News, and Things I've Been Thinking About

[lisa_goldstein]

1.  My brother wrote to two of the people we met in Ukraine when we visited Mukachevo, the town my mother came from.  Our cousin says that fortunately he’s too far west for the bombs to have hit that area, but a lot of refugees are coming from the east and they are trying to help them.  The man who drove us around turned out to be in Egypt (!!!) on vacation and is stuck there, though he wants to get back to Ukraine.

I also saw a newspaper article datelined Mukachevo, which seemed strange to me.  No one has ever heard of this town, and yet there it was, in black and white in a major paper.

I'm spending a lot of (too much) time watching and reading the news about the war.  I feel like I should say something about it, but I have nothing new to add, only a feeling of helplessness.

2. Art Spiegelman gave an interview about the censorship of Maus, his Pulitzer-Prize-winning graphic novel about his father's experiences in the concentration camps.  In the course of it he says something very similar to what Dara Horn (in the last entry) wrote about Jewish literature: “As Spiegelman sees it, the real reason for the board’s decision may be that the narrative of Maus offers no catharsis, let alone comfort, to readers. There are no saviors. No one is redeemed. The characters — Spiegelman’s family — remain the imperfect people they were to begin with. ‘It’s a very not-Christian book,’ Spiegelman says. ‘Vladek didn’t become better as a result of his suffering. He just got to suffer. They want to teach the Holocaust. They just want a friendlier Holocaust to teach.’”

I want to add something to the discussion of censorship as well, but everything about that has also been said.  Read Maus if you haven't already, and also another banned book, Toni Morrison's Beloved, which, among other things, is a fantasy novel.

3.  Bonnie got a vaccine against cancer, something I’d never heard of.  I looked it up and found out that most cancer vaccines are not yet approved by the FDA and so unavailable for humans.  A rare instance of dogs and other animals getting better care than people, at least for now.  We also got some chemo medication that was prescribed for her after a lab did genetic sequencing on her tumor, looking for mutations.  I had no idea that cancer research was this far advanced.  Meanwhile, she seems fine, with no side effects as yet.

Comments

[calimac]

I looked up Mukachevo to see where it is, and found that it's in the part of Ukraine that belonged to Czechoslovakia before WW2.

[lisa_goldstein]

It's even more complicated than that. It was part of Austria-Hungary, then Hungary, then Czechoslovakia, then part of Hungary again after the division of Czechoslovakia before WWII, then the Soviet Union, and now, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, is part of Ukraine. People there say that they've lived in four countries without ever moving. My mother was born in Czechoslovakia and claimed to be Czech (there's a pecking order of East European countries, and Czechoslovakia is near the top) but spoke Hungarian.

[calimac]

I knew that, but I simplified. I guessed from the dates that it would have been Czechoslovakia when your mother was born.

Talking of changing places without moving, Nicolas Slonimsky once penned a biography of a made-up composer who was born Feb. 29, 1900 (1900 was not a leap year in the West) in Pressburg and traveled widely to Pozsony and Bratislava.

[lisa_goldstein]

Simple is good :)

[sergebroom]

A friendlier Holocaust?