My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

The Shostakovich Cello Concerto is playing, performed by the incomparable YoYo Ma.  I hope you will enjoy listening to it as well.

Incidentally, the card in the picture below was painted by my mother before her Macular Degeneration became too advanced.
 





My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


All in all, a cute story. Gerald Durrell, about twenty years after the fact, hearkens back to a segment of his childhood that was spent on the island of Corfu. The year is 1935 and WWII is gathering like storm clouds on the horizon but you won't get any hint of that in this story.

When he is ten years old, Gerald's family, which includes his widowed mother, brothers Larry and Leslie, sister Margo and a dog named Roger pack up and move to the island of Corfu.

You must erase from your mind the overcrowded tourist-stricken Corfu of today and imagine a virgin island with old world charm.

Uh, and also old world primitivism. After finally finding a villa with indoor plumbing or at least a bathroom that doesn't require a trip to the beach, the Durrells settle in.

We soon are acquainted with peasants and villagers, all who are friendly and hospitable. As an example, Gerald, one afternoon finds himself far from home and ravenous so he simply wakes up a friendly neighbor (by sending his dog barking like a maniac to the man's porch) who immediately shares his own repast of cheese, grapes and wine with him.

Gerald enjoys the people, enjoys his eccentric family (because he is equally eccentric), the peculiar people his mother assigns to tutor him (Theodore a diffident scientist in love with puns and corny jokes, Katelvsky, owner of many birds and even larger owner of romantic fantasies of which he plays the hero saving a lovely lady, and Peter, alas, Peter did not last long due to his "inappropriate interest in sister Margo- and her equally inappropriate interest in Peter) and most of all the animal life.

Gerald's story flows back and forth like a warm Mediterranean tide between his adventures in capturing animals (magpies, a ferocious seagull, a lumbering turtle, a large assortment of insects) and his family and friends.

His stories are told with charm and with the innocence of childhood, which is no small accomplishment since Durrell was no longer a child when he wrote the story.

For people interested in a time long past as well as natural history this is an enjoyable little read.



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Kafka Was the Rage by Anatole Broyard

Anatole Broyard came from a French Creole family that moved to Brooklyn while he was a child.  After serving in the Army he moved to Greenwich Village in 1947 to forge an identity for himself with the avante-garde sub culture of artists, writers and musicians, otherwise known as the "Beat Generation".

This was a time when Kafka was the rage, as were the Abstract Expressionists and revisionism in psychoanalysis. (pg.3)

Broyard's book is a memoir of his early years there before he went on to become a critic and essayist for the New York Times.

He writes mostly of his sex life.  First it's with an artist named Sheri who was a protege of the artist Anais Nin.  Broyard moves in with Sheri and they live in her filthy, dingy apartment.  Sheri comes across as someone who never cleans or bathes.  When Anatole asks for the key to the hall bathroom she tells him to use the sink.  When he tells her there are dishes in the sink she responds that they have to be cleaned anyway.  Months later when he moves out he notes that the same dishes were still in the sink.  Ew.

There are other women but it would get monotonous to describe them all.  What I suppose Broyard was trying to present as Bohemian and fascinating comes across as rather boring and not very hygenic.  It's strange because  he seemingly wants to present his life in the Village as one of freedom of sexual repression and intellectual stimulation.  

It's hard to know how intellectually stimulating it was because, while he mentions the bookshop he opened and that he and all his friends discussed Kafka, Hemingway, Mailer etc.. that he attended several classes on pyschoanalysis taught mostly by German Jews who had fled Germany, he never involves the reader in those discussions.  Personally I would have found that a lot more interesting than hearing about how strange and deviant his lovers were.

That begs the question.  He talks of how the forties was a time of unleashing the desires that had been bound by uptight cultural norms.  He is arrogant in his belief that they had so much more freedom than people who limited themselves to monogamy and family.  

Yet none of his relationships sound free.  He is interested in these women for their sex.  He describes nothing else about them except how strange they are.  He portrays himself as a naive inexperienced kid who is used and manipulated by these women. 

Sometime after breaking off his relationship with Sheri,  he visits his parents in Brooklyn to find Sheri there looking at old family albums, sitting on his mother's lap.  His mother doesn't want her there but doesn't know how to extricate herself from underneath her.  Then Sheri pushes the button on the recliner causing both her and his mother to flip backward.  This view of Sheri allowed Broyard's parents to see that she never wore underwear.

It seems to me it is Broyard that is being manipulative.  He wants us to find these women disgusting because he wants to justify abandoning them.  He uses the same strategy in describing the other women in the book.  

He manipulates the reader by what he fails to mention as well.  First of all, he wasn't some kid fresh out of high school.  He was a 26 year old coming out of the army.  Secondly, by the time he moved in with Sheri, he had abandoned a wife and daughter.

I think that freedom, in Broyard's sense, is another word for selfishness.  He waxes eloquent for several pages at how inhibited and repressed the American culture was back then about sex.  He found it impossible to believe anyone could be happy being married with children.

Speaking as a member of the monogamous club, I can attest that his belief is based on a faulty premise.  He proves this himself by showing in his book how empty and self-absorbed he and his social circle was.

He apparently came to this same conclusion because this memoir, which was left unfinished, was published by his wife of 29 years after his death. 

The Arrogant Years: One Girl's Search for Her Lost Youth From Cairo to Brooklyn by Lucette Lagnado

Lucette Lagnado wrote an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal about the current push in certain academic circles to boycott Israel for all its crimes against humanity, specifically its treatment of  Muslims.  Her article was well-written and deftly addressed this latest trend among the "intellectuals" of our time to vilify one group of people while blithely ignoring the the atrocities committed by another.  There's a verse in the Bible that speaks of "straining a gnat and swallowing a camel."  It's not used exactly in this context, but it fits.

At any rate, this article sparked an interest as to who the writer was.  I looked her up and found she had written a couple of memoirs.  Her first book, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, focuses on the life of her father.  This second one, The Arrogant Years, centers around Lagnado's relationship with her mother and her own coming of age in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn.

I love to read about cultures and communities other than my own and Lagnado's book provides the reader with a rich, colorful account of life in an Old World household.

The book starts in the first half of the twentieth century in Egypt with her grandmother.  A small, nervous woman who had known wealth and status until her husband deserted her, spent her days sitting on the balcony of her small apartment drinking Turkish cafe and reading innumurable books.  She endowed this habit to her daughter Edith, Lucette's mother.  When Edith wasn't going to school she stayed by her mother's side on the balcony watching the busy streets below while drinking coffee and reading.

The book at this point digresses to fill in the background of the contemporary political climate of Egypt when Lagnado's mother and grandmother were young.  Jews played a prominent role in Egypt's government affairs.  Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived peaceably together.  Her mother eventually got a job teaching at a prestigious school and received the special patronage of the wife of the Pasha -an important government consulate.  As a result, she gained access to the Pasha's library, a treasure trove of thousands of books.  This was Edith's paradise. 

Eventually, Edith gave up her work, her friendship with the Pasha's wife, and her beloved library and, at her mother's insistence, got married.   In Egyptian-as well as Orthodox- culture this meant quitting work and staying home to raise a family.  Ms. Lagnado presents this as a sad development because now, instead of receiving daily intellectual stimulus and the reward of exercising her own teaching gifts, Edith became confined to a household, married to a man who spent his time carousing and socializing.

Edith now had the financial security her mother desperately wanted for her, but at the price of personal fulfillment.  At least this is how Lucette Lagnado describes it.  She was a baby when they left Egypt.  I wonder if this is how Ms. Lagnado's mother described her life (anybody who's stuck home raising children has to be miserable, right? ) or the conclusion she forms based on what her mother or others told her.

It didn't matter because by the 1950's, life changed for everyone  in Egypt with the rise to power of Gamal Abder Nassar and militant Islam.  Jews were ejected from every  walk of public life.  Finally, as with most of the other Egyptian Jews it was necessary for the Lagnado family to move. 

Many Jews moved to Europe and Israel.  The Lagnados moved to the United States and settled in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York.

This is where Lucette's own memories serve as the basis for her memoir.  She describes her growing up in a Orthodox neighborhood, the different personalities that made up the membership of her synagogue and her defiance at religious traditions that separated men and women and assigned them to rigid roles.

Her family lost the wealth and status they enjoyed in Egypt. They now struggled to make ends meet.  Her dad spent his days trying to sell men's ties in subways, but finally gave up in the end, a defeated man.  He does not enter much into the story.  Perhaps because he detached himself from his family.  Maybe because her previous book centers around him.

This did not, however, dampen her mother's spirit.  She was determined to make sure her daughter got the right type of education.  Lucette describes her mother in loving terms as a resourceful, energetic and unrelenting person who was determined to make Lucette the person she had failed at becoming.  Lucette's older sister had already abandoned ship, shed her Jewish identity, and had moved beyond the borders of the narrow boundaries of their Orthodox community.  Edith's entire hopes and dreams were planted firmly on Lucette's shoulders.  Edith depended on her "Lou Lou" to reconstruire le foyer (rebuild the hearth), an expression Edith often repeated to her daughter.

I wished that Ms. Lagnado had spent more time writing about her brothers and sister but they are mentioned only peripherally in her book.  I wondered if her sister ever returned to her roots or did she stay away.  I don't know if the brothers left.  They don't seem to have stayed Orthodox.  Perhaps they chose to be culturally Jewish but no more.

Lucette, even though she rebelled at her mother's ambitions, did receive a private education and ended up going to Vassar.  This chapter of her life details her culture shock as for the first time she leaves her community and is exposed to people of other religious and economic backgrounds.  She was surprised to discover that Vassar didn't serve Kosher food.  When she asked, they tried to accomodate her, but it made her feel even more different than the other students.

Lagnado bounces back and forth between her struggle to fit into a society that makes her feel foreign and out of place and the tenacity of her mother.  After her children are raised and living with a husband who has checked out on life, Edith gets a job at the Brooklyn Public Library.  Once again she is surrounded by her favorite friends, books.  Unlike Lucette, Edith seems to have no difficulty merging with the ethnic diversity in her work environment.  She spends her days working hard and developing friendships with men and women from various cultural backgrounds.

The overall tone of the book is sad.  Lucette never seems to gain a sense of belonging.  The Orthodox upbringing that she fought against- or at least its chauvinism-turns out to be her refuge against an alien world.

At university Ms. Lagnado resents her fellow students whom she refers to as "WASPs"(White Anglo Saxon Protestants) because of their dominate culture and wealth.  A sullen tone pervades the chapters of her college life.   It gives the reader the impression that she somehow feels that an apology is owed to her by the WASPs.  As though they are responsible for making her feel different or for the fact that her family didn't have as much money.

Yet as she tracks the lives of the people in her childhood neighborhood, she shows that none of them stayed. They all moved on.  Most acquiring their own wealth and education.  Her brothers and sister, as well as herself, all prospered materially. She follows her friends, members of her synagogue, to wealthy Bronx neighborhoods, upscale estates or to Israel.  Her neighborhood is a good example of the typical upwardly mobile families that dominated our country before the welfare system caused economic stagnation and generational poverty.

 Even though I enjoyed this book, the tone is a melancholy one.  Ms. Lagnado doesn't end the book with any feeling of resolution.  She doesn't impart an attitude that she has finally made sense of her life.

 Lucette is devoted to her Orthodox upbringing and even though she challenged some of the beliefs, she finally chooses to return to Orthodoxy. Orthodox Judaism colors and shapes her identity.  But one thing stood out to me. Lucette is devoted to the Orthodox traditions and liturgy, yet still remains a stranger to God.  God is not mentioned much, except as Someone far away and uninvolved.

She ruminates on the Messiah.  She once had great hopes for His coming.  But as she looks back at history and around at the present, she decides there really is no Messiah.

This is especially interesting to me since, as a Christian, our whole religion is centered around Messiah.  I believe her conclusion is based on a misunderstanding as to who Messiah is.  Her idea of a Messiah is someone who is going to exclusively save the Jews from physical persecution.  In her mind this Messiah never came when the Jews needed Him and now there really is no need for one.

She discounts that everyone still dies and that the Bible makes it clear that death is caused by sin.  Therefore, Messiah is necessary because sin exists as a barrier between God and man and causes eternal death. This is still a problem which needs to be resolved. What mankind still needs to be saved from. Christians see this accomplished when Jesus Christ sacrificed himself and replaced the animal sacrifices that the ancient Jews practiced as a covering for their sins.  And it's not an exclusive salvation.  It's offered to everyone under the sun. Hence, if we accept this offering, we are saved from eternal death and into eternal life, even if we die physically.

There is another reason I found Ms. Lagnado's memoir so interesting.  Her self- identity rooted in her Orthodox culture is in sharp contrast to my own.  As a Christian I don't worry about cultural identity or preserving my traditions.  Someone from China or Nigeria or anywhere in the world, who shares my faith is every bit my brother or sister as anyone who grew up a "WASP" like me.

The other reason I enjoyed this book is because Lagnado successfully paints a beautiful, if sad, picture of the history of, not only her own family's story, but of many people: Jews, Coptic Christians and Muslims.  I recommend this book to people like me, who love try to gain an understanding of someone else's perspective on the world and who enjoys learning about the life stories of others, regardless if-or especially because- their ethnicity and beliefs differ from their own.

Further links:
Washington DC Jewish Community
NY Times Lagnado review
NPR
Jewish Book Council

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming by Rod Deher

Rod Deher grew up in St. Francisville, Louisiana along with his sister Ruthie.  Though they grew up in the same small, southern town, their lives turned out very differently.

  Ruthie was a daddy's girl who embraced the Southern culture, heritage and tradition of her family.  She was one hundred and ten percent Southern girl, part tomboy, part Southern Belle.  She loved to hunt and fish with her dad and was popular at school.  She was pretty, vivacious, outgoing and confident.  She became homecoming queen, like her mother, and married her high school sweet heart.

She and her husband, Mike, settled happily down to raise their three girls in the town they were raised in, Mike working at the local fire department, while Ruthie taught at the elementary school.

Rod  was different.  He thought deeply, he was philosophical, questioning everything.  Ruthie believed life was to be lived and enjoyed, not analyzed.  Rod's journey took him from rejecting his Methodist upbringing to becoming an atheist, to converting to Roman Catholicism before finally joining the Orthodox Church.  Ruthie never left her church, never thought much about it.  God was there, He took care of you and you prayed to Him.  There was nothing to question or think about.

A turning point for Rod came his freshman year in high school.  While on a class trip, the popular kids decided he was going to be their target.  The jocks cornered him in a hotel room and pinned him down, threatening to pull down his pants in front of the giggling cheerleaders.  He cried to the chaperones for help but they stepped over him and walked out of the room.  In the end they let him go without making good their threat but Rod returned from that trip realizing that he wasn't going to be accepted in their small town high school with it's cliques and bullying. Life became harsh for him and when a gifted and talented school opened up in another town he applied and was accepted.

Ruthie and his parents didn't understand why he would want to leave and viewed it as a rejection of their way of life and a betrayal to their family.  This barrier would exist as Rod graduated from college, became a journalist, and moved around the country to various metropolises such as New York, Philadelphia, and Washington D.C.

The division between Rod and Ruthie was especially palpable.  Ruthie made it clear she resented Rod with an openly hostile attitude towards him.  He found out later that she had even turned her children against him by bad mouthing him to them.  What she refused to make clear was why.  A true Southern Belle, she refused confrontation.  Sweep it under the carpet and pretend everything's just fine.  Except it wasn't and the gap between Ruthie and Rod widened.

This impasse might have carried on indefinitely if Ruthie hadn't come down with lung cancer.  By the time she finally went to an oncologist it was stage four and had spread to other parts of her body.  The doctors didn't give her more than a year to live but Ruthie didn't know it.  Her determination not to think about this as she did with anything unpleasant caused  her to refuse any information about the seriousness of her condition.  She said she wanted people to enjoy their time with her, not wait for her to die.

This is actually where the book starts to become interesting.  The first part more or less reads like a eulogy from someone trying to come to terms with someone they loved.  Rod starts to examine his reasons for leaving.  He tries to engage his sister in telling him why she had so much hostility against him.  She would never discuss it.  In the hospital he confronted her by saying if he had done anything to hurt her that he was sorry.  She brushed his words off with a wave of her hand and kissed him on the cheek.

Ruthie soon died, leaving Rod as much in the dark as ever.  His analytical nature forces him to turn the stones over and over.  On the one hand his sister was loving and caring.  Many students from poverty and minority backgrounds gave their testimony- how Ruthie believed in them and encouraged them, inspiring them to excel.  A couple of them left to become professionals in big cities in other parts of the country.

The entire town turned out for her funeral.  If there was a most popular girl in town, it was Ruthie.  This got Rod to thinking.  How many people would bother to turn up for his funeral?  The showering of love and support for his sister and family led him to the decision to move his family back to St. Francisville.

On his return he made some startling discoveries.  His dad was glad he had left.  In fact his father wished he had left when he was a young man.  It turns out Rod's paternal grandparents never accepted their daughter-in-law and treated both his father and his mother abominably.  He put up with it for years because he believed that you stayed with "your people" regardless of how cruel they were to you.

The other discovery was finding out the cause of Ruthie's anger toward him.  One of her close friends confided in him that it was actually his treatment of Ruthie when they were young that was never resolved.  Apparently he had been something of a bully to his sister, mercilessly teasing and harassing her.  It reached a point where she hit a wall and let it stay between her and her brother.

Too bad Ruthie didn't follow the Biblical mandate that if your brother has something against you, go and make it up with them before offering your gifts to God. (Matthew 5:22-24)  But Ruthie was good at not delving too deeply in anything.

Reading this book reminded me of all the Ruthie's I've known in my life.  It's almost as if they play a role.  Everything stays on the surface, no one is ever let inside.  It's a game of pretend that things are fine when they're not.  It's so destructive because no one is allowed to deal with issues that hurt and cause division.  Healing is never allowed to happen because no one is allowed to admit there's anything wrong.  And yet the hurt still comes out.  It's not as if Ruthie hid her resentment against her brother, she only refused to admit it was there.

I guess I find myself siding with Rod.  Of course he is the one telling the story and Ruthie isn't here to defend herself, but I also spend a lot of time thinking things over, questioning and arguing topics in my mind.  I don't understand how someone can be content to glide along the surface and never dive deeply into their life.

In the end Rod sees the pros and cons of both kinds of lifestyles.  People who stay home are surrounded by life time friends and family.  They always feel loved and are never alone.  Those who leave are subject to more isolation but they also experience the richness and variety of culture, people and places that can't be achieved when one never lives anywhere but one place. 

One choice offers a sense of belonging and familiarity, the other offers variety and an increased appreciation of life outside our own boxes.  One is narrow but the other can be lonely.  Especially if you're an outsider trying to break into the clique of one of those small towns.  I couldn't help thinking as Rod described his attraction to the family-like atmosphere of his home town that those family-like feelings don't always extend to people "not from 'round here."

I think Rod wrote this book not simply to memorialize his sister, but to work through his own journey and to find closure for his complicated relationship with his sister.

The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is not an exciting read but it is a thought-provoking one, especially for those of us who have lived both the parochial and cosmopolitan life.  Or have had tempestuous relationships with family members.

$11.04 on Kindle