Farewell to Manzanar

In 1941, Jeanne Wakatsuki was seven years old, living with her family in Long Beach, California.  Her father, a successful and domineering captain, owned two valuable fishing boats while her two older brothers served as crew.  But the bombing of Pearl Harbor stunned America and swiftly led to the incarceration of 110,000 Japanese, many of whom had lived in the United States for decades.  Farewell to Manzanar is Jeanne Wakatsuki’s moving and thoughtful account of her own and her family’s experience of losing their home and belongings, their boats, and their freedom.  

From Jeanne’s young perspective, there were occasional light moments:

We drove past a barbed-wire fence, through a gate, and into an open space where trunks and sacks and packages had been dumped from the baggage trucks that drove out ahead of us. I could see a few tents set up, the first rows of black barracks, and beyond them, blurred by sand, rows of barracks that seemed to spread for miles across this plain. People were sitting on cartons or milling around, with their backs to the wind, waiting to see which friends or relatives might be on this bus. As we approached, they turned or stood up, and some moved toward us expectantly.  But inside the bus, no one stirred. No one waved or spoke. They just stared out the windows, ominously silent. I didn’t understand this. Hadn’t we finally arrived, our whole family intact? I opened a window, leaned out, and yelled happily, “Hey! This whole bus is full of Wakatsukis!”

Outside, the greeters smiled. Inside there was an explosion of laughter, hysterical, tension-breaking laughter that left my brothers choking and whacking each other across the shoulders. 

 For Jeanne, there were some disturbing experiences, but there were also some positive features to the camp.  But when the war was over and the incarcerated family members were allowed, or eventually compelled, to leave the camp and find a home, the adjustment to post-war American life was challenging.  

They wouldn’t see me, they would see the slant-eye face, the Asian. This is what accounts, in part, for the entire evacuation. You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals. Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.  It’s an attitude easy for nonwhites to adopt in America. I had inherited it. Manzanar had confirmed it. And my feeling, at eleven, went something like this: you are going to be invisible anyway, so why not completely disappear.

But another part of me did not want to disappear.  With the same sort of reaction that sent Woody into the Army, I instinctively decided that I would have to prove that I wasn’t different, that it should not be odd to hear me speaking English. From that day forward, I lived with this double impulse: the urge to disappear and the desperate desire to be acceptable.

Later, after marriage Jeanne takes her husband and family to visit Manzanar - which is almost gone, with only remnants of the barracks and guard stations.  Interestingly, the US Park Service has created a National Historical Site with reconstructed barracks and an excellent visitor center.   Altogether the book is a fine introduction to a young person's view of the events surrounding the incarceration and its effect on the loyal citizens who were treated so unfairly.

It is sobering to recall that though the Japanese relocation program, carried through at such incalculable cost in misery and tragedy, was justified on the ground that the Japanese were potentially disloyal, the record does not disclose a single case of Japanese disloyalty or sabotage during the whole war…

-Henry Steele Commager, Harper’s Magazine, 1947

 

 

The Director

The Director by Daniel Kehlmann is a fictionalized account of the career of C. W. Pabst, the famous Austrian director of Pandora’s Box and other masterpieces of early cinema. The very liberal Pabst fled to America during the rise of the Nazis but circumstances necessitated that he and his wife and (fictional) son return to Ostmark (Austria), where they then became trapped by the outbreak of war.  A major theme of the book explores how Pabst chose or was coerced into making (non-propaganda) films for the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda.

 

For me, it was one of those books that you can't put down....except that every now and then you have to put it down. By which I mean it's brilliantly written, very inventive, deeply absorbing, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, but it includes heavy doses of humiliation, terror, desperation and shame, resting upon a kind of covert foundation of increasing dread. It is deadly serious, and thinking about what I had read realigned some major viewpoints I had held.

Working

I revere Robert Caro, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography titled The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, and the four-volume (soon to be five-volume) biography of Lyndon Johnson, which also won a Pulitzer, as well as many other prizes. The books read like novels and the depth of his research is astonishing and widely celebrated - "Due to Caro's reputation for exhaustive research and detail, he is sometimes invoked by reviewers of other writers who are called "Caro-esque" for their own extensive research" (Wikipedia). Master of the Senate, which covers 11 years of Johnson's life, took Caro 12 years to write.

Caro is now 89. I used to say that I hoped he would finish the final volume of his Johnson biography before he died, but I now say that I hope he will finish it before I die.

Caro ends the Introduction to Working this way:

AND, FINALLY, one more question to answer: why am I publishing this book now, why don't I just include this material in the longer, full-length memoir I'm hoping to write? Why am I publishing these random recollections toward a memoir while I'm still working on the last volume of the Johnson biography, when I haven't finished it, while I'm still - at the age of 83 - several years from finishing it?

The answer is, I'm afraid, quite obvious, and if I forget it for a few days, I am frequently reminded of it by journalists who, in the course of writing about me and my hopes of finishing, often express their doubts about that happening in a sarcastic phrase: "Do the math." Well, I can do that math. I am quite aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I'd put some of them on paper now.

And the book is a profound pleasure. It recaps some of the main conclusions of the Moses and LBJ books, providing fascinating context and detail about how the research was done. And, as he reluctantly admits, to give the full story, he must sometimes provide insights into his own personality and motivations. For me, in addition to his incomparable reputation as researcher and writer, this book shows him to be a modest, honorable and admirable person.

The Perfect House

First published in 2002, The Perfect House by Witold Rybczynski is pure pleasure.  Rybczynski is now an Emeritus Professor of Urbanism (who knew?) at Penn.  He's a noted author, having written over 300 articles and more than a dozen books, which have received several important awards.

This book is an account of a trip to Italy Rybczynski took to personally visit the many villas in the Veneto designed by Palladio. He describes the history and design of each villa, and some history and thoughts on Palladio's life.  It's all very interesting, but a delightful surprise to me was how wonderful the writing is.  Simple, graceful, effortlessly insightful and witty. For example:

The final step of the makeover involved finding a more impressive name than Andrea di Pietro.  Renaissance architects regularly adopted professional names.  Jacopo Sansovino was born Tatti; Giulio Pippi de' Giannuzzi, a Roman expatriate practicing in the Venetian Republic, called himself Giulio Romano, or simply Giulio.  The mellifluously named Michele Sanmicheli had adopted the name of his birthplace, San Micheli, a village near Verona.  Andrea di Pietro might have become Andrea Padovano, or Andrea Vicentino.  It is generally assumed that Tissino (his mentor) proposed the name since he later used it in an epic poem.  The Latin palladius means pertaining to sagacity, knowledge, or study, and is derived from Pallas Athena, the goddess of wisdom.  It is a name to live up to.

Here's another example:

Every evening I walk across the Piazza dei Signori from the trattoria where I regularly eat dinner to my hotel.  The ivory white Basilica shimmers in the moonlight.  Goethe characterized architecture as frozen music, which well describes this extraordinary building.  I don't know what kind of music Goethe heard when he looked at the Basilica, but I hear percussion - the great jazz drummer Philly Joe Jones, my boyhood idol. The tall half-columns are the steady rhythm beat of the bass drum, which Palladio accentuates by breaking the extremely deep cornice and projecting it forward over each capital.  At the attic level, a statue above each column provides a high-pitched cymbal clash.......(and further correlations!) 

And another striking description, of Rybczynski's visit to a different Palladio villa, with a powerful conclusion:

The main street of Piombino Dese, a large village east of Vicenza, is Via Roma.  The busy artery is lined with unremarkable apartment buildings and neon-fronted shops.  It's Sunday morning and there's not much traffic.  A parking lot near the church is temporarily occupied by a traveling amusement park whose single attraction resembles a huge lazy Susan.  Children line up to get on, then scream as the ride begins to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster, finally tilting and turning at the same time.  The more daring boys leave their seats to crawl, crablike, across the angled floor. Strobe lights flash, and noisy calliope music is piped over loudspeakers.

Across the street, rising behind a brick wall, the stately portico of the Villa Cornaro overlooks the raucous spectacle.  The juxtaposition of the fun fair and the villa makes me think of a scene in a Fellini film. The villa more than holds it own.

Rybczynski thoughtfully adds a glossary of architectural terms and a chronology of Palladio's designs, with sensible cautions about the relative certainty of the dates of construction of different buildings.

Maybe not to everyone's taste, but a delightful read.

 

 

Sappho

This pleasurable book contains Mary Barnard's translations of 100 of Sappho's poems and fragments, together with a brief and lively introduction by  Dudley Fitts and a brief and an informative afterword by Barnard.

Sappho is wonderful - the breadth of mood from joy, to sadness, to anger is captivating and the spareness of her language distills and strengthens the emotions expressed.  Here are a couple that I really like, followed by a great quote from Mary Barnard:

16.       YOU ARE THE HERDSMAN OF EVENING

Hesperus, you herd

homeward whatever

Dawn’s light dispersed

 

You herd sheep – herd

goats – herd children

home to their mothers

 

91.       IN MEMORY

Of Pelagon, a fisherman,

his father Meniscus placed

here a fishbasket and oar:

tokens of an unlucky life

           

86.       EXPERIENCE SHOWS US

            Wealth unchaperoned

by Virtue is never

an innocuous neighbor

 

Barnard quotes a commentator's observation:

The sense of her poems goes naturally with the meter and seems to fall into it, so that it looks like ordinary speech raised to the highest level of expressiveness.  In her great range of different meters there is not one which doers not move with perfect ease and receive her words as if they were ordained for it.

And responds: 

I should say, rather: as if she had invented it in that moment for that phrase alone.

Gondola

Donna Leon's brief, charming paean to "the sleek, mysterious gondola, the boat whose name and image are inextricably linked with the city". The intertwined histories of Venice and the gondola are illuminated through amusing anecdotes (her recounting of the call and response between a gondoliere and the dachshund Artù is riotous); gorgeous illustrations from Canaletto, Carpaccio and Guardi; and Leon's love of the city, tempered (in both senses!) by her dismay at the assaults of cruise ships, pollution and corruption.  An accompanying CD includes barcarole sung for centuries by gondolieri and here re-created by Il Pomo d'Oro, featuring the exceptionally versatile and talented singer Vincenzo Cappezzuto, with a special guest appearance by Cecilia Bartoli.  It's the next best thing to a trip to Venice.

My Venice and Other Essays

Donna Leon was born in Montclair, New Jersey, but lived in Venice for over 30 years.  She is best known as the author of the Commissario Brunetti mystery series (>32 books and counting) all set in Venice.  The Commissario is calm, decent, humble, smart and immensely likable - and the mysteries are well-crafted and quite revealing of life in Italy.  But Leon also has written many essays and other books. One is a delightful book on Gondolas, which is accompanied by a CD with gondolier songs in the Venetian dialect sung by a lively virtuoso (Leon is a music aficionado who is mad about Handel - as she describes deliciously in one of this book's essays).

Brunetti's wife Paola is very likable, but has strong, forceful views - In real life, Leon seems to be like Paola - only more outspoken and forceful!  These essays can be charming, humorous, or blistering attacks on customs or viewpoints that Leon finds intolerable.  Since I agreed with almost all her views, I found the essays to be very entertaining!  Below is an excerpt from one essay, which she introduces by explaining that she had called her plumber, who finally arrives three hours late, and offers this explanation:

"Giorgio's putting in a new bathroom." The plumber lives in my neighborhood, and both of us buy our fruit and vegetables from Signor Giorgio.

Curious about any bit of neighborhood gossip, I asked, "What's he doing to the bathroom?"

"He's putting in new fixtures and lining the walls with black marble." 

"Black marble?"

"Yes"

"Giorgio?"

"Yes"

"Giorgio il fruttivendolo?"

"Oh, no, that other Giorgio. The nice one from Rome who bought the palazzo around the corner. Giorgio Whats-His-Name? Olmini? Olmoni?"

This couldn't be. "Giorgio Armani?" I asked, voice tentative.

"Yes, that's right. Armani, that's his name. Is he a friend of yours? Do you know him?"

No, I didn't know him, but I wish I did, for I'd love to tell him the story.