Dobryd, or How One Little Girl Survived Disaster

 

The first sentence of Ann Charney's Dobryd is chilling: "By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft." Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. Yet the novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. But despite high praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Last year, however, Baraka Books brought out a new edition, giving current readers a chance to read one of the best chronicles of life as a civilian in wartime ever written. 

The story is simple: After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

But the privations she has suffered do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

The book is also full of  love and luck. Charney was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Read it!The first sentence of Ann Charney's Dobryd is chilling: "By the time I was five years old, I had spent half my life hidden away in a barn loft." Those words took my breath away when I first read them many years ago. Yet the novel's unsentimental, clear-eyed vision offers hope that, with luck, the human spirit can blossom under the most dreadful circumstances.

Dobryd was published in Canada in the mid-1970s to a few, very good reviews. But despite high praise, it wasn't a commercial success. Last year, however, Baraka Books brought out a new edition, giving current readers a chance to read one of the best chronicles of life as a civilian in wartime ever written. 

The story is simple: After two and a half years hiding outside a small town in Poland, a five-year-old girl, her mother, her aunt, and her cousin along with four other adults, all Jews, are rescued by Russian soldiers as World War II draws to a close.

The child is at first terrified by the reaction of the people in her little world: "Weeping and laughing at the same time, they hugged me and embraced one another. I felt smothered in their arms. These embraces were not the ones I was used to; too tight, too close. I was frightened." And, looking outside the barn for the first time, she says: "A large orange circle covered the sky and coloured the world below. The fields, the animals, the farmhouse, all were illuminated in this strange, intense, blood-like colour.I heard myself scream, again and again."

The scream is the one that she has been prevented from letting out during their long period of hiding. Finally Yuri, the Russian soldier who has been carrying her, calms her. "My new friend.carried me outside. All the while his soft voice reassured me, and the sound of those words made me feel safe.. The fresh air of the summer evening felt soothing against my skin. I looked around me. I was no longer afraid."

But the privations she has suffered do not make an occasion for sorrow and regret. Charney says her book is an attempt to distance herself from the work of other survivors of Nazi oppression like Elie Wiesel and André Schwarz-Bart. "I didn't find my experience in their books, and I didn't want to spend my life following the narrow lane of lamentations," she says.

"I wanted to show that one can live through all that and still go on to be a whole human being. I wanted to have the world as my oyster the way it is for other people, and I wanted to feel free to go on to explore other things." She adds with emphasis: "One should really exalt life." That's why the book begins as it does with the liberation, and why there is so much about pleasure: ice cream, the feel of air on skin, the joy of being able to see further than four walls.

The book is also full of  love and luck. Charney was lucky enough to be born to a mother who was strong and clever and had enough resources to pay for help. Then once they were in hiding, the adults around her doted on her, teaching her to read and write, to knit, to sing. Afterwards Yuri became her special friend, and the champion of the family. It is from these repeated experiences of love and attention that Charney has built a sensibility that allows her to say that she had a "happy childhood".

Read it!

When Books Complement Each Other: Little Women and March

  

The first "chapter book" I ever read was Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  It ws a Christmas present when I was in second grade, and it took me to March (yes! that long) to read the first part.  But after I got that far, I found myself a committed reader, and it's been one book after another ever since.  It is hard to underestimate the effect of the book on me in other ways as well: I've often said that my political, social and moral ideas are rooted in the striving of the four March girls, the Little Women.

 

Set during the American Civil War, the book tells of their domestic ups and downs as they struggle to do the right thing, and worry about their father who has enlisted  in  the Union army as  a  chaplain. Mr. March is not a well-defined character, however, so despite his central place in the psychological geography of the family, the reader knows very little about who he really is.

 

Geraldine Brooks fills that gap.  Her

March tells the story of what he does when he is with the army, how he painfully arrived at his moral principles, and how he is wrenched to realize that his youthful love for a young slave woman has smoldered for decades.  In short, it is a novel for grown-ups full of moral questions as well as drama.  It is also a wonderful complement to Alcott's classic.

 

There are two levels of invention here: Alcott's enthralling quartet of girls, and Brooks’ imagining of their father's life. Alcott apparently didn't think much of Little Women, but the book has delighted generations. Brooks' novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2006.  Both are engaging and "true" in the way that the best fiction is true and both are worth reading, no matter your age.     

 

Note: the image is of the cover of my much-read copy of Little Women 

Prophet Song: "the end of the world is always a local event.."

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize, is  billed in some quarters as a cautionary tale about what happens when a  country allows itself to be taken over by authoritarians.  It begins on a cold and rainy night when government agents come for Larry, a union leader and the husband of Eilish through whose eyes we see the drama.  From there things go from bad to worse.

But the book is far from being just another dystopic tale, ready to send shivers up the reader's spine but soon to be forgotten.  It is told with curious mixture of concrete detail--what you need when you're preparing for a siege, why the water from the kitchen faucet runs brown, the rapidity with which people put up or take down flags that are symbols of their allegiance--and poetic description.  It is written in lengthy  run-on sentences that both sweep the reader along, and make him or her gasp for breath at the audacity of seeing inside someone's head so clearly. The combination is mesmerizing.  

Lynch says he was  compelled to write Prophet Song by the Syria refugee crisis of 2015 and subsequent years.  Since he did not know enough about Syria he transposed his drama about people responding to civil war and an authoritarian state from there to Ireland, where he was born and where he still lives.  That he can make the transfer so believable is evidence of his skill as a storyteller but also sad testimony to how close to the surface disaster is in most places.

Ultimately, however, Lynch offers a sort of hope. He writes of Eilish as she tries to escape with her two surviving children. 

"... she looks at her infant son... and she can see that the world does not end, that it is a vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time...that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event..."

At the time I first read those words I was working on my book about the importance of collective and individual memory to the survival of our civilizations, Before We Forget: How Remembering Will Get Us Through the Next 75 Years.   Yes, I thought, the end may seem nigh, but we must continue as best we can.  Which is what Eilish does in the end, the very end.

A book to read and to think about.