Slowing down

I suppose I'll slow down eventually - after all how much memoir writing can I do? But, for right now, there has been a general stirring up of past history and reading about the Holocaust is part of that. I just finished - thank G-d - the book on the years 1938-1945 dealing with the Holocaust. It was hard reading with no happy endings. Even as I read of the death of Hitler and Goebels, it was not with any satisfaction - only relief that it was over.

According to the writer of the book, the Nazi's kept killing Jews right up until the last minute hoping to destroy as many of them as possible before the Allies arrived to shut down the camps and roll up the Nazi army. Some 50,000 Hungarian Jews were killed in the last WEEK of the war. The crematoriums burned out from "working so hard without stopping".

Maybe I'll sleep better now. But maybe not. Two night ago I woke to hear a loud knocking at the front door and my first thought was "They've finally come to get me." Of course, my second thought was maybe my neighbors were in trouble, or maybe the wind chimes were keeping the neighborhood awake and .......but it was none of those things. It was my half sleep/half nightmare growing yeastily out of my reading.

I don't think I'm through reading about the Holocaust but maybe I'll just take some time out to read less disturbing material.

I've been reading for the Book Club "Loving Frank" - a book about Frank Lloyd Wright and one of his mistresses (one of the more infamous mistresses). I don't know why this book got such wide acclaim. I could neither feel the "passion" that pulled those two people together, nor sense from the writing the restlessness and dissatisfaction of his mistress, Mame - who left her husband and two children to run off with FLW (who left a wife and 6 children). Somehow we are told that she was too intelligent, too well-educated to settle for being a wife and mother. Well that certainly annoyed the hell out of me. This was a woman who, in the 1920's, was college educated and had a profession as a librarian - she was already bucking the standards and values of the times - it just made no sense to me, even for allowing that I don't necessarily understand the sensibilities of a woman of that time.

We've read a variety of unsatisfying books this year. I find myself being very critical of them all and picking them apart with frustration. Incoherent, mixed author voices, sliding time periods - one filled with Spanglish slang with no translation.

I'm going to recommend a couple of books for next year that I hope others will enjoy as much as I did. "The Zookeepers Wife" - while not a perfect book, was interesting and intriguing. "The Help" was a wonderful book (and they'll be happy to know it's not about WWII). This year I recommended "The Book Thief" and "People of the Book" both with either a Jewish or WWII theme. But that's what's been interesting me lately.

Still it's nice to discuss books with other book lovers - even if we disagree we have some interesting exchanges and sometimes thought provoking ones.

One book we read, not really a very good book, "Shadow Catcher", produced a very interesting discussion on what do we know about history, and how do we know it's "True". Isn't all history a product of the writer's imagination and culture? So what is truth?

Last year I read several books - some novels - on the subject of Henry VII (Henry VIII's father),
and Edward IV all to better understand Richard III who was briefly king between those two.
The killer, supposedly, of the "little Princes".

What wonderful books they were and how they turned you this way and that looking at the different perspectives, the different sources, and the different points of view. My very respected Thomas More lied through his teeth about Richard III.

I don't think I could recommend any of those books for the Book Club. They come under the heading of historical fiction - which it turns out is almost all history.

In "Shadow Catcher", the story is told of a famous - and real - photographer who photographed magnificent photos of Native Americans. Those photographs are iconic. It's what we believe about Native Americans - the noble savage - the native peoples ......and yet, we find out he took those pictures in the 1930's; posed people chosen for their interesting faces and dressed them for effect - often in clothes not related to their tribal history. So it's all a crock - or is it?

Untidily interspersed in the story of Edward Curtis, the photographer, who was real - is a modern story of the writer. The only part of that story I enjoyed was the difficulty of driving in Los Angeles for people who don't know the city well.

Well, I told you, it was a strange book.

I don't think I'll ever look at photos of Native Americans again without that little shift in my mind questioning who this really is - and who photographed them.

The Holocaust is like that - it's shifting as we speak. No two people can come at it the same way. I read today that Feminists in Germany claim that their Mothers were also victims of the Jews - Huh? They claim that the Old Testament values (Jewish) of women were the root cause of the Nazis sending German women back to "Kinde, Kirche, and Kuchen". My understanding of the Nazis was that they rejected all religions since they grew out of the Jewish Torah. They had a more pagan "religion" having to do with German legends and Valkyrie. Go figure.