Center of Contemporary Art ( COCA)

I was invited to attend a fundraiser a few weeks ago at the Center of Contemporary Art, also known as COCA. It was a performance of dance featuring Antonio Douthat, a principal dancer for The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. I, who have never been a dancer, am a great fan of the Ailey Company and try to catch them whenever they come to St. Louis so I immediately said yes. And what a great performance it was.

I knew that Douthat was a native St. Louisan and had started dancing at COCA as a teenager. He brought along some friends from Ailey to help him out. They performed some Ailey and some works of their own choreography.

Douthat is a magnificant dancer and you can tell that he comes out of the Ailey tradition. Ailey has said that he likes the line and technical range that classical ballet brings to a dancer's body but he wants to also bring the expressiveness that modern dance brings. The word that always comes to my mind when you mention Ailey is ... strength. Some choreographers will show languid pieces where all the effort is hidden. Not Ailey. Every move is pushed to the limit and ... strong. I've never seen a review of an Ailey work that didn't use the word strong.

And the works that Douthat and his friends brought epitomized strength. For instance, in the work one of them choreographed for the young dancers (which they learned and performed in one week) there were a lot of moves that you might find in a typical yoga class - moves that require strength but that when done properly in class leave the impression of simplicity. Under Douthat's direction the impression is one of strong, STRONG, (but fluid) muscles.

As I said, this was a fundraiser and Douthat was there to give back to a community that made him what he is today - as he fully admits if there had been no COCA he would not be a dancer. Growing up in north St. Louis poverty, for a time he lived at Hope House, a transitional facility for homeless families to offer them support, new skills and a place to live while they try to turn their lives around.

COCA put together a short film in which Douthat explains how he came to dance and to COCA. As Douthat tells it, he and his friends were roaming the streets of the near north side one day when they heard rhythms coming from the basement of a building. Looking into the building they saw a dance class. The teacher allowed them to stand in the back and watch and, although his friends weren't interested, Douthat was. Seeing him move, the teacher told him he could come back, which he did. This was a class for adults, so eventually she called COCA and told them they should see the young man dance. They arranged for him to come attend a class and, as he says, after the class the teacher took him down the hall to the executive director and said "this boy needs a scholarship."

They provided everything for him. Not just lessons, but dance clothes including shoes. And transportation. And tutoring if he needed it. As he said, families have a lot to worry about just putting food on the table and a roof over their head. Dance comes out of what is left over and in his family there was nothing left over. But COCA saw to everything. Eventually he was also able to get into the St. Louis Public School Magnet school for the arts which saw to the rest of his education.

The thing is - this was not an aberration for COCA. This is what they do. If a family can afford to pay then they pay, but COCA also is looking for talented students who could not walk through the door with a check. Through their urban outreach program they reach out to the community, offering programs free of charge.

Since 1993, the Urban Arts Program has made arts education , performance, and hands on experience available to more than 50,000 children who would not otherwise have access to such programs. The philosophy of this program embodies a developmental approach to arts education which considers the physical, emotional, and artistic interests, needs and capabilities of each student. All programming is provided at no cost to the participants, and is sustained entirely by contributions from the local community and national funders.

Through the urban outreach they keep their eyes out for talented students and then offer them the opportunity to come to the COCA facility to take master classes, providing what is needed: tuition, clothing, transportation, tutoring and mentoring.

And it all takes money. Usually the arts are the first programs cut when budgets get tight. COCA fills that gap. COCA also helps talented kids from all schools find classes that could prepare them for a career in the arts. After the performance, they asked us to raise our hands if we were willing to provide $25 to help buy a pair of shoes for a dancer. Lots of hands went up. I suspect some of those hands will contribute more, maybe even the $500 that it takes to provide 1 week of transportation to/from COCA for 25 students.

I wish the film that was shown at the fundraiser was available on youtube. But it isn't. Instead here is a film about Antonio Douthat done about a year ago by the local public television station.



There are a lot of organizations out there that help people achieve better lives. They all need funding. As you receive end of the year requests, consider them.

The Gift (Part 4)

I recently finished reading Lewis Hyde's The Gift and thought I would post my (I think) final thoughts.

As I moved into reading Part II of Hyde’s book I had in mind a conversation from the comments of my previous posts in which AndiF theorized that Hyde was drawing too sharp a distinction between work and labor and that this distinction might be the source of my frustration with his theories. As I read through Part II, a great deal of which is an analysis of the lives and work of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, I noticed that Hyde himself seemed to be glossing over the difference between work and labor.

The actual beginning of this shift in tone was the last chapter of Part I in which Hyde describes the history of usury. It is a long and complicated chapter and well worth reading on its own, but I’m not going to spend much time summarizing it. In brief, according to Hyde, ancient people who lived in gift economies realized that when you interact “at the edges” of the community it is sometimes necessary to change the way you interact because you can’t necessarily trust strangers to act the way that your community would act. And thus was born the idea that you cannot charge interest within your community but you can charge interest to those outside your community. Interest seems only sensible to mitigate the risk of dealing with the stranger.

Later, in his conclusion, Hyde summarizes it like this:

I imagined a tribe with a boundary drawn around it. In the center of the tribe goods circulate as gifts and reciprocity is positive. Outside the tribe, goods move through purchase and sale, value is reckoned comparatively, and reciprocity is negative. I initially described the permission to usure as a permission to establish the boundary between these two spheres, to declare an outer limit to the circle of gift exchange. And in earlier, more polemical versions of the chapter I set out to strengthen that boundary insisting ... that the creative spirit will be wounded if it is not carefully protected from the spirit of stranger trade.

But as I brought this argument into the modern world, my own ideas underwent a bit of a re-formation I began to understand that the permission to usure is also a permission to trade between the two spheres. The boundary can be permeable. Gift-increase ... may be converted into market-increase ... And vice-versa; the interest a stranger pays on a loan may be brought into the center and converted into gifts. Put generally, within certain limits what has been given us as a gift may be sold in the marketplace and what has been earned in the marketplace may be given as a gift. Within certain limitations, gift wealth may be rationalized and market wealth may be eroticized.

And this shift in his understanding seems to have come about through, first, his understanding of the history of usury and, second, his examination of the lives and ideas of Whitman and Pound. It was a slow process, however, because the entire chapter on the history of usury, while fascinating, seemed out of place and I hesitated to even blog about it because I wasn't at all sure with how it fit into the whole.

And even as I read his chapter on Whitman, I can't say that I completely understood where he was going. He did, however, use the chapter on Whitman to synthesize his ideas on the artist and the gift. There's a lot of good food for thought in the chapter on Whitman but, in general, I don't like Whitman's poetry so it was hard to get swept up in Hyde's analyses. But finally, half-way through his analysis he paused and suddenly wrote " ... I should pause to clarify where, exactly, the gift lies in the creation of art." This is the first time that he actually puts down what he intended to do all along - analyze the arts in the words of his theory of gift exchange.

There are three gifts present in the creation of art, says Hyde. First the initial gift - what is bestowed upon the artist by "perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision, or another work of art." The artists tries to transmit this initial gift but rarely can he do it without laboring. The ability to do the labor is the second gift. I would say this is the gift of talent but it is also a gift of perseverance (which perhaps comes from the gratitude for the initial gift). The artist refines the initial gift and as it passes through the artist it increases. The finished work that is offered to the world is the third gift.

Hyde spends a deal of time on the politics of Whitman and of Pound, which I think are less important to Hyde's theory of gift exchange than they are to Hyde's eventually coming to his own integration of gift society and market society in his conclusion . He says that "his central dilemma" was: "How, if art is essentially a gift, is the artist to survive in a society dominated by the market?" And he concludes that, no matter how the artist decides to support himself (whether by getting a second job, finding a patron (or getting a grant) or selling his work), the artist needs to create a protected gift-sphere in which the gift can operate and the artist needs to define the edges of that sphere beyond which the market exists and commerce occurs, just as ancient gift exchange societies did. As long as she protects the inner core where the gift can exist and flourish she may allow herself commerce with the market beyond those boundaries. Thus it seems to me that the line between work and labor can be blurred. Or as he says:

The problem is not "Can gift and commodity coexist?" but "To what degree may one draw from the other without destroying it?" From the point of view of the market, the white man has a point when he complains about Indians who refuse to invest capital; there can be no market if all wealth is converted into gifts. And from the other side, the Indians have a point when they resist the conversion of all gifts to commodities; there is a degree of commercialization which destroys the community itself. But between these two extremes lies a middle ground in which, sometimes, eros and logos may coexist.

At last, the middle ground that I expected all along but not acknowledged until the Conclusion Chapter. Hyde does not have a specific answer to where this middle ground can be found. But as I found in looking at the relations between French traders and the Algonquians of the Great Lakes area, the middle ground will, by definition, always be shifting.

In the edition that I read (the 25th anniversary edition) Hyde added a special afterward. He admits that his intent was to describe a problem without giving a specific solution, because times change and a solution in one time will not work in another time.

One interesting point he makes in the afterward is this:

I have come to believe that, when it comes to how we imagine and organize support for creative work, the pivotal event in my lifetime was the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union.

I previously wrote a post about American Expressionism in which I wrote about an art exhibition I went to and I said:

One small section that I found particularly thought provoking was a display about how abstract expressionism was attacked as un-American during the 1950's because it didn't reflect American "values". This seemed unfathomable to someone like me who is an advocate for freedom of expression. And yet, I found the counter idea that this work should be defended as VERY American equally difficult to fathom. Mostly because I doubt that most Americans like it or understand it.

In one of those "everything is related" moments, I found myself reading Hyde's description of those years. According to Hyde, during the 1950's, while Congress criticized abstract expressionism, the CIA actually funded a number of artists because the CIA saw value during the Cold War in showing the world what freedom of expression looked like. So, in that sense, it WAS very American because, even though America didn't like the art, it tolerated and even (covertly) encouraged its creation because expressing yourself freely is an American value. Think about it - it's an American value to allow and encourage artistic movements that create art that you dislike. (The question to me, of course, is why this seems to preclude funding the creation of art that you like. But the American mindset is beyond the scope of this post.)

Beginning in the 1960's with the Kennedy administration and the launching of Sputnik, the government began to affirmatively and openly see the benefit of funding the arts as a political statement -it would be an exhibition of the "greatness of America" that it would not just allow but would encourage freedom of expression. Kennedy created the National Endowment for the Arts; Nixon doubled its budget. As Hyde said, the existence of the Soviet Union provided a cushion to some of the harsher realities of the market system of the West. The market does not value some things but the Cold War goaded Americans into paying for things that the market did not value so as to show that a market-based economy could still produce those things.

Once the Cold War was over, however, the impetus to fund the arts as a political statement ended and we entered what Hyde calls the era of market triumphalism. After capitalism conquered communism, Hyde says, the free market forces of the 90's and early 00's put everything up for sale to the detriment of those things that have an ill-defined market value.

With that in mind it will be interesting to see where we go next in the wake of the current collapse of the market system.

I'm glad that I read The Gift even though it ended up being a more difficult read than I expected. I think it will continue to provide food for thought.

This and That

I'm still looking for suggestions in the post below.  While you think ...

• Sometimes you just need a holiday chuckle -- and this one is at someone else's expense.  But I can't help it, I lauged. If you need a laugh then click here to hear the worst ending to Handel's Messiah evah.   For those of us who have sung it many times ... it's one of those funny but thank god it wasn't me moments.  (h/t Inside the Classics)
• If any multi-millionaire was out looking for a Christmas gift for me, I hope he (or she) picked me up an original EH Shepard Winnie the Pooh Drawing.
• Majel Barrett-Roddenberry has died.  The computer is speechless.  And Deanna Troi is mourning.
• I'm thinking of making Cranberry Sorbet this weekend.  Unless I feel too cold.   My sister and I are baking cookies and I figure we'll need a palate cleanser.  Which reminds me that I need to dig out a cookie recipe for Toni's Cookie Exchange.
• As I sit here amidst ice and some snow, feeling very cold, I'm very jealous of my friends Meg and Adam who are spending six months in South America.  They were my inspiration for starting a blog in the first place.  But while they are now blogging in summer clothes, while drinking Argentinian wine and eating Argentinian steak, I'm in my bunny slippers and an oversized sweater shivering.   ::sniff::
• Haven't finished your holiday shopping yet?  Books make great gifts.  At least, that's what America's book publishers think.  And they've done a youtube that says so ( I particularly like Jon Stewart's reasoning):

What's in a Name Challenge

I think the point of this challenge is to pick a book from each of these categories and then read it during 2009.  So I'm trying to think of books for each category that I haven't read yet.  I need suggestions.

A book with a "profession" in its title:

Help?!!

A book with a "time of day" in its title:

Twilight by Stephanie Meyer (because I feel I ought to)

Or

Thursday Next, by Jasper Fforde (because I want to read it - although technically Thursday is a day and not a time a day and technically Thursday isn't even a day in this book.)

A book with a "relative" in its title:

Dreams of my Father, by Barack Obama (truthfully I'm not all that interested in reading this but I can't think of another book with a "relative" in its title.)

A book with a "body part" in its title:

The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant (I didn't have to think hard on this, it was already on my list)

A book with a "building" in its title:

The Black Tower by Louis Bayard (I could be convinced to pick something else)

A book with a "medical condition" in its title:

I'm stumped.  Andif recommends Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven" by Susan Richards Shreve which I do remember being interested in.

Enid Bagnold - The Chalk Garden

I finished reading The Chalk Garden and A Diary Without Dates and I'm pleased I spent the time, although for different reasons.

The Chalk Garden in play form is slightly different than the movie version (and I did go back and watch the movie).   Maitland, the manservant played by John Mills in the movie version, is less of a stable character than he is in the film.  In the movie version he is a voice of reason who we think is concerned for the best interests of Laurel but who doesn't have the power to do much more than he does.  His only quirk is his interest in criminal trials.

In the play, he's more quirky, just as caught up in the psychological games that the household is caught up in as the rest of them and with the same touch of instability.  Where there is a hint of romance between Maitland and Madrigal in the film version, I caught no hint in the play.  Maitland is portrayed as one of those sexless characters who is vaguely camp. 

Mrs. St. Maugham is also more batty than she is in the movie; we meet her as she shouts from the garden wondering where she has left her false teeth.   But the biggest difference is the presence of two more characters who are not in the movie version - Mr. Pinkbell the butler (who is an invisible character and hovers unseen over the cast sending directions down from his bedroom where he is dying) and his nurse who delivers his directions when he isn't directing things personally over the house telephone.:

Mrs. St. Maugham:  You made me jump.  He's my butler. Forty years my butler.  Now he's had a stroke but he keeps his finger on things.  (Rings handbell. Keeps bell)

Madrigal:  He carries on at death's door.

Mrs. St. Maugham: His standards rule this house.

Madrigal: (absently) You must be fond of him.

Mrs. St. Maugham: Alas no.

More so than the movie, this is a play about the death of a way of life.  Mrs. St. Maugham is living by the standards of the butler, the standards of another age, and the tension is whether she will ever have to acknowledge that, in the modern age, things may be done differently.

The most obvious tension over this is over the handling of the garden.  Pinkbell directs the gardening from his window and the garden is dying.  Madrigal brings her own knowledge in and the garden begins to thrive. 

This is also seen in the tension between Mrs. St. Maugham and her daughter.  In the movie there is an allegation that is never really rebutted that the first marriage of her daughter, Olivia, might have been caused by Olivia's unfaithfulness.  Olivia is certainly portrayed as a glamorous figure in the movie.  In the play it is clear that Olivia was a quiet girl who had no wish to "marry into society" and did so on the arrangement of her mother.  The marriage was a failure for reasons other than any unfaithfulness.  And the husband appears to have died long before Olivia met her new husband.

(Olivia enters from front door.  Madrigal rises)

Olivia:  (shakes hands) Judge!  I remember you! You used to be so kind to me when I was little!  What was that odd name Mother had for you? Puppy?  I used to wonder at it.

Judge: (Smiling, taking her hand) You were that silent little girl.

(Madrigal crosses down right)

Olivia:  Yes. I was silent.

As in the film version, the dramatic tension comes to a crisis when Olivia arrives to take Laurel away and when Madrigal's past is revealed and she sets herself in opposition to Mrs. St. Maugham over Laurel.  But the key moment of the play, the moment of the butler's death, comes immediately after Mrs. St. Maugham discovers who Madrigal really is, realizes that under the butler's rules Madrigal would be unacceptable in her household and would be a scandal and yet the Judge does not seem concerned, Olivia is not concerned, and Maitland is in awe of the fact that a real convicted murderess is among them. 

Mrs. St. Maugham:  Heavens!  What an anti-climax! What veneration!  One would think the woman was an actress!

This moment when celebrity outweighs propriety is the very moment when the Butler dies.  We have entered the modern age.

I enjoyed reading this play as much as I can enjoy reading plays.  I'm not very visual, my mind doesn't work that way, so the stage direction didn't give me a clear idea of the action.  Just reading the description of the set confused me and the stage directions (moves down right) meant nothing to me.  My imagination just isn't that specific. So even though I love going to plays, I don't think I'm going to spend my time reading a lot of plays.

Oh.  One last thing.  I particularly enjoyed this note at the beginning of the script:

By the Lord Chamberlain's wish, and in all places within his jurisdiction, the word "violated" on p. 24  Act One, must be played as "ravished," though it should remain "violated" on the printed page.

Showing that, even in 1953, things weren't quite as modern  as they could be.

Pudd'nhead Books

The Library made me crabby yesterday.   

I went to return my books and I wanted to browse for new fiction.  I should know better by now.  I get crabby every time I go to Buder Branch without a "mission" and just decide to browse around, looking for a book I've never read that attracts my interest.  You see, I have this silly idea that one of the functions of a public lending library should be to encourage people to read. What better way to encourage reading, not to mention justifying the expense of purchasing new books on the taxpayers' nickel, than to display those new books in a prominent, easy-to-access location.

Some Library branches do that.  But those branches aren't open on Sundays so I always end up at Buder Branch, where "new books" are tucked away in a little alcove with floor to ceiling bookshelves on opposite walls and only enough room for 2 people at a time to browse and where most of the books for some reason are placed on the lower three shelves so that you have to bend over to look at them and, yes, bump butts with the other person in the alcove who is doing the same thing on her side. It's just incredibly poor design and it's been that way since they opened this otherwise beautifully designed building - a building that has LOTS of space that could be used to display new fiction in all its glory.

I was not in the mood for butt bumping yesterday; it made me crabby.  And, when crabby, I cannot choose a book.  I left the Library.  Crabby.  I knew I needed to do something book related to try to get the crabbiness out of my mind, so I went to check out Pudd'nhead Books at 37 S. Old Orchard in Webster Groves (in the same little shopping center where the Ben Franklin and the Starbucks are located). 

I saw it a few weeks ago, the day after Thanksgiving, when my extended family was going to dinner at Big Sky Cafe (which I highly recommend and not just because I'm related to the fabulous sous chef there).  The books in the window of what had recently been an empty store front caught my eye and I wandered over to look.  A new bookstore! That was nice.  It was, however, closed and I couldn't see much of the interior. But I decided to go back one weekend day and check it out.  Truthfully I didn't think that it would end up being a place that I loved because ... well, I'm used to disappointment.

But. Oh. My. God.  I loved it. I think it is going to be one of my favorite places. 

The thing is, I always like the idea of supporting independent booksellers but truthfully I have not had an independent bookstore that I've really patronized for all my book needs since The Library Ltd. closed its doors many moons ago. Independent bookstores by their very nature reflect the tastes of their owners and the successful ones generally try to find some kind of niche market.  None of the bookstores within easy distance of me really seem to fit me, although it's hard to say why.

What would fit me? The bookstore of my imagination is small, with a friendly proprietor who likes the kind of books I like, in an easily accessed location with a lot of books that excite me. 

That last part sounds simple but it isn't. I can find a book to buy in almost any bookstore, but my idea of heaven is to walk into a store and fear for my wallet within the first five minutes.  That just doesn't happen very often in small bookstores, at least the ones near me.  They seem to be directed at people with different tastes in reading than mine.  Thrillers.  Political tomes.  Niche books (gardening, photography, psychology).  It's not that I won't read those, I do.  But they just don't get me ... excited.   Off the beaten path literature (especially British) excites me.

So you can imagine my excitement when I walked into Pudd'nhead Books and the first thing I saw on a table full of books was one of the books in the Merry Hall Trilogy.

Well, maybe you can't. 

Because I'm guessing that most of you haven't heard of Merry Hall by Beverly Nichols.  I had never heard of Merry Hall until a few years ago when I came across it at the bookstore of The Missouri Botanical Garden and decided to buy it for my best friend H, who is a great reader and a great gardener.  The first-person account of Mr. Nichols' post-war renovation of a rundown Georgian house named "Merry Hall" including, most particularly, the reconstitution of its garden, seemed like a perfect gift for H.  And she loved it.  She lent it back to me to read.  I loved it.  She bought the sequels; we both loved them.  They have made the rounds of our book club.

The thing is, as delightful as they are, I have never seen them anywhere except the Botanical Garden bookstore.  And it ran out of its copies long ago. So to walk into a little bookstore in Webster Groves and see one just sitting there among a group of other, more "normal", books made me think that maybe this might be the bookstore for me.

I started wandering around.  Although it contained all the usual categories, it's focus seemed to be on the things I like to read.  Fiction.  And not just fiction.  "Literary Fiction". Lots of British authors.  Lots of Canadian authors.  Lots of books I knew and loved.  Lots of books I've been wanting to read.  A fair amount of books I've never heard of.  A smattering of best sellers.  It also had what seemed to be a really good children's section. 

It also had a nice sitting section with a big comfy looking couch and a couple of upholstered chairs.  It isn't very big - really just the right size for a friendly neighborhood bookstore.  But what really clued me that whoever was running this bookstore was on the same wavelength as me were the displays.  Almost any bookstore will have books that I want to read.  But the bookstore of my imagination will make it easy for me to find them.  They won't be hidden on shelves; books that would interest me would be displayed (the owner would of course be able to read my mind to know my tastes). 

As I looked at the displays I realized that about half of the displayed books were ones that I had already read and REALLY liked.  And the other half were books that I hadn't read.  There were no books on display that I knew I didn't like.  That meant that there was a very good chance that I would like the books I hadn't yet read.

I intend to frequent this little store and I hope everyone I know does too.  It's hard to operate a bookstore in this economy so word of mouth is going to be important.  So all you St. Louis lurkers pay attention!  Go check it out and buy something!

And those of you NOT nearby .. do you have a small bookstore you love?  Or are you still searching?

A Thread of Grace

"There's a saying in Hebrew," he says. " 'No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.' "
About 10 years ago, on my very first trip to Italy, I visited the church of Sant'Ignazio di Loyola in Rome. The Baroque building houses Andrea Pozzo's masterpiece, a trompe l'oeil painting on the ceiling of the church that represents the Apotheosis of S. Ignatius (click through, there is a picture). There is a a brass disc on the floor of the church where you are to stand and look up, and from that vantage point the ceiling appears to extend upward into a vaulted roof decorated with statues. The ceiling is, in actuality, quite flat.

My family's connections with the Jesuits are of long standing and one of the things we did in Rome was meet an old school chum of my dad's, a Jesuit stationed in Rome, who lived down the street from Sant' Ignazio. He told us that there is quite a large space between the ceiling of the church and the actual roof of the church and that in the final years of WWII the Jesuits used that space to hide Jews. In preparing this I searched for some official recognition of that fact but I could find none. But he seemed quite certain of this and I have no reason to disbelieve him.

The Vatican is often justly criticized for its policies toward Hitler but too little recognition is given to the people of Italy, within or without the church hierarchy, who took it upon themselves to try to save their neighbors and even refugees that they didn't know. And the history of the liberation of Italy is often ignored in favor of the far more publicized history of the liberation of France. Perhaps because France was never a willing ally of Germany.

Mary Doria Russell's beautifully written novel A Thread of Grace will make you want to learn more. The story begins in September, 1943. A group of Jewish refugees cross the Alps from France into Italy because Italy, with the commencement of the Allied invasion of Italy, has made a separate peace. The Germans will not, however, willingly give up the Italian peninsula and for the next year and a half Italy exists in a state of war not only between German troops and the Allies but an underlying civil war between the Italian partisans and the Repubblicans who fight on the side of the fascists.

The main theme of the novel is the generosity of the people of Italy who managed to save the lives of 43,000 Jewish people, Italian and foreign. Set in the northwest corner of Italy, among the hills and valleys of Aostia and Liguria, in towns real and fictional, it has a large cast. Russell is a trained anthropoligist and in the afterward of the novel she credits her story to the many interviews she did with survivors and their descendants. She recognizes that they will find it strange to find bits and pieces of their lives interspersed throughout her novel. She says "What I have written is not real, but I hope they will find it true." This, I think, is what good historical fiction does: convey the reality of a situation.

At one point in the novel, one of the principal characters philosophically opines:

Ten percent of any group of human beings are shitheads. Catholics, Jews, Germans, Italians, Pilots, priests, Teachers, doctors, shopkeepers. Ten percent are shitheads. Another ten percent - salt of the earth. Saints. Give you the shirts off their backs. Most people are in the middle. Just trying to get by.

This is a novel made up of Saints who are fighting shitheads. Very few of the people of the middle, ordinary type exist in this novel except in the background.

For a while I thought that was going to be a problem for me. I kept doubting that ALL of the people of Italy were as benificent as they were made to appear in this novel. But after a while I gave myself up to the concept that I was reading a Lives of the Saints. And like the old fashioned Lives of the Saints, the stories are not pretty and do not end happily. And like many of the Saints of old, some of the characters seem to have been born saintly while others have sordid pasts for which atonement is necessary.

As with any book about Germans and Jews in WWII, don't get too attached to any of the characters. If such a story is to convey the reality of the situation, all characters must be casualties, even the ones who don't die. And, as in a war, Russell allows no time to mourn the demise of a character but sends us on to the next crisis.

The Allies play little role in this story. Landing in the south and fighting their way up the peninsula, they exist only in bombing raids that are equally likely to kill their friends as their enemies. They show up in person only towards the end and only very minimally. The partisans of the northwest of Italy fight almost completely alone through most of this novel. The Allied fight up the peninsula is a story of another novel.

However, despite their absence, I found myself thinking about them because of another experience I had in Europe. After the 50th anniversary of the end of WWII I found myself in deGaulle Airport in France waiting for a flight back to St. Louis. In the waiting area were a large number of elderly Japanese American couples who were connecting through St. Louis on their way back to San Francisco. I assumed that they were a tour group.

After we boarded the plane and took off, however, the pilot set us straight. These old men had once been in the 442nd Infantry Regiment, a regiment composed of Japanese Americans, many of whose families were left behind in the United States in Interment Camps. They had fought their way up the Italian Peninsula and in Southern France and were the most highly decorated military unit in the United States Armed Forces. The pilot himself came back to shake their hands followed by many older men on the plane who looked like they could remember WWII. These men and their wives had been invited back to Italy to take part in, and be honored by a commemoration ceremony for the liberation of Italy and they had continued on to France.

I knew next to nothing of these men or the liberation of Italy until my flight on that plane. But it caused me to look up the history of the 442nd and the Italian campaign. This novel opened my eyes to another part of the very human campaign in Italy against Nazi Germany. It also was a good way to remind myself that acts of good or evil are undertaken by otherwise ordinary people. In the final line of the novel, a 21st century Rabbi, attending the death of one of the remaining survivors, thinks about Hitler and reminds himself and us:

One hollow, hateful little man. One last awful thought: All the harm he ever did was done for him by others.