It is a first-person account by a male bird, who has spent months seeking a mate, a female of his species, the Eskimo curlew, that once and not too long ago was very common in much of eastern Alaska. This particular bird is aware that he must soon leave for the long flight first eastward over Hudson’s Bay and the islands of eastern Canada, then southward across the ocean to Venezuela and straight down the South American continent to Patagonia. He will spend five months there and then prepare to fly northward again over a different track, crossing Guatemala, passing over Texas and Saskatchewan, and finally arriving at the small valley from which he departed six month before.
He does not find a mate, but he leaves anyway, knowing he has to and hoping to find a female bird in the southern land that he remembers from previous journeys. He does so, and their love is rewarded with an offspring in her body that will be born when they reach home. They fly together, the male bird constantly watching the female, knowing she is burdened by her pregnancy and guiding her when he thinks she may be losing her way, until they reach the plains of central Texas where a man, seeing this odd creature in the air, shoots and she falls to the ground. For days the male bird circles the place where she fell, wishing, hoping, until he realizes there is no help and continues his long journey to his native land. When he arrives he continues his search for another mate, always seeking, never giving up hope …
How does this beautiful book end? I will not tell you but allow you to feel, to hope, to weep and laugh … It is a common story, of course, of love between a boy and a girl, or a man and a woman, or two birds, male and female because that is the way things almost always are.
PRIMO LEVI
1918–1987
The Periodic Table
If Not Now, When?
Primo Levi was born in Turin in 1918 and trained as a chemist. He was a Jew and he experienced difficulties, but not until Germany took over the Italian government was he in any real danger because his work was valued by Italian firms. In 1944, however, he was arrested as a member of the anti-Fascist resistance and deported to Auschwitz.
His “shipment” in twelve unheated and crowded cattle cars arrived on February 4, 1944. There were 650 persons in the “shipment”; only twenty survived to be liberated by the Red Army. Before that the SS took the inhabitants of the camp on a forced march behind the lines, during which large numbers died of exhaustion and cold. Levi was one of the lucky ones because he had been stricken by scarlet fever and the Germans didn’t want to take him with the other prisoners, so they left him behind to die, which, somehow, Levi managed not to do. However, it was eleven months before he reached Turin. At first no one recognized him, he was so emaciated and worn down.
On his journey homeward he began to tell people about his experiences and they urged him to write them down. He did so, publishing them in a book called If This Is a Man in 1947. The book was hard to write because his memories were so raw even years after his escape, but he knew there were still stories that had to be told and he tried to do so. One book, a collection of stories, was called The Periodic Table (1975), because each chapter deals in one way or another with a different element, from argon and hydrogen to vanadium and carbon. It’s a fine book, too.
If Not Now, When? unlike his other books, is a novel, although it is based on stories Levi had heard from others about events in the fateful year of 1945. It follows a group of Jewish partisans behind the lines who are fighting to survive. One scene in the book is chiseled in my memory. The partisans turn the tables on a group of SS and are about to shoot them all when one of their number says, “No, let’s not do that–I know a better way.” They order the Germans to lie down on their bellies in a room and then, taking very careful aim with a pistol and slowly, one by one, they shoot each of the men in the lower spine. They are paralyzed from the waist down and the partisans watch them for a while as they try to get up, reminding Levi of a scene in Paradise Lost when the Devils at the bottom of Hell are twisting and squirming in the mud, unable to even raise their heads. The SS troops beg for food and water. The partisans do not even laugh.
Primo Levi died on April 11, 1987. He had fallen from the balcony of his apartment house in Turin. His life had not been happy; his memories were hard to live with. But the rumor that he had committed suicide is probably not true.
LEO ROSTEN
1908–1997
The Education of H*Y*M*A*N
K*A*P*L*A*N
The Joys of Yiddish
Leo Rosten was born in Lodz, Poland, in 1908 and moved to Chicago when he was three. He graduated from the University of Chicago and received a Ph.D. in 1937. The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N was published in 1931 after chapters had been appearing for months in the New Yorker. I must have been too young to read that first edition, but I soon read a second one and have been chuckling over it ever since.
Mr. Kaplan is in a class taught by a professor of English for students wishing to learn the language. He signs all his papers with the asterisks because, he says, the teacher will notice him better. He has no problem being noticed because he drives the teacher crazy with his sly comprehension of more than the teacher realizes. For just one example, Kaplan writes on an examination about his uncle:
“His eye fell on a bargain and he picked it up.” “You can’t say that, Mr. Kaplan,” says the teacher. “You have to say, ‘He saw a bargain and picked it up.’” “No,” said Mr. Kaplan. “I am right, because mine onkel has a glass eye.”
The teacher sighs in despair.
The bibliography of works by Leo Rosten (sometimes under the pseudonym of Leonard Q. Ross) fills a large page. One of the items is The Joys of Yiddish (1968), one of my favorite books.
I am not Jewish, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate and love The Joys of Yiddish. It may not be my native language, but I’ve heard it from friends all my life and am sorry that so many American Jews have forgotten it, although their parents may not have. Even so, it is one of the most expressive languages in the world and includes many typical gestures. It is like the dialect of Italian that is still spoken by some people in Sicily. It too is very expressive and involves a lot of hand movements.
Leo Rosten was a humorist and compiled several collections of Jewish humor and Yiddish quotations. They are all good. He was the source of many fine quotations. For example: “A conservative is one who admires radicals centuries after they’re dead.” “Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense.” Rosten died in New York in 1997, at the age of eighty-nine.
KURT VONNEGUT, JR
1922–2007
Slaughterhouse-Five; or,
The Children’s Crusade
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis in 1922. He was studying at Cornell when World War II broke out. He enlisted in the army, which sent him to Carnegie Tech to study mechanical engineering. This didn’t last long, and eventually he found himself in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge. Together with three other men he became lost behind the lines. The four of them wandered for days until they were captured by Wehrmacht troops in December 1944. Vonnegut was sent to Dresden as a prisoner of war and was incarcerated in cells beneath the city that had held frozen carcasses of cattle. On the night of February 13, Dresden was obliterated by firebombs from a thousand allied planes that flew over the city in waves creating a firestorm so intense that almost no one on the streets or in houses and other buildings survived. Estimates of the number of civilian deaths vary between 38,000 and 138,000 but the real number is probably closer to the latter. The problem is that there was no way to count the dead because, although the Germans at first tried to bury them all, they realized there was no way they could do that; they handed out flame throwers and burned every body they could find.