The Zookeeper's Wife

The Zookeeper's Wife is a war story about Warsaw under siege and the Jewish holocaust. Jan Zabinski, the zookeeper, and his wife Antonina ran the Warsaw zoo, but when the animals were shot for sport by a German zookeeper Lutz Heck after selectively taking the preferred and rare animals (European bison, Przywalski horses which had only been "discovered" in 1879, and a few others) for Nazi selective breeding, Jan and Antonina stayed on at the zoo to assist in the running of a fur farm for making fur coats for the Nazis. [Under the Third Reich, animals became noble, mythic, almost angelic -- including humans, of course, but not Slavs, Gypsies, Catholics, or Jews. Therefore, breeding programs were for the selected animals and medical procedures and experiments were for the undesirably "humans". The subjects of Auschwitz's operating doctor Mengele could be operated on without painkillers, but a remarkable example of Nazi zoophilia was that a leading biologist was once punished for not giving worms enough anesthesia during an experiment.]

The zoo, despite its loss of wild animals, was a cover for hiding Jews right under the invaders' noses. In the course of the war Jan and Antonina managed to save 300 by hiding them on the zoo grounds, which were, by the way, right next to a Nazi compound. The Jews referred to as "guests" were given animal names that reflected their character and their cage of domicile. This naming method also prevented slip-of-the-tongues or prevented people who overheard their talk from guessing the truth of what really was going on at the zoo. The people who lodged in the lion's cage were, therefore, called the lions. "Pheasants" often came in the night and lodged in the pheasant house, only to fly a few days later when their trail wasn't so hot. 

During the five years of the war, 860,000 Poles were uprooted and resettled; 75,000 Germans took over their lands; 1,300,000 Poles were shipped to Germany as slave labor, and 330,000 simply shot. With ingenuity the Polish Resistance sabotaged German equipment, derailed trains, blew up bridges, printed over 1,100 periodicals, made radio broadcasts, "illegally" taught in schools and colleges (attended by 100,000 students), aided Jews in hiding, supplied arms, made bombs, assassinated Gestapo agents, rescued prisoners, staged secret plays, published books, held its own law courts, and ran couriers to and from the London-based government-in-exile. At the height of the war, 380,000 soldiers with Jan Zabinski among them comprised the military wing of the Home Army.

Jan was the leader of an Underground cell, and he used the delivery of hay and fodder for the animals as a way to bring in and pass on explosives and other counter-intelligence equipment, which Antonina never knew about until after the war. He poisoned pigs, butchered them, and then arranged the meat to be eaten by German soldiers. During one month in 1943, his cell derailed 17 trains and damaged 100 locomotives! Antonina basically knew that he was part of the resistance but not that he led parts of it so actively, often narrowly escaping capture or death. Antonina would only learn of his great exploits after the war and Jan's return from a POW camp. Jan figured that Antonina had enough stress on her plate with taking care and protecting her very young son, and of course ensuring the meals, shelter and safety of her continue flow of "guests".

In the earlier part of the war Germans established food lines for the starving people of Warsaw. They calculated a calorie-feeding system for the differing races who stood in three separate food lines based on race. The Germans received 2,613 calories of food per day, the Poles 669, and the Jews 184. German Governor Frank who controlled all matters in Warsaw declared, "I ask nothing of the Jews except that they disappear."

According to German figures, Germans shipped 316,822 people from Warsaw to concentration camps between early 1942 and January 1943. Many were shot in the ghetto so the death rate was actually much higher. Aided by friends on the Aryan side, tens of thousands escaped the ghetto, but some who stayed, such as Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the ghetto's Hasidic rabbi, revealed a tigerish struggle with faith as was discovered after the war by his discovered diary. How could anyone reconcile the agony of the Holocaust with Hasidim, a dancing religion that teaches love, joy, and celebration? During World War II, 30-40% of the world's Jews were killed, but more specifically 80-90% of the Orthodox community was wiped out; this was the group that kept alive the ancient tradition of mysticism and meditation traced back to the Old Testament world of the prophets.

In 1941, Governor Frank decreed everyone must have an identity card complete with serial number and fingerprints. For two years, Polish offices responsible for making the cards stalled. Meanwhile, they along with Underground offices and greedy opportunists were able to set up a system for making fictitious identity cards. Hordes of people suddenly seemed to have lost their records (born in Russia, born to Muslim Poles, records burned in a church fire), so needed to reissued identity credentials. By 1943 it was commonly known that 15% of all identity cards and 25% of all working papers had been forged.

After the war and his return from the POW slave labor camp, Jan was forced to retire from zookeeping at the age of 54. Times were hard after the war and anyone who praised pre-war independence or resistance during the war (and especially for someone who fought in such a war) were judged to be dangerous. Jan retired from zookeeping but still devoted to zoology, he focused on writing and ended up writing 50 books on the lives of animals and conservationism. He also spent much time writing and researching the pedigree of the European bison that had been returned to Warsaw by Lutz Heck, which turned out to be good since Germany was bombed right afterwards killing its bison herd. Antonina, after the war, stayed in contact with the former "guests" who were spread among many countries. She and Jan never left Poland, but their hearts remained bound with all of the many people they helped save.

(Fascinating source article)

Some of the 300 "guests were Irena Mayzel, Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk, Dr. Ludwig Hirszfeld (a specialist in communicable diseases), Dr. Roza Anzelowna from the National Hygiene Institute, the Lemi-Lebkowski family, Mrs. Poznanska, Dr. Lonia Tenenbaum, Mrs. Weiss (wife of a lawyer), the Keller family, Marysia Aszer, journalist Maria Aszerowna, Rachela Auerbach, the Kenigswein family, Drs. Anzelm and Kinszerbau, Eugienia "Genia" Sylkes, Magdalena Gross, Maurycy Fraenkel, and Irena Sendler, among many others. All 300 "guests" survived the war except Kazio and Ludwinia Kramsztyk (cousins of renowned painter Roman Kramsztyk), Dr. Hirszfeld (specialist in infectious diseases), and Dr. Roza Anzelowna and her mother. They were arrested by the Gestapo a few months after leaving the zoo and were summarily killed.

Antonina died in 1971, her husband three years later.

Silk Riders: On the Trail of Marco Polo

Silk Riders: Jo and Gareth Morgan's Incredible Journey on the Trail of Marco Polo was an interesting read. Jo and Gareth were avid motorbikers, and as they were finishing a ride high in the Indian Himalaya they started thinking of their future tours. A fellow rider tossed out the silk road and Jo and Gareth really liked the idea. The trip took two years to organize. In that time they had to figure out political details, travel logistics, cultural awareness issues, get and curry sponsorship, and of course figure out who among their friends could join them on their trip. BMW only provided at large discount 7 bikes and so the trip was limited to 7. 

The 7 were kiwis, but their trip would begin at the BMW factory in Munich where the new bikes recently broken in in the Australian outback and imported into Germany to begin the trip would get a total tuning in readiness for the multi-thousand-kilometer journey.

Then in 2005 the trip began. They were waved off in Munich by a single person, an English motorcyclist who journeyed from Yorkshire to Bavaria to see them off, and off they went through the lower reaches of Germany, into Austria, to the foothills of the Alps, and onward to Venice, the family home of Marco Polo. Despite the Polo family being one of the most prominent families of Venice and despite the since fame of the explorer, the 7 were surprised at the few memorials commemorating one of the city's most famous past residents. There is a library where Marco's last will and testament is held and the San Lorenzo church, in the yard of which he was buried in 1324. Near the site of his homestead is an area of little courts called 'Il Milione', which was Marco's nickname, 'the teller of a million tales'. 

Then off to the Balkans they sped. Few people are aware that Marco Polo was not a Venetian by birth but rather a Croatian. Marco was born on Korcula, an island of what is now Croatia. Of course the 7 had to go to the island, ferrying one of the bikes over for a picture with the iconic bike in front of what is said to be the house of Marco Polo's birth. 

To Serbia, Bulgaria, then Gallipolli, Turkey, which was very significant to the Kiwis as they recalled the Kiwis who died trying to claim the cliffs of Gallipolli. Onward to Istanbul where Jo started to having trouble as women were not to be seen in public, certainly not on a motorbike, and even though as she progressed further into Iran, the chador she wore just wasn't quite enough because it outlined her provocative bottom as she sped along. 

A disappointment to me in the book was the little attention given to following the trail of Marco Polo, as far as information on what they discovered in relation to Marco. Instead, the intent of the book was just to skim over the countries the 7 sped through and give mostly motorcycle commentation on the road conditions or visa issues. There were tidbits on culture but obviously the book was about a mad dash across Asia following a trail and not really picking up that many culturally rich experiences. 

That said, the highlight of the Iranian segment of the trip was the visit to the Valley of the Assassins, of which Marco wrote. The fortress of Alamut still remains, and as legend goes, an 11th century Hashish-iyun sect, basically an Islamic mercenary group led by a fanatical imam, had an unusual method for training young men to fight unconditionally. He would dose them with hashish and then turn them loose in a five-star pleasure garden stocked with milk and honey and virgins--all accouterments of paradise. After a couple of weeks, he removed them and cut off their narcotic supply. Finding themselves in a military camp they were told that they had been to paradise and if they hoped to live again in the style they had experienced in paradise, they would need to distinguish themselves in battle, and the imam of course provided that. These feared, driven warriors were known as Hashish-iyun, and the word 'assassin' derives from this group.

The Silk Riders only did the overland route from Venice to Xanadu (now Yuanshangdu) and down to Beijing. They didn't even attempt to follow Marco's route of 20+ years. 

To Tehran (the city that couldn't possibly have worse traffic, and motorcycles were forbidden in them for fear of drive-by motorcycle gunners) so their motorcycles were transported via truck. Lots of problems but eventually they were allowed to proceed onward to Turkmenistan, perched on the edge of the Karakum Desert across which they would have to travel. 

Then to Uzbekistan, the country that is the world's largest silk producer, and the country that was the half-way point of the 7 bikers' trip. Onward to Kyrgyzstan and most notably to Kara-Kul in the northwest where there are soaring mountains, alpine meadows and cooler temperatures. Close is the beautiful Lade Issyk-Kul, the second highest navigable alpine lake in the world after Lake Titicaca in Peru. Jo had swum in Lake Titicaca two years previous on another tour, and she attempted to take a dip in Lake Issyk-Kul in memory of her previous swim.

Of course they had chances to try the many exotic foods on the regions they passed through. In Kyrgyzstan is was the kumys, the fermented mare's milk popular among the nomads and which Marco had reported favorably that the drink tasted like white wine. The 7 heartily disagreed!

To China. One of the most amazing highlight in China was in Dunhuang, known for the famous Mogao Grottoes, or the Caves of 1000 Buddhas, which is a structure carved into a rocky cliff-face at the edge of the Lop Nor Desert. The Buddhas trace back to the first which was carved in AD366 when a Buddhist monk carved one Buddha figure into a rock. Over the ensuing 1500 years, more Buddhas were added, but not only Buddhas as the name suggests, but also the life of the local people. In the 20th century a chamber was discovered containing thousands of manuscripts which had been sealed since the 11th century. Unfortunately, explorers from England, Germany, Russia and more countries pillaged the place, dispersing artifacts around the globe but leaving the caves as empty shells, but ones which continue to whisper the reminders of great secrets from Chinese antiquity.

Continuing onward out of the desert great mounds of packed earth started appearing ... remnants of the ancient Great Wall which ended in the desert and which in their entirety were built over a period of 1500 years. This amazing wall eventually was over 10,000 kilometers in distance, but despite the great expanse, the beacon towers could relay a message of attack, fire, emergency from the furthest-most tower in the desert back to Peking in less than 30 minutes! 

Of course they cycled to Xian, the capital of China until Kubla Khan (Marco's Great Khan), the man who shifted the reins of command to Peking in the 14th century. They viewed the 2000-year-old, life-sized warriors guarding the royal tomb that was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well. The 7 reckoned 300,000 workers were needed in this construction that took over 35 years to build.

From Xian to Mongolia, the end of the road. They headed to Shangdu, known to Marco as Xanadu and which, according to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan had his stately pleasure-dome. Once they got there, they were in trouble with the authorities as to their purpose in that town. And then they came to realize that Shangdu was not the old Xanadu but Yuanshangdu, 200 kilometers away, was. And off they sped to Yuanshangdu, where in 1275 Kublai Khan had received Niccolo and Maffeo Polo and Niccolo's boy, Marco. This was the town that marked the eastern limit of Kublai Khan's empire, which stretched right back the way they had come, to Hungary. This was the end of the Silk Riders enterprise. Since April, they had covered almost 20,000 kilometers, crossed two major deserts, dodged through a war zone, visited the three inland oceans of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, and traversed the entire distance from west to east of the Great Wall.

They saddled up and set off for Beijing, the city known as Khan-Balik, "the Lord's City", in Kublai Khan's day. Their journey culminated with a ceremonial banquet at the New Zealand embassy and well attended by members of the BMW owners' club. would be held in their honor for the completion of their journey.

For a 52:30 minute YouTube clip on their journey, watch "Silk Riders - Motorcycling tour in the footsteps of Marco Polo",  and their blog on their journey.

Words Lost in Translation

When translating from one language to another, inevitably you will come across a word that just can't be translated directly into the other language and you must resort to description and explanation of the concept. This is true because language reflects culture and vice versa, culture reflects language, so our cultures like our languages are different and therefore result in different ways of looking at the world. Many cultures in fact have totally different world experiences from other cultures preventing full understanding between the cultures because they just can't quite identify with one another. 

Many people already are aware that the Inuit have a large number of words for "snow" that just don't translate into English. This is because when the Inuit talk about the snow, they are including references to how cold it is and therefore how fluffy, crisp, hard, blowy, etc and the snow is that is falling, the snow that is on the ground, e.g. in hard packed coverage or deep fluffy coverage that doesn't support a dogsled. In English we resort to description if we think the kind of snow on the ground or falling is important. That would take a long, long time in the Inuit language because about nine months of the year the Arctic has some kind of snow.

If you'll recall, the movie "The King and I" was about a missionary who went to Siam (Thailand) in the 1800s and had the palace concubines and children put on a play. In the play about Harriet Beecher Stowe's book "Uncle Tom's Cabin", the miracle of snow was introduced. The concubines and others didn't believe that anything cold could fall from the sky; it was outside of their world experience and so at first they didn't believe anything like that could exist, then they played with the word "snow" and the mysterious idea of a cold world and marveled that such a thing could exist. They were able to step outside their culture via literature and broaden their world concept.

Well, a rather new and interesting book on the shelf is "Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Compendium of Untranslatable Words from Around the World". The book has pages of illustrated words from other languages that just can't be translated easily or directly into English, but if they were, could be an asset to the ever-growing English language. Following are several of the entries with some charming illustrations:

Suadade (noun)

Probably one of the most famous (are beautiful) Portuguese words is "saudade" which refers to the feeling of longing for something or someone you love or have lost. Fado music, a form of music characterized by mournful tunes and lyrics, relates to saudade.

Saudade is not just a feeling but something you can literally "have". In Portuguese, you could say "Tenho saudades," which translates as "I have saudade."

This kind of reminds me of a Spanish expression, "No tengo ganas", with ganas being another word that doesn't translate. Ganas kind of means desire, will or energy, so "No tengo ganas" kind of means "I don't have the desire/will/inclination/energy to do that."

Cacimbo (noun)

This Kimbundu word, used in Angola, refers to a heavy mist or drizzle that occurs in the Congo basin area and which is often accompanied by onshore winds. It is synonymous for the cool season, and apparently there is no translation possible. Upon hearing the word, Angolans think about the fresh air, the summer, the cool weather and the very cold water.

This word reminds me of "siwonhada", a Korean word with perhaps more meanings on cool, refreshing, invigorating ideas. It seems to similarly be used for a breath of fresh air after the summer heat or the icy coldness of the air conditioner after the burning heat outside. It has no specific temperature range but often reflects the change in coolness after the hotness. Actually, siwonhada is an idiom with many more meanings, but this one on coolness is probably the most commonly used one.

Extrawunch (noun)

This useful German word is used to denote someone who is slowing things down by being fussy. It means an additional request which turns a simple delivery/operation/undertaking into a complicated one, often with only a marginal benefit and a sense of it being an unnecessary complication.

Hiraeth (noun)

Hiraeth is Welsh and refers to a particular type of longing for the homeland or the romanticized past. The Japanese word "natsukashii" means something similar. It sometimes has connotations of nostalgia for an idealized past that never was.

Somewhat similarly is the Korean word "han", which is in fact a cultural disease of the Koreans before Korea became a democratic country (in the late 1980s - early 1990s). Han means a rancor, bitterness or inability to express one's feelings of turmoil or resentment, kind of like a bitterness that could not be expressed (because of the military government) and an eating away of bottled up pain, anger and frustration. The oldest generation may still have the cultural disease of Han but the younger generations, experiencing freedom of speech and action, certainly do not.

Korembi (noun)

A beautiful Japanese word that refers to the sunlight that filters through the leaves of trees. Taking pictures of korembi is popular with photographers and this word seriously needs to be added to the English language!

Mokita (noun)

The word "mokita" comes from the Kivila language in Papua New Guinea. It translates loosely as "the truth we all know but agree not to talk about". Another necessary word addition for English!

Dapjeongneo (noun?)

The next time your girlfriend asks you, "Don't you think I'm pretty in my new dress?" you'll get an instinctive feel for the meaning of this word. Dapjeongneo (답정너) is a recently created Korean word used when somebody (usually, you may have guessed, a woman) has already decided the answer you want to hear, and all is left for you to do is to utter the answer.

Waldeinsamkeit (noun)

Waldeinsamkeit is German for "a feeling of solitude, being alone in the woods and a connectedness to nature." Perhaps not the most useful word out there, and to be fair, it's a fairly old term that nobody uses nowadays, but it's still pretty cool and would make you look very smart if you were to throw it in  a discussion, and mention that Ralph Waldo Emerson even wrote a whole poem about it.

Depaysement (noun)

A word that is in every French-speaking traveler's vocabulary. It doesn't translate to "homesick" but rather to the feeling that comes from not being in one's home country, of being a foreigner or immigrant or displaced from your place of origin. Literally translated in English, it would be something like "unlandscaped" (Italian has an exact translation, "spaesamento".)

The word can also have a positive connotation, a "change of scene" that is experienced in a completely new place. Therefore, in using and understanding the exact meaning of the word, one must pay attention to context and tone.

Iktsuarpok (noun)

Iktsuarpok is Inuit for the feeling of anticipation that leads you to go outside and check if anyone is coming. It also denotes impatience. Imagine living in an igloo in the middle of the northern tundra where not a single living soul lives within 100 square kilometers, then you can quickly get the sense of the meaning of the word for expectancy. The environment certainly has shaped the creation and use of this word.

Jayus (noun or adjective?)

A very useful word if you have friends with a bad sense of humor. Jayus is Indonesian for "a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but to laugh." English has the expression of "corny" and Koreans can use the above word "siwonhada" (cold) in this situation, but neither English nor Korean have a word for the embarrassed laughter following such a joke. Both languages could benefit by this word!

Mamihlapinatapei (noun)

Mamihlapinatapei is an amazing word in Yagan, an indigenous language of Tierra del Fuego (an archipelago off the southernmost tip of the South American mainland, across the Strait of Magellan). It means the wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start. Yeah, this word could seriously work in English! "The look", the closest translation is English, just has too many possible meanings.

Verschlimmbessern (verb)

Another German word, a verb in fact, means "to make something worse when trying to improve it," something we've all experienced but now we have a word for it. Somehow if this word gets borrowed into English, I do believe it'll have to be introduced as a contraction, maybe something like "The boss versched the reconstruction." It does sound appropriately negative so maybe this shortening will find its way into English ... eventually.

Eomchina (noun)

Eomchina (엄친아) is a hilarious Korean contraction of the phrase "Mom's friend's son" (엄마친구아들). Korean mothers are often very competitive and compare their children against the offspring of their friends. This word is used to describe a person who is more successful or skilled than you - the kind of person your mother would compare you to in a negative light so as to motivate you to study harder. Wow, yes, Korea is so competitive that I bet my students hear this word a LOT!

Schadenfreude (noun)

This German word literally translates as "harm-joy" and refers to the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer mentioned schadenfreude as "the most evil sin of human feeling." A number of interesting scientific studies of schadenfreude were undertaken in recent years.

Following are some more culture revealing words, for as Virginia Wolf said in the only surviving recording of her voice, "Words belong to each other". Words are indeed a magnificent meditation and cultural reflection on the beauty of language. Language is what makes us human; it defines us, our essence, our souls.

Gurfa - Arabic (noun)

The amount of water that can be held in one hand. (I'm wondering how this word became popularized in Arabic and in what context it is really used.)

Tsundoku - Japanese (noun)

Leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books. Hmmm, I think I need this word.

Palegg - Norwegian (noun)

Anything and everything you can put in a slice of bread. Well, why not? A sandwich connotes two pieces of bread with a filling and people describe the filling via language, cheese-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich, PBJ sandwich. Why not put anything between bread, I mean, food is food, right?

Forelsket - Norwegian (noun)

The indescribable euphoria experienced as you being to fall in love. Useful indeed!

Trepverter - Yiddish (noun)

A witty riposte or comeback you think of only when it is too late to use. Literally, "staircase words."

Wabi-sabi - Japanese (noun)

Finding beauty in the imperfections; an acceptance of the cycle of life and death.

Jugaad - Hindi (noun)

Ensuring that things happen even with minimal resources, even if they happen "by hook or by crook." Oh, yes, English needs this!

Komorebi - Japanese (noun)

The sunlight that filters through the leaves of the trees. Komorebi is just plain word poetry!

Kilig - Tagalog (noun)

The feeling of butterflies in your stomach, usually when something romantic or cute takes place.

Fika - Swedish (verb)

Gathering together to talk and take a break from everyday routines, usually drinking coffee and eating pastries (either at a cafe or at home) and often for hours on end.

Commuovere - Italian (verb)

Often taken to mean "heartmoving" but directly relates to a story that moved you to tears. Guess this means something different from tear-jerking, but they seem quite similar to me.

Luftmensch - Yiddish (noun)

Refers to someone who is a bit of a dreamer and literally means "air person". The closest English I can think of is the person has his head in the clouds, but a one-word descriptor is so much more culturally powerful.

Tretar - Swedish (noun)

On its own, "tar" means a cup of coffee and "pelar" is the refill of said coffee. A "tretar" is therefore a second refill, or a "three-fill".

References:

15 Untranslatable Words You Wish Existed in English - Lingholic

Lost in Translation: An Illustrated Catalog of Beautiful Untranslatable Words from Around the World - Brain Pickings

The Hearts of Horses

The Hearts of Horses by Molly Gloss is a nostalgia novel mostly about the winter of 1917 and 1918. The story is as meandering as a winding trail up a mountain, and like a winding trail that suddenly ends at the top, the story culminates with a written view of where the heroine, Martha Lessen, 19, female horse-whisperer and bronco-buster has been and experienced in her youth as well as giving a verbal glimpse of her future life in the west as it was further tamed.

In the meandering story Molly Gloss shared fascinating lost horse-sense on horse markings and pigmentation:

• a white-faced horse's eyes will weep
• a horse with white feet is prone to split hooves
• palominos, claybacks, skewbalds, piebalds, some strawberry roans have amber hooves that are brittle and prone to cracks
• white hides will scald and chaff from sweat and heat
• some paint horses—the ones with mostly white on them—and blue eyes are not right in the head
• a pure black horse will sunburn in hot weather and fade out under the saddle and harness
• but horses seem to know that those of them that are the plain-colored ones are the lucky ones (p. 115)

Molly Gloss also wove little known knowledge of the 1910s, a time when cars were replacing horses, and other era-specific tidbits into her narrative. For example, some young kids collected the shed antlers of bulk elk and bull deer to be sold for a few cents a pound at a hardware store. Or cars were driven backwards up hills to keep fuel going into the carburetors. Or ptomaine poisoning, from improperly canned foods, was a very serious matter. She shared the time-era social gossips of the time too. As the war picked up (1917), women gathering at the many functions debated over whether Americans should get involved in Europe's war, whether Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn ought to have been arrested for handing out birth control information and whether Jeannette Rankin over in Montana would cause a riot when she arrived in Washington DC as the first woman elected to Congress.

Molly did later add some insightful humor on Margaret Sanger later in her book:  Although Margaret Sanger in Brooklyn was arrested for just passing out birth control information, condoms did in fact already exist. Evidently it was as illegal to share birth control information publicly just as it was illegal to ship condoms across state lines and in some/many counties, buying and selling them was also illegal.

Other social dynamics in the books concerned entertainment, which primarily centered around theaters. Back in the 1910s the plots of movies were the near equivalent of dime novels. "Stories of Mounties and Texan Rangers abounded, frontiersmen in coon caps, heroes with swords and plumed hats, Kit Carson-style scouts; titillating stories of girls dressed in breeches and pith helmets, cave girls in fur tunics, brown-skinned girls in grass or leather skirts, innocent girls in jeopardy from mustache-twirling villains. Quite a few movies made a point of the barbaric and the unusual—Eskimos in the far North, for example, building their igloos. The movies brought a lot of people their first glimpse of a seaside bathing beach, a woman smoking, colored people in a jazz band, men in swallow-tailed tuxedos, a woman in a negligé. Charlie Chaplain was popular, and Buster Keaton, an unlucky young many coping with the mysteries of modern life; it was from these picture shows that most people in the West had their first images of electric streetcars, ocean liners, airplanes. And in the war years there rained down a storm of movies about boys in uniform, boys who were the pride of their fathers and the envy of their younger brothers" (p. 261).

During the movie real changes, Four-Minute Men, community volunteers who spoke for encouraging enlistments or making communities aware of other wartime needs, delivered speeches. They might incite members in their communities to look for spies among their neighbors, expound on the evil of extravagance (eating sugar, wheat, pork chops when soldier boys get stale bread and cold meat), laud the virtues of wearing half-soled shoes and mended trousers and of signing food pledge cards to eat less, and of course to extol the wearing of Liberty Badges to confirm their patriotism. This was the era when Germans were hated, and even those German families with children born in America and fighting against the Germans overseas were hated. Such were the social dynamics of the times.

Patriotism ran wild. Conscientious objectors were jailed, war protesters were to be kicked out of the country, as well as pacifist ministers and journalists who wrote anti-war editorials, soldiers who complained of bad conditions in the army, and teachers who spoke out in favor of German literature.

The spirit of ruthless intolerance and repression continued after the war. The Ku Klux Klan became strong and put ads in the paper calling for "Patriots Who Hold This Country Dear" to conceal their identities in robes and hoods and come for public initiations. Negroes and Chinese were not as yet in Elwha country where Martha Lessen had her riding ring for breaking horses, and the KKK was determined to keep them out as well as plan their attacks on the "unwanted" Jewish family, some Basques, Mexicans and Catholics already there.

The Heart of Horses was not focused on the political or social currents but rather on the mundane riding circle of Martha Lessen and her gentle-taming of horses who were owned by seven separate households. Written in the first person, Martha rides her ring daily, breaking and loving the horses. Her thoughts are shared on the horses she rides as well as their owners, for as Martha says, knowing the owners is primary to knowing the horse itself.

Paratroopers of the 101st Airborne

Lately I've been doing book exchanges with colleagues who are interested in history and the effects of war. My most recent is Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers about E Company, 506th Regiment, 101St Airborne who first parachuted over Normandy, who often spearheaded attacks on thinly guarded front lines and finally ended up in Hitler's Eagle Nest where blatant looting and wild drinking closed the war, and where casualties were no longer from gun fire but car accidents resulting from the inebriated state.

For an excellent book review, click here.

The name of the book Band of Brothers is the result of specialized training with the same group of men who were forced under dire stress by their unanimous hatred of their company commander, forced night marches where they learned to recognize each other's shadows, and fierce and on-going combat. They were faced with the ugliness of war, destruction, death, and where nothing was worse than letting one's buddy down. And through the grime, filth and blood they formed the closest brotherhood they would ever know, one founded on selflessness and the intimate trust that comes when one knows he can depend on another to do his utmost for his buddies' best interests. And as the book states, by the time they had gotten through the Battle of the Bulge they were a band of brothers who would be linked to one another through life from their shared horrific experiences.

The men of E Company passed through many countries as the war progressed, and each country was stereotyped by their treatment/reaction/indifference to the troops. In general the men had widely different perceptions and experiences with the German people, the supposed enemy. Some found reasons to reinforce their hatred, others loved the country and its people, but nearly everyone ended up changing his mind about their preconceived ideas of the Germans as all of them had some kind of fascination with the German people.

"The standard story of how the American GI reacted to the foreign people he met during the course of WWII runs like this: He felt the Arabs were despicable, liars, thieves, dirty, awful, without a redeeming feature. The Italians were liars, thieves, dirty, wonderful, with many redeeming features, but never to be trusted. The rural French were sullen, slow, and ungrateful while the Parisians were rapacious, cunning, indifferent to whether they were cheating the Germans or Americans. The British people were brave, resourceful, quaint, reserved, dull. The Dutch were, as noted, regarded as simply wonderful in every way [but the average GI never was in Holland, only the airborne.] The story ends up thus: wonder of wonders, the average GI found that the people he liked best, identified most closely with, enjoyed being with, were the Germans. Clean, hard-working, disciplined, educated, middle-class in their tastes and lifestyles (many GIs noted that so far as they could tell the only people in the world who regarded a flush toilet and soft toilet paper as a necessity were the Germans and the Americans), the Germans seemed to many American soldiers as "just like us."" (p248-9)

The book ends with the E Company running riot in Hitler's Eagle Nest but where the incessant drinking in the final days of the war became a bore and the men ached for action or a speedy return home. Finally, on November 30, 1945 the 101st was inactivated and E Company no longer existed. But the brotherhood remained. And almost annually a reunion takes place where many of the former paratroopers get together and re-cement their bonds with one another. Not all have faired well. While all suffered some physical or other adverse traumas of war, the majority were able to adjust back to civilian life. A small number became dysfunctional, three became wealthy, but the vast majority became builders of society.

In the final chapter on the "Postwar Careers" of the men from E Company, it was noted that most men took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights and went to college, became educated and participated actively in contributing to the social, and for some, economic welfare of the US after the war-torn years. And as Ed Tipper, one of the paratroopers, sums it up in regard to why so many of the soldiers returned to be teachers, he said, "Is it accidental that so many ex-paratroopers from E Company became teachers? Perhaps for some men a period of violence and destruction at one time attracts them to look for something creative as a balance in another part of life."