Patrice’s Uncle Kurt & The Holocaust
On 16-17 October, The United States Holocaust Museum sponsored Patrice’s 89-year-old Uncle Kurt Maier, Emeritus Librarian, Library of Congress (German collection), lectures at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library. Kurt, a Holocaust survivor with a wicked...
Honor Flight 2 September 2019
Honor Flight September 1, 2019 -- Northern Wisconsin On Labor Day week-end, 2019 I joined 200+ veterans and guardians on the local Honor Flight To Washington, D.C. I went grudgingly… Marcia, my daughter, had long ago signed me up. Patrice, my wife, more or less...
Semur-en-Auxios, France
Observation tower and portion of medieval Semur-en-Auxios defensive wall. Patrice and I are moving this November (2019) to Semur-en-Auxios., near Dijon, in Burgundy, France. Why? Because we can. We are retired, squared away, and I speak French. And, as opposed to...
The Impossible Presidency
Professor and historian Jeremi Suri’s The Impossible Presidency shines. Neither ornate nor prosaic, his words are well-chosen, his metaphors apt, the construction of the argument convincing (to me, at least). A previous work, Kissinger, rests on my desks...
Louts, Predators and Daughters
I am a hard case for the homilists of Holy Wisdom, the Benedictine Monastery, Madison, Wisconsin, where I attend mass. I tend to zone out. However, the first reading during last week’s mass, Numbers 27:1-11. caught my attention. Here, before Moses, the daughters...Featured Books
Thirteen Coats
Evgenii Belodubrovskii's Thirteen Coats is a recollection and meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion to the present.
Russia's twentieth century traumas––two world wars and the long civil war that endured from the October Revolution in 1918 until Stalin's death in1953 (we can include the collectivization of agriculture, the Great Terror and Gulag as part of this long civil war).
Numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin noted that one death is a tragedy, but ten thousand deaths is a statistic. If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism that enumerates the tens of millions murdered in the name of that twentieth century religion of Communism.
If there is any sense to be made of the madness, it will be in the single individual story. Longevity tables suggest an American will on average live ninety-three years. Self-medicating trauma with alcohol, drugs and tobacco, my Russian male cohort has now been dead ten years, his statistical lifespan fifty-three years. Memorial is a Russian movement to tell the story of Russia's twentieth century tragedy one death and one story at a time. Here, perhaps, there is some hope for Russia's recovery rather than in longing for its 'Black Book' greatness.
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