Reviews

Catching Up With Two Excellent Books

9/1/2015

I associate Roger Cohen with his skateboarding on a small ottoman, at risk of a broken neck, to celebrate a Chelsea goal on the tube.

I associate Tracy Kidder with his long legs racing around the bases on a softball party, decades ago.

Yes, serious writers, have their sports side.

I just caught up with books by both of them, touching the deepest issues in the world – genocide, inequity, identity.

Cohen’s book is “The Girl from Human Street: Ghosts of Memory in a Jewish Family,” published this year by Alfred A, Knopf. It is partially about the imbalance in many members of his family, which has made the trek from Lithuania to South Africa and onward. His mother became troubled shortly after emigrating from South Africa to England early in her marriage and never recovered.

The book also delves into what it means to be Jewish in a dangerous world, with some of his family escaping ahead of the murders in Europe, making a success in South Africa, but never feeling quite accepted in England – hearing the discreet lowering of voices and being described as “Jew” rather than “Jewish.” Later Cohen re-settled, for reasons he came to understand.

“One day, banking over New York City on the approach to LaGuardia, watching the serried towers of midtown, a single word welled up from deep inside me: home.” Cohen writes of the city of “incomers.” He has become one of journalism’s most staunch defenders of the marginal.

Tracy Kidder has also been exploring corners of the world, ranging from the emerging computer society to poverty in Haiti, often seeking people who take chances, who make a difference. His idealism is on display in his 2009 book for Random House, “Strength in What Remains: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness.”

Kidder traces the wandering of a people, and an individual, Deogratias Niyizonkiza, a member of the Tutsi tribe in Burundi. Barely escaping a bloodbath while in medical school, Deo survives in Africa the same way some of Cohen’s family survived in Europe – through the grace and courage of others.

In Kidder’s book, the man called Deo lands in New York, is helped by a baggage handler named Muhammad, a former nun, and an intellectual couple from Greenwich Village – the parallel layers of strength that work so often in this city.

Kidder recreates Deo’s survival in Burundi, and moves toward the present, with Deo, now a poised 40-something New Yorker, running a medical facility back home in Burundi, where the prevailing custom is to not remember terrible things that have happened.

My conclusion is that there is no such thing as light summer reading. These books by Cohen and Kidder would make me think and care in any season.

Sam Toperoff

9/1/2015 11:21:43 pm

Wonderful books, both of them. Wonderful human beings, both of them. And reason, George, as you often remind, not to lose heart, but to fight the honorable fight in a very dishonorable world. Let me also add Oliver Sacks to your short list. And of course, Oliver Sacks, who in his recent memoir gave us: "Above all I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure." Where the Mets figure in all this, I still can't figure!

George Vecsey

9/2/2015 01:28:22 am

Sam, merci beaucoup for noting Oliver Sacks. Marianne, who as you know is far more knowledgeable about science and philosophy than I am, adores Sacks and we have been talking about him for months, since his announcement. I once read that he had the same meal every day -- chicken, potatoes and peas. But then I read that when left to his own devices he had cereal or sardines, in 30 seconds. And he swam! And lifted weights! I studied a photo of him in middle age -- major muscles on his arms. And he rode a motorcycle. And was very handsome in his youth. And he wrote a bit. He had a flat in the same building as a friend of ours in the Village, and I always hallucinated about spotting him, but it never happened. So to get back to the theme here, yes, I felt I knew him.
But not the same way I knew the writers at the softball parties you and Faith held back in the day -- poets, teachers, agents, writers, artists, a couple of Pulitzers down the line, as I recall. And coed games. I know Laura played.
Thanks, I look forward to your next book. Meantime, we could keep busy just reading books by people we have met. I have here on my desk a gift from David for Father's Day, "The Men Who United the States," by Simon Winchester. David liked hearing that I met Winchester a few times, once covering the Irish PM's trip to NYC in the 70's, once after he wrote that great book about hiking around South Korea (that prepared me to love South Korea before I even got there in '88.)
Keep writing, mec.
GV

Brian Savin

9/2/2015 02:22:14 pm

As is your wont, George, your seemingly straightforward observations are anything but. You demand serious reflection. OK, here's what you are saying, to me: Do these different but similar books mark the true globalization of our species so that we can read of suffering anywhere to anyone and take it personally? Or, are we still a tribal species that, like all the territorial animals, care only about their immediate own and their required territory for survival and can easily disassociate? President Truman said on a now disappeared newsreel "None of our boys!" when asked if he were concerned about the suffering caused by the atom bomb. I suspect wars wouldn't happen, or at least no one would show up, if we were a truly globalized species; the family of man and woman. Evolution has a ways to go. Maybe I'm wrong.

George Vecsey

9/3/2015 12:45:14 am

Brian, there are traces of universal recognition in both books.
Deo is alive today -- is a friend of a good friend of my family -- because a Hutu woman, whom he did not know, claimed him as her son during a sorting out by troops in a racial bloodbath. Instinctively.
And Cohen shows how some Lithuanians sheltered Jews, and how some of his circle in South Africa questioned, and acted against, apartheid.
Anne Frank wrote: "I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart."
That works for me. I would make it "some people" -- but still.
Thanks for always going to the next step.
GV

Alan Rubin link

9/5/2015 09:45:38 pm

George,

You may have reduced your reading list, but two interesting books were added to mine.

In a world that is so focused on negatives, not enough is said about people who survive under conditions so severe as to be beyond comprehension.

“Does Your Rabbi Know You're Here?: The Story of English Football's Forgotten Tribe” by Anthony Clavane is an interesting take on English Jew’s troubled relationship with soccer. Many of the people interviewed for the book, both players and fans, refused to be named for fear of exposure.

Typical of all good history books, many interesting facts are in the background material. I never knew that Jews were expelled from England in about 1200 and were allowed to return by Oliver Cromwell almost 400 years later.

Simon Kuper’s “Ajax, the Dutch, the War: The Strange Tale of Soccer During Europe's Darkest Hour”---

When most people think about the Netherlands, images of tulips and peaceful pot smoking residents spring to mind. Bring up soccer, and most will think of Johan Cruyuff, the Dutch player thought to rival Pele in preternatural skill, and Ajax, one of the most influential soccer clubs in the world whose academy system for young athletes has been replicated around the globe (and most notably by Barcelona and the 2010 world champions, Spain).

But as international bestselling author Simon Kuper writes in Ajax, The Dutch, The War: Soccer in Europe During the Second World War, the story of soccer in Holland cannot be understood without investigating what really occurred in this country during WWII. For decades, the Dutch have enjoyed the reputation of having a “good war.” The myth is even resonant in Israel where Ajax is celebrated. The fact is, the Jews suffered shocking persecution at the hands of Dutch collaborators. Holland had the second largest Nazi movement in Europe outside Germany, and in no other country except Poland was so high a percentage of Jews deported.

Kuper challenges Holland’s historical amnesia and uses soccer—particularly the experience of Ajax, a club long supported by Amsterdam’s Jews—as a window on wartime Holland and Europe. Through interviews with Resistance fighters, survivors, wartime soccer players and more, Kuper uncovers this history that has been ignored, and also finds out why the Holocaust had a profound effect on soccer in the country.

Ajax produced Cruyuff but was also built by members of the Dutch resistance and Holocaust survivors. It became a surrogate family for many who survived the war and its method for producing unparalleled talent became the envy of clubs around the world. In this passionate, haunting and moving work of forensic reporting, Kuper tells the breathtaking story of how Dutch Jews survived the unspeakable and came to play a strong role in the rise of the most exciting and revolutionary style of soccer — “Total Football” — the world had ever seen.

A significant number of our national politicians, including most currently hoping to run for president, should get out and visit the real world.