Sandwiched between School board related work I found time to finish reading one book to Claudia and started another. The book finished was yet another spectacular history by Erik Larson. I only had the Epilogue to finish and then read a couple more pages on the sources he most relied on to put his book together. The book was In the Garden of Beasts, a fitting book for me to read after my visit to Israel’s Yad Vashem in January.
Its one of eight or nine books I’ve read on Hitler and the misery he inflicted. This one follows the Dodd family, the father of which was the unlikely American Ambassador to Germany as Hitler took power. I’m not sure how much time Larson took to research the book but he says his necessary reading of so many holocaust related materials: “living among the Nazis day in, day out proved for me a uniquely trying experience.” I understand. I feel an obligation to read such material for much the same reason as Church folk read liturgies during services which admit to our failures. Last week our prayer of confession to God said in part: “We want you to reign in our midst, but we want you to do it our way.” I suspect God has gotten used to being ordered around.
I knew I wanted a lighter book to continue with and I’ve had my mind on John Hershey’s “A Bell for Adano” for a couple months. I’d suggested it to Claudia and, by coincidence, she found a musty old copy of it at her seminary that she bought for a dime. I know she read it thirty or forty years ago. She thinks she read it before our marriage but I think it is one of hundreds of books I recommended or bought for her because I knew I wouldn’t read them.
Its first forty pages were a breeze. I read the Italian accents like Father Guido Sarducci I know its an uplifting story and it has a parallel in Duluth with our Japanese sister city, Ohara.
Its also a reminder of a very different time when plastic xenophobes like Donald Trump were stilled and America grew its heart two sized larger. So far, both Claudia and I have chuckled through this book except when the Italian American Major walks into Adano to find a dead woman with her leg blown off in the street. Hershey sets out the premise for his novel in a two page foreward. It hearkens to a time when Americans were the good guys and says in part:
America is the international country. Major Joppolo was an Italian-American going to work in Italy. Our Army has Yugoslavs and Frenchmen and Austrians and Czechs and Norwegians in it, and everywhere our Army goes in Europe, a man can turn to the private beside him and say:”Hey, Mac, what this furriner saying? How much does he want for that bunch of grapes?” And Mac will be able to translate.
That is where we are lucky. No other country has such a fund of men who speak the languages of the lands we must invade, who understand the ways and have listened to their parents sing the folk songs and have tasted the wine of the land on the palate of their memories. This is a lucky thing for America. We are very lucky to have our Joppolos…
America is on its way into Europe. You can be as isolationist as you want to be, but there is a fact. Our armies are on their way in. Just as truly as Europe once invaded us, with wave after wave of immigrants, now we are invading Europe, with wave after wave of sons of immigrants.
