ lives didn’t.

So it’s mostly in moods of appreciation and anticipation that I approach historical fiction. I’ve now read enough history to recognize when facts are fudged, if downright missing. The effect can be distracting, if downright disappointing—but such is not the case with Avi’s new historical novel, The End of the World and Beyond—which it turns out is a sequel to an earlier novel,
The Unexpected Life of Oliver Cromwell Pitts.

I’m certain the earlier novel goes more deeply into the eponymous Oliver’s family life. This novel stands alone; there is a little of Oliver’s family, enough to provide his motivation to find them, but as he is separated from them at the start and has to make his way alone, the novel stands satisfactorily on its own.

We learn at the outset that twelve-year-old Oliver, desperate to survive, stole some money from a wrecked ship. The penalty is hanging or being shipped to America for a seven year stint as an indentured servant. He is given the latter sentence, and shortly thereafter we find him aboard a ship, shackled to his fellow prisoners. Unlike many, he manages to survive scant, rotten food, filthy conditions, and terrifying storms as they cross the Atlantic.

His life only get worse: no one buys his bond, so he’s sent to jail. Eventually he’s bought by the psychopathic, murdering miser Fitzhugh, who seems to have murdered his last bondage servant on a whim. As Oliver endures beatings to remind him of his place, and works as hard as a grown man on Fitzhugh’s tobacco far, he befriends an African boy, Bara. The two become fast friends with the same powerful goal: to escape Fitzhugh before they wind up dead, because nobody else in the world is going to look after them.

It’s a riveting account, horrifically true to accounts of the lives of more unfortunate bond servants of the time. The prose an accessible pastiche, blending modern language with period cadences and a sprinkling of eighteenth-century vocabulary, enough not to overwhelm the student who has yet to be exposed to older styles of writing. Oliver and Bara are appealing, complex, and the pacing races along--an achievement considering the veneer of stately eighteenth century cadences.

This is exactly the kind of novel that can draw readers into a sense of history, and spark their interest in exploring further.

Over here I talk about a thoroughly enjoyable narrative overview of the American Revolution, that I think would be of interest to Hamilton fans, judging by the first comment. And everyone else, of course.

Other than that, hiding from the building heat, and dealing with family stuff, and nobody wants to read about that here, so back to radio silence.

I was commenting to asakiyume about how I was watching film clips, as I often do when resting my hands. I guess I was drawn to such after hearing that the wannabe Putin is trying to take control of intelligence and data gathering, and it is so depressing to consider how few of my fellow Americans have a sense of history--or of consequences.

Berlin, summer of 1900: https://youtu.be/B-m9A8mY-U0

So many men and boys.

So many women in this one, same area, (some of same sites) in summer 1945: https://youtu.be/R5i9k7s9X_A

Yesterday afternoon my 98-year-old great-aunt stood in the old farmhouse where she'd been a child, her careful feet on the break between the newer part of the house and the old. Gazing down at the scrubbed floorboards covered with a modern rug, she said, "My father lay right there in his casket. I was five years old, and I had no idea what was going on. They never told children in those days, you know. Not like now."

Standing by her was the 82-year-old man whose father had bought the farm when my great-grandmother finally had to give it up, after unsuccessfully trying to hold onto it as a widow in the Depression. He'd been a kid when he moved in, and at once his dad put him to work improving a house that was still nineteenth century in every way--outhouse on the knoll, paraffin stains on the walls from the lamps, a wood stove that was the only heat in the house. That stove was gone, as was the big copper pot before it that the families had bathed in--the girls first, then mom, then the boys, and the dad got the dirty bath water after everyone else was done. Both families--that was the way around there--and they laughed about how to get in and out with your knees around your ears.

That house has been in their family for seventy years, but he and his family always understands when the Carlson girls' descendants want to come visit the farm. (I was there with my mom summer 1969, but that time the dad was away, so we could only peek in the windows) They hosted a Carlson family reunion on the beautiful grounds about ten years ago--my grandmother got to be there before she died.

My daughter and I spent the entire day with my aunt, going to the various sites from hers and my grandmother's and their sisters' childhoods, with glimpses, no more than shadows, of the previous generations, left behind in work, and of course in their graves in the cemetery. So many children. "These two little boys would have been my uncles," Aunt Mim said, pointing down. One was two, the other made it to five before he died in the 1880s.

My daughter asked over dinner, "Do you miss those days?"

"Are you kidding?" Aunt Mim laughed. "Life is so much easier now. Especially for us girls. We were indentured servants back then."

She fought bitterly to be allowed to finish high school, and they let her, but the minute she got home she had to get on her overalls and get the farm chores done (she was living with a childless aunt and uncle while my great-grandmother worked as a domestic at a local rich person's house; my grandmother did child labor as the domestic at someone else's house, all the labor for a buck a week). Her younger sister was so bright that she was offered a scholarship to the local college, but that was ridiculous, the family decided--it was past time to get to work.

All the women worked, she said. Her best job was at a local orphanage, where a lot of the kids coming in spoke only Swedish.

Late in the day she admitted that she had written her autobiography. It's wonderful.

"I sugar-coated some stuff, you know," she said. I nodded--having just read a harrowing passage--and told her that if it was computerized it would be easy for her to change it any way she liked.

She admitted that she's always liked writing, but never showed anyone any of it. The only one of her kids interested died of MS ten years ago. Aunt Mim's nearly blind, but she bends over the paper with a super strong LED light bar, and writes in pencil. I told her if she writes more, or can find the chapters she wrote subsequently that didn't get typed when the MS finally crippled her daughter, I can put them in her book, and see that the whole family on that side gets a copy, along with the film my daughter is making. (She took her boyfriend's super powered camera along, and spent the entire day shooting tons of footage.) So she gave it to me.

When I show this autobiography to my mom, she's going to be blown away.

Heirlooms and lost arts.

Watched Hava Nagila (The Movie). Anyone else ever seen this documentary? I really enjoyed it. Had no idea that "Hava Nagila," which was popular enough when I was young to go mainstream, began as a nigun in the Ukraine.

If you speak some German, you might find this video made by Germans about the families streaming into the country interesting. Here is one made for German school kids. And another, angling on families.

Reprise on bricolage, after a bunch of related discussions online and at cons. Plus mentions of a couple books, including Andrea K. Höst's new release.

gillpolack has been hosting essays all month, finishing up with this one from writer/historian Kari Sperring.

Over the weekend I was in the redwoods, working with Dave Trowbridge on our massive rewrite of our space opera. Dueling computers, with occasional gusts of laughter, and sometimes Deborah, Dave's wife, who is staying with a friend through her hast days. She could be present on Skype so we could all talk writing.


I don't know if you can see it, but there is a stream far below this bridge I was standing on. (Dave and I walked the three miles into the small town for dinner one night.)

When I got home, there was my Netflix waiting, and first up was Triumph des Willens, the Nazi propaganda film made by Leni Riefenstahl in 1934, a year after Hitler took power.

Getting on toward half a century ago (it seems to weird to type that, but it's true) I first saw it, on one of those occasions when the German profs showed us significant German films. This particular time they used a room off at the film school I guess so that casual passers by couldn't look in, and with this peculiar atmosphere partly grimness, partly disgust, partly the almost-embarrassment of academics studying sociology looking at a famous porn flick, they hitched up the projector, we sat in those horrible plastic chairs popular at the time, and they let it roll.

I'd been dreading it. By then I'd spent my year in Austria, and I'd talked to a lot of folks, young and old, about the war years. That shadow was still long in 1971. I already knew plenty about atrocities, and if this was a party film, I was expecting clips of the sort of stuff Hitler had loved at private showings. (You can imagine; I'll stop here, but I heard even more details a few years later, when I was working in the film industry, and one of the older screenwriters talked about his days in the signal corps, having to review and catalogue the private film stashes of Nazi commanders, captured after the fall of Berlin.)

But what did we get? The film starts out high above the clouds, an exalted view of the sky overhead and all around amazing air-castelated cumulous. Then we descend through the mists (we are on Hitler's private plane) and there below is old Nuremberg, a fantastically beautiful city with a complication of slanted roofs juxtaposed over medieval and Renaissance times up and around the spires of famous churches. A castle or two. All to be bombed flat, of course, a few years later--and then apparently rebuilt pretty much as it had been. (I think that was still going on when I drove through there in '72, at least, all I remember is a lot of scaffolding.)

The shadow of the plane soars along a main boulevard down which precisely squared rows march toward the central gathering area at city-center. It's called Adolph Hitler Platz in the film; I don't know what it was before, or is now. The camera swoops down and makes love to glimmering reflections of old buildings in the peaceful waters, shows castle and homely (but picturesque) farmhouse, street and statue, and all of them--every one--flying the new flag of Germany, with the swastika (Hakenkreuz, or hooked cross) they'd pinched from the Aryans of India, under the supposition that the master race had conquered there and gone north, I guess blondifying as they went, until they reached the pinnacle of racial purity in Germany.

Everywhere at the roadside and hanging out of the streamer-bedecked windows and climbing precariously on centuries-old statues of saints and commanders, are people waiting to see Hitler. Blonds, mostly; though Hitler and his middle-aged, constipated-looking senior staff (except for the cadaverous Goebbels with the hooded gaze) were stodgy and dark-haired--Riefenstahl couldn't do anything about that except to shoot them from below, making them as imposing as she could--she and her camera linger on the fair-haired. There is a lot of speechifying about Germany and a reference to racial purity, though Hitler, when he speaks, reveals a very strong Austrian commoner's accent.

That is the best part of the film. Most of the rest are various sustained set pieces shot over the week-long "Party Day" get-togethers, which Hitler hosted every year until 1939, when he dispersed his peace-loving, state-serving boys off to slaughter and be slaughtered. The centerpiece is a long sequence I guess meant to show the solidarity of the S.A. with the S.S. as this was shot a bare month or two after Hitler bloodily purged the S.A. of 'undesirables.' Including the president, von Hindenburg, whose memorial is lengthily and unironically displayed in the film.

There is a second film, which is all military parade all the time, which makes me wonder how much Leni R. had had to fight the party honchos to get her vision over their demand for More Military Might. (According to the history professor who did the 2000 re-release film commentary, there was plenty of debate, for example, the old cavalry units wanted their time in the film but only got four minutes.)

The speeches are as creepy as you'd expect, the torchlight parades and all the rest pretty much what we've seen displayed in endless fiction since that time. But what got to me were Leni's own touches: the shots of Hitler from behind, from over his shoulder, so that the adoring crowd are framed between the side of his head and his upraised arm; the lingering on his profile with sunlight limning his head; and above all, the upward, heart-lifting shots of beautiful blond boys and girls, their hair sun-kissed, looking up adoringly at their leader. These shots are what I remembered all those years later, when the rest of it had faded.

1934. It got me wondering if this film was intended to sell the Nazis to the rest of the country, because it seems to me (and of course I stand to be corrected, as I've only been there twice, and can only read and listen from a distance) that Hitler might have finagled control of the government (which was a mess, coming out of post-war depression, and the humiliation of Versailles), and he undoubtedly did have all these thousands of followers, but he did not actually have the entire country behind him. It's interesting to note who is left out of that film, like the old army, commanded for centuries by the warrior caste. You get a couple brief shots of distinguished Junker army chiefs, in the audience at the speeches, not speaking themselves. There is absolutely no sign of German's once-vigorous intelligentsia. Instead we have Young Germany as Hitler envisions it, everyone in either in uniform, or in traditional garb when celebrating fealty to Hitler's person.

It occurred to me that this particular film was as effective as it was because of the female view, this lingering on the beauties of the city, the ancient buildings, the lovely smiling faces of girls and women. Sweet shots of the scuffed backs of children's shoes as their tow-headed wearers stand on tiptoe eagerly trying to catch a glimpse of the motorcade.

The party boys wanted (and got, in the sister film, which is stunningly boring except to the historian), military matchings and arms swinging, boots smacking the ground in unison, row after row of artillery with barrels jutting upward at an aggressive angle, medals glinting on uniforms. Leni Riefenstahl twines her message around the heart of the watcher, which is far, far more insidious.

It got me thinking about women who, while not in power, used their gifts to serve power, and how very dangerous they were.