Category: Lit & Crit
“The Holocaust was the single most horrific episode of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, which had no shortage of horror. Most Ukrainian Jews who became victims never made it either to Auschwitz or to any other extermination camp. Heinrich Himmler’s Einsatzgruppen, with the help of local police formed by the German administration, gunned them down on the outskirts of the cities, towns, and villages in which they lived. The shooting began in the summer of 1941 in all territories taken by the Wehrmacht from the retreating Soviets. By January 1942, when high Nazi officials gathered in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to coordinated the implementation of the Final Solution—the eradication of European Jewry—Nazi death squads had killed close to 1 million Jewish men, women, and children. They did so in broad daylight, sometimes in plain sight and almost always within earshot of the local non-Jewish population. The Holocaust in Ukraine and the rest of the western Soviet Union not only destroyed the Jewish population and its communal life, as was the case in Europe generally, but also traumatized those who witnessed it.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“Ukraine under German occupation became a large-scale model of a concentration camp. As in the camps, the line between resistance and collaboration, victimhood and criminal complicity with the regime became blurred but by no means indistinguishable. Everyone made a personal choice, and those who survived had to live with their decisions after the war, many in harmony, some in unending anguish.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“In December 1940 [Hitler] signed a directive ordering preparations for war with the Soviet Union. The operation was code-named Barbarossa after the twelfth-century German king and Holy Roman emperor who had led the Third Crusade. He had drowned while trying to cross a river in heavy armor instead of taking the bridge used by his troops. It was certainly a bad omen.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“By early October 1939, the Polish army had ceased to exist . . . . The Red Army, which was no match for the Germans in mechanization, demonstrated its superiority to the Polish troops in the quality of its armaments, which included new tanks, aircraft, and modern guns—all products of Stalin’s industrialization effort. But to the surprise of many, the Soviet officers and soldiers were often badly dressed, poorly fed, and shocked by the relative abundance of food and goods in the Polish shops. The locals found Soviet officers ideologically indoctrinated, uncultured, and unsophisticated. For years, they would tell and retell stories about the wives of Red Army officers who allegedly attended theaters in nightgowns, believing them to be evening dresses.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“The past is not made out of time, out of memory, out of irony but is also a crime we cannot admit and will not atone.” – Eavan Boland, “Making Money”
“Was the Great Ukrainian Famine (in Ukrainian, the Holodomor) a premeditated act of genocide against Ukraine and its people? In November 2006, the Ukrainian parliament defined it as such. A number of parliaments and governments around the world passed similar resolutions, while the Russian government launched an international campaign to undermine the Ukrainian claim. Political controversy and scholarly debate on the nature of the Ukrainian famine continue to this day, turning largely on the definition of the term ‘genocide.’ But a broad consensus is also emerging on some of the crucial facts and interpretations of the 1932-1933 famine. Most scholars agree that it was indeed a man-made phenomenon caused by official policy; while it also afflicted the North Caucasus, the lower Volga region, and Kazakhstan, only in Ukraine did it result from policies with clear ethnonational coloration: it came in the wake of Stalin’s decision to terminate the Ukrainization policy and in conjunction with an attack on the Ukrainian party cadres. The famine left Ukrainian society severely traumatized, crushing its capacity for open resistance to the regime for generations to come.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“The ‘Russian revolutionary sweep’ that Stalin wanted to combine with American efficiency came to Dniprohes with tens of thousands of Ukrainian peasants unqualified to do the job but eager to make a living. The number of workers employed in the construction of the dam and the electric power station grew from 13,000 in 1927 to 36,000 in 1931. The turnover was extremely high, even though the Soviets abandoned the earlier policy of equal pay for all categories of workers, and the top managers received up to ten times as much as unqualified workers; qualified workers made three times as much as the latter. Peasants had to turn into workers not only by learning trades but also by getting accustomed to coming in on time, not taking breaks at will, and following the orders of their superiors. It was a tall order for many new arrivals at the construction site of communism. In 1932, the Dniprohes administration hired 90,000 workers and released 60,000.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“The Ukrainian national anthem begins with the words, ‘Ukraine has not yet perished,’ hardly an optimistic beginning for any kind of song.” – Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe
“Is it not well that even for a little time the light of life shine—though it shine through fear and sadness—than be cut off altogether? For who knows where the trails tend that lead through the darkness of the night of death?” – The Elder Maiden of Héshokta, “Átahsaia the Cannibal Demon,” Zuñi Folk Tales (recorded & translated by Frank Cushing)
“My face is in front of me, and under a roof is no place for men.” – Mátsailéma, “Átahsaia the Cannibal Demon,” Zuñi Folk Tales (recorded & translated by Frank Cushing)
“ ‘Ye of the Home of the Eagles! Ye do I now inform, whomsoever of ye would gather datilas, whomsoever of ye would gather piñon nuts, whomsoever of ye would gather grass-seed, that bread may be made, hie ye over the mountains, and gather them to your hearts’ content, for I have driven the Bear away!’ A few believed in what the boy said; and some, because he was ugly, would not believe it and would not go; and thus were as much hindered from gathering grass-seed and nuts for daily food as if the Bear had been really there. You know people nowadays are often frightened by such a kind of Bear as this.” – “The Ugly Wild Boy Who Drove the Bears away from South-Eastern Mesa,” Zuñi Folk Tales (recorded & translated by Frank Cushing)
“Pretty girls care very little how their husbands look, being pretty enough themselves for both. But they like to have them able to think and guess at a way of getting along occasionally.” – “How the Corn-Pests Were Ensnared,” Zuñi Folk Tales (recorded & translated by Frank Cushing)
“Now, there are two kinds of laugh with women. One of them is a very good sort of thing, and makes young men feel happy and conceited. The other kind is somewhat heartier, but makes young men feel depressed and very humble.” – “How the Corn-Pests Were Ensnared,” Zuñi Folk Tales (recorded & translated by Frank Cushing)
“In individual experience immediacy is never fully enjoyed; satisfaction is a subsequent affair. Existence is ever-not-quite. We look to the past for the source of our enjoyment. That backward look, in fact, constitutes our enjoyment.” – David L. Hall, “Culture, History, and the Retrieval of the Past” (emphasis in original)
“Were I outside time, able to dip into it here or there at will, I should have little trouble in retrieving a specific past moment. I am, however, inexorably constituted by time, for without memory I should have no means of having, of being, a self. Only by remembering my self may I remain a self. In some crucial sense, I am my memories.” – David L. Hall, “Culture, History, and the Retrieval of the Past” (emphasis in original)
“No one owns anyone’s culture, and that to believe otherwise is to deprive us of the human fullness and richness we all deserve. To reconcile this insight with an equally compelling American truth—that racial injustice is our inheritance and our responsibility—is the challenge for every artist and critic, black or white.” – George Packer, “Race, Art, and Essentialism”
“Both virtue and art are always concerned with what is harder, for success is better when it is hard to achieve.” – Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, Ch. 3
“He who cannot see the truth for himself, nor, hearing it from others, store it away in his mind, that man is utterly useless.” – Hesiod, Works and Days (trans. Richmond Lattimore)
“Fueled by self-love, the I is at its most garrulous inside its lonely garage.” – Will Schutt, “Storm”
“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” – E. L. Doctorow
“How do people come to know themselves? One way is by reading fiction. The profound act of empathy demanded by a novel, forcing the reader to suspend disbelief and embody a stranger’s skin, prompts reflection and self-questioning. But most people don’t read novels.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” – James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village”
“A novel insistently demands the presence and passion of human beings, who cannot ever be labeled. Without this passion we may all smother to death, locked in those airless, labeled cells, which isolate us from each other and separate us from ourselves.” – James Baldwin, “Preservation of Innocence”
“In good fiction, as in real life, there tend not to be sentimental heroes and cruel villains but only deeply compromised human beings who struggle with their sins and shortcomings as best they can.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“Race was—is—the fundamental American issue, underlying not only all matters of public policy (economic inequality, criminal justice, housing, education) but the very psyche of the nation.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated and this was an immutable law.” – James Baldwin, “Notes of a Native Son”
“Police killings of unarmed black children, indifference to providing clean drinking water to a majority-black city, or efforts to curtail the voting rights of minority citizens are not freak incidents but outbreaks of a chronic national disease.” – Nathaniel Rich, “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”
“A real writer is always shifting and changing and searching.” – James Baldwin (quoted by Nathaniel Rich in “James Baldwin & the Fear of a Nation”)
“If it were in my power to change the mercantile laws of literary society, I could easily spin out my existence writing and rewriting the same story in the hope that I might end up understanding it and making it clear to others.” – Ignazio Silone (quoted by Dorothy Day in The Catholic Worker, January 1968)
“The industrial world destroys nature not because it doesn’t love it but because it is not afraid of it.” – Mary Ruefle, “On Fear”