Remembering a Vanished World

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Excellent review/essay about a new documentary on the photography and the life of Roman Vishniac (1897-1990), the foremost chronicler of Eastern European Jewry. Vishniac’s major book A Vanished World (FSG, 1983) is a touchstone volume; though it was an oversized hardcover, coffee-table style book—with dozens of richly printed full-page images which sold for at least $50 when it came out—in my Cleveland bookstore, Undercover Books, we ordered lots of copies, stacked it  up, and sold dozens. The essay is by Mark Athitakis, a critic whose reviews I alway enjoy. He explains that Vishniac, who was born in Russia, not Eastern Europe, had scientific training, and after narrowly saving himself and his family from the Nazis, and coming to America in 1940, “he taught biology and photography at New York colleges and, in the ’50s and ’60s gained fame for his microphotography—high-resolution shots of live insects and colorful images of amoebas and protozoa and human tissue filled the pages of magazines such as Life and Boys’ Life.”

The film also reveals that during WWII, while the Holocaust was raging, Vishniac tried to use his pictures to influence policy, including inside the Roosevelt administration. Athitakis also explores something the film touches on—a tendency of Vishniac to write captions for his photographs that were not, shall we say, journalistically rigorous, and may have romanticized or idealized some of his subjects.

A connection to Roman Vishniac through Isaac Bashevis Singer

I worked with my siblings Joel and Pamela, and our parents, Earl and Sylvia, at Undercover Books from 1978-85. In 1979 I had an opportunity to take some books from our store inventory to a personal appearance in Akron by Isaac Bashevis Singer—who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature the year before. I brought copies of some books of Singer’s from our inventory for him to autograph after a talk he gave. Among the books I brought were his then-current book of short stories Old Love (FSG, 1979), and another book we had in stock, A Day of Pleasure, a personal portrait by Singer of the lives of Jewish children in Poland before WWII, a small volume which was illustrated with photos by, you guessed it, Roman Vishniac. The latter is classified among Singer’s books as a book for children. It was of course published before the magnum opus collection that would be published to great acclaim just four years later.

It strikes me that when Vishniac took his pictures of a population so soon to vanish, while he surely must have feared the loss of the people, he could not have foreseen that those pictures would one day illustrate a book of childhood remembrances by a Jewish Nobelist writing about the pre-war period. Not to employ a colloquialism that would in any way trivialize the loss of millions of Eastern European Jews that occurred after Vishniac photographed them, and after Singer came to America, but an observer might be tempted to invoke the Yiddish word, beshert, meaning something that was “destined, or meant to be.” I don’t want to want to ascribe destiny to anything associated with the Holocaust, but I’ll just say I think it was mete and right that FSG thought to use Vishniac’s photos in Singer’s book, even before they published his big collection.

It seems that Roman Vishniac may have been a sort of house photographer for FSG, and that maybe when they used his photos in Singer’s book, the publisher and Vishniac were already anticipating the big book to come. The editor of A Vanished World, Michael di Capua, a long-timer in publishing, is interviewed in the documentary. di Capua was well known for doing children’s books, so maybe there is something to that idea of mine.

For a last word here on Roman Vishniac, I’ll just say that for him to have worked so brilliantly in the medium of human portraiture, and then later in life to embark on the scientific subject matter, highlights an amazing career with an aesthetic range that is kind of astonishing. His daughter Mara, who died in 2018, was interviewed by the documentarian Laura Bilias, the director of Vishniac. I hope to see her film. Until you get the chance to see it, I recommend Mark Athitakis’s essay, which is published on the site of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), titled “Photographer Roman Vishniac Explored the Shtetl and the Scientific.” And check out the trailer of the documentary: https://vimeo.com/332316939

I don’t own a copy of A Vanished World, but I do still have copies of two books that were signed by I.B. Singer that day in Akron almost 45 years ago.

 

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Listening to and Learning from the Publishing Greats—”A Constant Education”

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June 17 update: The organization that sponsored the event below, NY Book Forum, has posted a video of the May 24th program on youtube, linked to here.
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Listening to tales of the career experiences of successful professionals in publishing is always inspiring, and I felt that in spades about last night’s event put on by the New York Book Forum, held in Hachette’s sleek offices in Midtown Manhattan. The event was a shared conversation between two major figures in the book business, Victoria Wilson, an editor at Knopf for five decades, and Jane Friedman, publishing and marketing maestra who was with Knopf for twenty-nine years, then CEO of HarperCollins, and was more recently the founder of Open Road Media. Between them, they embody a combined century of publishing experience.

The evening got off to a convivial start with an unexpectedly lengthy cocktail hour that nearly stretched to an hour. I had taken a chair, but took part and made the rounds, too. Post-pandemic, I think people are so pleased to be in social settings that no one was in a hurry to start the program, even though we were also all eager for it to begin.

Vicky Wilson (l.) and Jane Friedman

Once everyone was settled, Vicky Wilson began by talking about her father, who was a writer, and she said among her family’s circle of acquaintances were family names like Boni and Liveright who operated the Boni & Liveright company, a publisher of some distinction. She was hired at Knopf in 1972 or ’73, in the editorial department, soon became a full-fledged editor, and never went elsewhere. At one point, she sought permission from her boss, Bob Gottlieb, to attend a writer’s conference out west in Squaw Valley, Idaho. Gottlieb agreed, though he told her he doubted she’d find any writers there to publish. In fact, that’s where she met Anne Rice, whose debut novel, Interview With A Vampire, she would then edit and publish. Among other things, the book became a bestseller in hardcover, and the paperback rights were sold in an auction among mass-market publishers for more money than any novel to that point. Wilson recounted sitting on a couch in Gottlieb’s office as the paperback bids ascended, astonished at all that was happening. Among Wilson’s authors is one we have in common, humanitarian and photojournalist Ruth Gruber  (1911-2016). Wilson described her career as “a constant education” in life and in business. Life, because as an editor you’re always encountering some new thing you were not apt to have known about before, and business, because you need to have at least a modicum of business sense, even though you may be more passionately interested in content and writing than the nuts & bolts of the operation.

Jane Friedman related how she came to Random House for an interview with the personnel director where, without blushing, she stated that she wanted to be in charge of something at the company.  She started working with the longtime head of Publicity, Bill Loverd, and not too long after that became head of what was then known as the Promotion department. In that role, she inaugurated—with Julia Child as the author—the first city-to-city author tour to promote a new book. The tour for Mastering the Art of French Cooking visited many major cities, supported by local morning show TV spots and well-attended signings in the book departments of major department stores, where the inimitable Julia would do a cooking demonstration. Friedman later started Random House Audio, the first audio division at a major book publisher.

Their personal monologues very quickly evolved into a stimulating back & forth, with some ribbing and joking about each other’s exploits, achievements, and work styles. It made for a delightful conversation. And everyone who came to see and hear them had a chance to engage and ask questions. I was especially pleased that many Knopf veterans were on hand, including Kathy Hourigan, Martha Kaplan, Andy Hughes, Vicky Wilson’s assistant Melinda, and Nicholas Latimer, who is Knopf’s head of publicity.

During the extended cocktail hour that kicked off the event, I was excited to learn from Latimer that Knopf is bringing out a memoir by Rose Styron, pub date June 13. Nodding toward the front of the conference room, he added that in fact Jane introduced Rose Styron to Vicky, who acquired the rights and edited the manuscript. I am eager to read it, as she has been involved throughout her life with many important humanitarian causes and human rights issues, advocating for social justice with her husband the late novelist William Styron (1925-2006). I see now that the new book is titled Beyond the Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart. Almost twenty-five years ago, I had a meaningful professional encounter with her husband, and later had occasion to meet Rose, too.

It all began when I read in a biography of William Styron that the first piece of nonfiction he ever published was a critique of capitol punishment in Esquire magazine. I was working as an editor at Times Books/Random House, where I had just acquired a powerful nonfiction book about an innocent man on Death Row in Virginia. With that in mind I contacted him through his editor at Random House, and asked if he would write an Introduction to the book. It was titled Dead Run: The Shocking Story of Dennis Stockton and Life on Death Row. As a son of Virginia himself, it roused him to write a powerful essay that opened the book. After his death, I attended the public memorial held for him at a Manhattan cathedral. Afterward, I introduced myself to Rose Styron, expressed my condolences, and explained my connection to her husband, whereupon she embraced me spontaneously and said, “Oh, Bill loved that Death Row book!” I write more about Dead Run and William Styron in an essay that ran in the BN Review some years ago.

For readers of this blog who may be interested, Bob Gottlieb, head of Knopf for many of the years that Wilson and Friedman, is the author of a delightful memoir chronicling his years in publishing, a Avid Reader. Last fall, before Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary Turn Every Page was released, about her father and Robert Caro, I wrote an appreciative essay about the memoir, published here on The Great Gray Bridge, “Avidly Reading Bob Gottlieb’s Avid Reader.”

I’ll watch for other events put on by New York Book Forum, whose president, Peggy Samedi, spoke at the beginning of the program. She said they want to bring back events like this for publishing people to take part in, now that we’ve finally all emerged from Covid isolation. I say, three cheers for that!

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Book Cover for “Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater”

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Thrilled to see that Applause Theater and Cinema Books now has the cover and the book catalog page up for Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater live on their website. The cover—and a full listing with price, pub date, and ordering info—is also now posted on major book retailing websites—Bookshop.org, BN.com, and Amazon—with many more booksellers to come. Gail Merrifield Papp’s memoir, with many photographs, will be published October 17, 2023.

I first wrote about the project when we sold it to Applause last summer and it was announced in Publishers Weekly. To offer readers of this blog a sense of the book, I’ll quote here from the pitch letter we sent to publishers.

 

Gail Papp has written an engrossing and highly entertaining book that blends an affecting memoir of her life alongside the founder of the Public Theater Joe Papp with a behind-the-scenes portrait of the influential theater’s dazzling history. She opens with the Public Theater’s beginnings more than a half-century ago in a narrative that spans the decades-long association the couple enjoyed until Joe’s death in 1991. During that span, the Public mounted hundreds of productions, from Shakespeare in the Park to such plays as for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf and Sticks and Bones, to the musicals Hair and A Chorus Line—with many actors whose careers were launched at the Public, including James Earl Jones, Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Colleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen, Gloria Foster, George C. Scott, Diane Venora, Morgan Freeman, and dozens of others.*

In a witty conversational style, the author paints a comprehensive portrait of the creative process of one of America’s most acclaimed theater artists, highlighting the innovative ways the Public operated, driven by Joe’s ambition to create a year-round producing home focused on original plays and musicals from new voices, while employing non-traditional casting which made it a home for scores of the most creative people in American pop culture. In Public/Private she traces the founding of the Shakespeare Festival, when its role was for a time limited to small venues around New York City, later moving into Central Park where its Shakespeare renditions became an indelible feature of summer in the city, and the Public’s evolution toward cultural renown and national significance, a beacon for social change.

New aspects of Joe Papp’s many battles with the establishment are also highlighted, from tilts with Robert Moses to theater critics to conservative poohbahs in the US Congress. The scourge of AIDs is also documented, in the form of people close to Joe and Gail, Larry Kramer’s play The Normal Heart, and in the toll it exacted on Joe’s son, Tony.

Her touching remembrances lend the narrative a keen, emotional edge, which will captivate readers and bring a human side to the legendary figure whose theater continues to thrive today, operating at both the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, in the theaters on Astor Place and at Joe’s Pub, a live music venue dedicated in his honor.

At a time when America remains divided over issues of race, identity, and sexual orientation, Public/Private reminds us that theater is a powerful force for social change and community-building, a place for people to gather.

*A marvel of the book will be its impressive appendices of more than thirty pages appearing under the headings: Featured Actors, Choreographers, Composers, Directors, and Playwrights.

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“On Browsing in Bookstores, a Pastime” by M. G. Turner

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There is something uniquely magical about walking inside a bookstore, preparing to browse: you cross the threshold and suddenly you have been transported, quite literally, to a world of books. As the atmosphere settles, you notice there is a quiet here that reigns supreme, a quiet comparable perhaps only to that of a library; a pregnant hush fills the air and instills a state of calm that you would be unlikely to find elsewhere. Especially in New York City where the aggressive frenzy of life never ceases, the bookstore—and its ill-treated cousin, the library—can be an oasis, a place of refuge, a second home that can be utilized when other options of play or fun or drink have been depleted or appear uninviting.

When times are tough the world of books calls to us, and if we’re lucky we heed that call—the call of what we must do and not what we ought to. There is no greater pleasure than going to a bookstore with an objective in mind, say to purchase some work or other by Balzac and leaving inexplicably with a Faulkner. Bookstores divert our expectations. The shelves in many of New York’s finest are crammed high to the ceiling with both old and new tomes that at first speak to us in voices we may only hear subliminally. Thus visuals are our calling card, our way in. Often it is the seductive glint of a spine or the flicker of a cover that catches our eye, and as we pull the book off the shelf, and stare at it, a love affair begins. The eye tries to comprehend what the soul sees clearer. We know there is some future here for us, our paths will diverge together, we will save that spark and let it grow—that is, if we are lucky and decide not to put whatever work we have found back on the shelf where it will be consigned to wait a while longer for the coming of its true owner.

But if we hold in our hands the book we are meant to read, then we are giving ourselves over to something unconscious and in some ways very powerful. What we are giving ourselves over to is Fate. For reading books, and at the outset, buying books, is very much like making friends. The object itself transcends the lucid boundaries of paper and ink; it is so much more, and because of that the weight of a decision rests heavily on our shoulders. Do you buy another Nabokov? No, you’ve already read four of him. Another Tolstoy? You haven’t even finished Anna Karenina. A new edition of Ulysses? You have two already, dog-eared and disgruntled and waiting to be finished. You walk on aimlessly, through the aisles, dodging people taking on a similar pursuit: beautiful girls in faded jean jackets and sunglasses on their foreheads, old men stooping over dangerously to get a look at some old and beaten Melville, and the others like yourself trying to work themselves up into a state of rapt determination, studying the walls, trying to discern the titles of famous works, squinting as if at the hieroglyphics of Luxor.

The weight of a book in hand is equivalent to the weight of gold. You measure it, test it, consider whether you can withstand the flurry of its pages, the emotional impact of its premise. Stories are contained within stories, characters within characters, subtlety gives way to novelty, novelty to extremity, enjoyment to a cessation of pain. For that is what all the browsers, including yourself are looking for: a place to stop and sit awhile, to direct thought consciously toward a more righteous purpose, feeding the imagination a meal it cannot make on its own.

The shelves are calling to you. You know not to make a mistake. Occasionally you do make one and you are back at the register the next day making the same hurried, nervous claim: “I bought this for my friend but it turns out he already had it.” Several Hemingways have found their way back to this bardo. Tolstoy’s What is Art? was too polemical for your taste. A copy of the Master and Margherita whose translation you utterly hated was happily parted with. Silently, the cashier, gives you store credit and with this slip, handed over with a subdued frown—half-judgement, half-dismay—you are now able to go back to the walls, back to the drawing board as it were, to feast your eyes over the multitude of possibilities, the bold, broad scope of world literature staring you so determinedly in the face.

And finally you find what you’re looking for. And that pain does cease. Until of course you finish the book at a remarkable clip and opt to do it all again. The energy to read recycles, reincarnates, reinvigorates, and you hope never to give up the journey; even after you have lined up your finished books like the proud trophies they are, there is always a little more room, another book case to fill, another story to sink into. Finished Mann’s Buddenbrooks, well there’s always The Magic Mountain or Doctor Faustus. You’ve read those two Flauberts but there’s more Proust to dig into, a seemingly endless supply of it. Turgenev always wins over the other, more popular Russians, but there is not much of him along the walls, save the obvious in Fathers and Sons. You’d read more Dostoyevsky if you didn’t hate his guts and think he was an anti-semite and in many ways a difficult and stifling writer. You need to read more women, it’s a fault of the whole system, the whole structure, but for your part you do love Woolf, Chopin, Cather, Stein; Wharton is an undeniable great but her meanness never ceases and it’s not clear she even likes her characters.

But no matter who you choose—or rather who chooses you—the point is never to give up on books or decline what they have to offer. The point is to never cease searching for some little taste of paradise that we had previously lacked, to find the good in the bad, the large in the small, the mediocre in the great. You can see in three dimension and you can read in four. To live other lives is to live your own more fully. You can’t believe it sometimes, the depth, the brevity, the longevity, the incalculable gifts given to us by people who worked sitting down. It is connection that we are looking for when we pace like ghosts up the hallways of some magnificent temple of literature, filled to bursting with every voice; male, female, Black, white, and all varieties of humanity. Nothing can touch us, and by the same token, everything can. For we want it to. We will it to. For if Fate has deemed it, we go home happy—and if we’re lucky, stay that way.

M. G. Turner

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The Joys of Synchronous Reading, Part II

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I’m a big fan of what I’ve come to call synchronous reading, a phenomena I first wrote about in 2014, after I read Emily St. John Mandel’s engrossing pre-Covid post-apocalyptic plague novel Station Eleven and Nevil Shute’s scalding post-nuclear event novel On the Beach, published in 1957.

More recently, I loved Jim Steinmeyer’s 2013 book Who is Dracula? which explores the many sources that fed the creative imagination of Bram Stoker (1847-1912), and the late 19th century London milieu that led to him publishing Dracula in 1891. Players on stage here include Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, Walt Whitman, Francis Tumblety, who may well have been Jack the Ripper, and actors Henry Irving and Ellen Terry.

Before picking up Who Was Dracula? I’d just finished Joseph O’Connor’s novel Shadowplay featuring many of the same characters as in Steinmeyer’s book, especially the thespians Henry Irving, an irresistible force and the winsome Ellen Terry who had a deep friendship with Stoker. He worked as the manager of Irving’s Lyceum Theater in London. The novel has some great parts, like the writing lair that O’Connor imagines Stoker resorted to in the rafters of the Lyceum when the pressures of the theater, and Irving’s frequent hectoring, became too much for him.

I’m very glad I followed Shadowplay with Steinmeyer’s nonfiction account. Reading them back-to-back, gave me a really rich perspective on Victorian London, and the personalities of all these fascinating real-life characters, all of whom were capable of conjuring from their imaginations a rich tapestry of make-believe and human drama.

In 2002, I published Steinmeyer’s Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, which was reviewed by Teller in the NY Times Book Review in 2003.  Steinmeyer is without question, one of most interesting writers on magic and the theater, and I published several more of his books, pictured below. For the record, The Conjuring Anthology, was published by Hahne, while the others were published by Carroll & Graf where I worked from 2000-2007. At Carroll & Graf, I also published The Illustrated History of Magic by Milbourne and Maurine Christoper.

I remain fascinated by all books associated with magic and theater, reflected in the authors  I represent nowadays as a book developer and literary agent, Alexis Greene, author of Emily Mann, Rebel Artist of the American Theater (Applause Theater and Cinema Books, 2021) and Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater by Gail Merrifield Papp (forthcoming in October 2023 from Applause Books). I’ve written about both of those books on this blog, here and here.

 

 

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David Lynch: Archaeologist of the American Unconscious by M. G. Turner

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I became fascinated by David Lynch roughly eight years ago, during a difficult and crucial period of my life. I was lucky though, for while I was garnering an appreciation for the artist I now consider the leading archaeologist of the American unconscious, I also acquired the practice of Transcendental Meditation, of which David Lynch is among the world’s foremost proponents.

It came to me almost magically. I had been thinking about adopting a meditation practice, and had dabbled in several forms, until a good friend—whose family happened to be acquainted with Lynch himself—learned the practice and I subsequently joined the party. This experience in meditation was followed by an appreciation of the filmmaker-turned-meditation-advocate: I watched all his movies.

First I saw “Blue Velvet” which represented for me the ending of my childhood and the beginning of what came next. Then I went back to his earlier work, the beautifully absurd “Eraserhead” and the quintessentially humanist “The Elephant Man” which may in posterity’s light be seen as his greatest achievement. Later, “Mulholland Drive” revealed the depravity of an alternate, or perhaps not so alternate, Los Angeles while nodding humbly at Hitchcock and other suspense icons; he has also cited Edward Hopper as an influence. “The Straight Story” is a surprise in and of itself, and adds a touching element to Lynch’s oeuvre and doing much of what the title implies without sacrificing his innate artistic vision. “Twin Peaks” changed the calculus of what American television can accomplish and fashioned a bizarre and complex world that pulsed with reality and intricacy.

It has taken me a few years to really grasp what Lynch’s output means for the larger culture. Not to mention his meditation foundation which these days seems to be his main mission and is doing important work. Its positive impact is well-established and the results it’s achieving in the areas of PTSD and relief of trauma among vulnerable populations deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—if only that institution were more forward thinking, and more open to alternative modalities. However, I want to focus on his artistic output and its importance to contemporary culture. The truth is, America has never felt like more of a Lynchian hellscape. On the surface, as in “Blue Velvet,” there is wealth and beauty, green lawns and bright sunshine—but below the surface, if one simply peers down, there is corruption, degradation, and a deep moral failing at the root of our materialism.

And yet, I have never felt that Lynch was preachy. To the contrary, his view is objective. He is simply presenting reality as he sees it—no matter how bizarre, depraved, or alien. This is where the absolutism of meditation comes in. I use the word “absolutism” to demonstrate the totality of the unified field, the field we reach in Transcendental Meditation, of which Lynch himself is a perennially committed diver. This field feeds the artist’s creativity; in Lynch’s own words it “serves the work and serves the life.” But through Lynch we are also being served a meal of oddities and profundities, which he has dived within to capture and present. For there is something almost incidental about Lynch’s own role in the artistic process. I’m not sure if he would describe it this way, but his language surrounding “catching fish,” which he likens to ideas, seems a unique endeavor in an industry where being a go-getter is praised and people supposedly make their own luck.

The ideas themselves, these fish which he has so patiently waited for and watched swimming under the surface of the mind, and which he has then skillfully fished out—these ideas, in sum, say something vital about our culture. It would be reductive to suggest they say only one thing, but every great artist may only be able to tackle one great idea over the length of a career. In Lynch’s case, with respect to his reluctance to give voice to his reasons and motivations, the question is, how with all we have, with every rolling hill, with every shining sea, with every great thoroughfare to drive down, with every beautiful house that has out front a rich, green lawn, how is it that we are all at base so desperately unhappy? Why do we distrust our neighbors? Why do we hate each other? Yet the corruption Lynch points to is not seen by him as ubiquitous; instead he seems to suggest that these dangerous impulses only control us when we have no conscious knowledge of them. We cannot see them, because most don’t bother to go to the place from which all matter springs; or in other words strive for something deeper.

This brings me back to meditation. It is impossible to look honestly at Lynch’s work without seeing it in the context of a committed meditator, and a man who has faced his personal darkness every day and put it into his art, rather than into the world. There is a moving anecdote in the probing documentary film “David Lynch: The Art Life” in which he describes taking his father down to the basement of his home to show him his “experiments,” which included the carcasses of dead animals, rotting fruit, and similar earthy paraphernalia. Later, as they are climbing back up the stairs Lynch’s father says “David, I don’t think you should ever have children.”

Naturally, Lynch is devastated by this. But in his narration he seems more devastated by the fact that his father misunderstood a pursuit he was deeply excited about, rather than his insensitive command to refrain from procreating. He wants to be understood—but for Lynch the type of understanding he traffics in is not of the conscious understanding that can be easily categorized. His movies enter you at a different, more subliminal level than most movies being made today—perhaps ever. It stands to reason that would be the case, given his almost fifty-year meditation practice and the wisdom he has gathered from it, the wisdom he has sought to infuse, perhaps furtively, into the movies we have all enjoyed and embraced.

All this meant a lot to me eight years ago and still does; given the few degrees of separation between us I could very well have met him, though never have. But I don’t have to meet him to appreciate his work, nor feel personally connected. Truly great artists make us feel as if we know them; they consciously lower the barriers of morality and good taste so that we can have an experience that is free of judgment. These days when most of what is being peddled smacks of 16th century morality plays, where good always wins and the bad are always punished, it is refreshing to have someone stepping in to say “Not so fast. The world is much more complicated, and much more nuanced than anything you can reduce into a simple catchphrase.” Maybe a more concise statement is what the character named Donna Hayward says in “Twin Peaks”—“It’s like I’m having the most beautiful dream and the most terrible nightmare all at once.”

If that doesn’t describe America today, I don’t know what does. All I know is I’m glad David Lynch is around to illuminate us. It’s nice to know someone is meditating for our sins. Maybe one day soon the world will join him.

M. G. Turner

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Peat Bogs and Iron Age Humans

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One of my most treasured books from my college days was The Bog People: Iron Age Man Preserved by Danish scholar P.V. Glob (a real name), chronicling the custom of people burying dead bodies in boggy ground. Such burials are found throughout Northern Europe. It is believed the practice began around 5000 BCE and diminished around 700 CE.  Bogs are made of damp peaty soil, high in tannic acid and largely anaerobic, which had the affect of preserving the flesh, hair, clothing, fingernails, and even personal effects on the bodies. I had a mass-market Ballantine paperback published in 1973 (left with a cover photo of what became known as Tollund Man). I lost track of that copy some years ago, and have replaced it with a newer edition of the book, published by the NY Review of Books imprint (right).The new edition has prefatory material by the scholars Elizabeth Wayland Barber and Paul Barber, author of Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality.

On January 30th, the NY Times published a fascinating update about the burial practice, reporting on a database maintained by scholars with more than 1000 known bog burials in such countries as Ireland, Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. Archaeologists who’ve studied the sites and the bodies say some of them show evidence of violent treatment or even execution, perhaps incurred in the course of ritual or even sacrificial practice.

Despite what scholars in the Times article are describing, I don’t accept that all bog burials would’ve followed executions; it strikes me that at times a burial in a bog would have solved a challenge confronting mourners: how to inter or process the dead. Consider that if these 1000 burials have been found, these fifty centuries later, imagine how many multiples of that number there might have been bog burials down through the ages?

The images of the remains shown here cast my mind back uncounted generations when grieving families would’ve pondered how to inter their dead:

  • How do we dig several feet into hard-packed earth?
  • Who has a shovel, especially one that’s made from stout enough lumber and iron-forged steel so it won’t just snap in two?
  • Best not leave the grave too shallow, lest the remains be found and torn by animals, as was invoked in the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers.

In some instances, placing the dead in swampy ground would have been the simplest option, one that offered mourners the greater likelihood that the body of their loved one would be undisturbed.
In addition, survivors feared the violation of a grave. Corpse robbery—theft of keepsakes like jewelry, or the skeleton itself in the case of a body snatcher (see Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Body Snatcher) is something that occurred. I know some people must find the study of funerary practice lugubrious, but I never have.

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The Legacy of the Late Ruth Gruber Lives On

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I keep a Google Alert on for my old friend and longtime author, the humanitarian and photojournalist Ruth Gruber (1911-2016), as I still enjoy seeing mentions of her and her many accomplishments when they appear in media, as they still do with some frequency. One such item popped up yesterday.

I was tickled to see that one of the refugees Ruth helped rescue and escort to America on the Henry Gibbons ship in 1944—as related in her book Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1,000 WW II Refugees and How They Came to America, and in the 2000 CBS mini-series “Haven,” with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth’s role—has celebrated her 101st birthday. As reported by journalist John Benson in this Cleveland[.]com article,:

“Liberated by the British in 1944, Musafia, her mother and sister were one of 1,000 women and children selected by Ruth Gruber, per instructions from President Roosevelt, to be relocated to the United States.

They arrived with $17 at Fort Ontario camp in upstate New York, where Musafia finished high school and learned how to type.
‘My mother and sister, we were always together,’ Musafia said. ‘In that respect, we were very lucky. My father was a different story.’

Sadly, while her father escaped the Nazis by fleeing to Hungary to live with his sister, he eventually died in a Russian prison.

After spending two years at Fort Ontario, the family relocated to Cleveland. Eventually, Musafia moved to New York City, where she married a fellow Holocaust refugee.
They were married for 36 years; Musafia said he died 36 years ago.
She lived in Florida for a while before deciding to move closer to her niece, who lives in Northeast Ohio.
‘In my old age, I figured it was time to come here, so I bought a condo,’ Musafia said. ‘I don’t particularly like the weather, but what can you do.’
As a Holocaust survivor who sees fascism once again rearing its head, Musafia offers sage advice.
‘Believe what they tell you,’ Musafia said. ‘People can do very good and people can do very, very bad. What’s going on now, some people can’t believe it. But I believe it because I know what I went through.’”
In Haven, there is a census printed at the back of the book listing the names of the refugee passengers on the Henry Gibbins. I took a photo of the census and include it here for the record. On the fourth line down from the top left, it shows that Gordona (spelled Gordana in Benson’s article) Milinovic (Musafia being her married name) was born Jan 2, 1922 in Yugoslavia, thus confirming the content of the story.

In 2000, “Haven” was adapted for a TV movie with Natasha Richardson playing Ruth Gruber. That year, I published a trade paperback edition of Haven with a Foreword by Ruth’s niece Dava Sobel, author of the bestseller Longitude.

A hearty happy birthday to Gordana Musafia, who’s lived her long life thanks to Ruth Gruber, and the USA who brought her out of war-torn Europe.

If Ruth Gruber is a new name to you, I invite you to read some of the other posts on this blog about her, and view some of her photographs, like the ones below, of refugees embracing, and a photo of Ruth from a different period in the 1940s when she worked for the FDR administration in Alaska.

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