Catherine Chidgey's Remote Sympathy (2021) implicitly takes Hanah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil & constructs a story of Germans' self-delusion & complicity in the horrors of Buchanwald Labour Camp during WW2. Told from four perspectives (a jewish prisoner, an SS Officer & his wife & the townspeople), its a compelling story that does not flinch away from difficult questions & explores the lies that people will tell themselves!
Hi all
Trying to remember the title and author of a book I had as a kid (about 40 years ago).
This is what I remember: A girl who has been in a bad accident moves to her aunt and uncle's place. They have a horse farm and all the kids ride. This girl doesn't want to ride anymore because she accidentally (?) killed her horse (?). She discovers two stolen pedigreed horses during a snow storm and saves them.
It was definitely not "literature" but I loved that book.
"When I was twenty-six, my first novel, The Temple of Gold, was published by Alfred A. Knopf. (Which is now part of Random House which is now part of R.C.A. which is just part of what’s wrong with publishing in America today which is not part of this story.)'
William Goldman, Preface to The Princess Bride. @bookstodon
@SimonRoyHughes@bookstodon
Better than the Godfather for quotes.
"Some day everyone will be wearing masks"
Wm Goldman was a versatile writer. Some of his books on the TBR pile. Though I'm not convinced he ever really meant to write a sequel to "The Princess Bride"
Last night I finished Starling House by Alix Harrow. I had no idea what it was about when I started it, but I loved it. It's hard to describe without spoilers, but it's a complex story of families and poverty and bad luck woven into a great haunted house story. It wasn't scary, just creepy. Alix Harrow is now one of my favorite authors, she's brilliant. @bookstodon#Bookstodon#Fantasy#HauntedHouse#AlixHarrow
Spent all weekend working on a project that failed. Today’s newsletter almost didn’t happen. It’s hasty and haphzard. When it comes to luster, it’s lacking. But…it’s here…
You ever get the feeling that you just can’t read fast enough? I’m usually happy to mosey along, but this book I’m reading right now—Weyward, by Emilia Hart—is so interesting I just want to devour it, inhale it, consume aaaaall of it at once.
@nik@bookstodon I've read it. Some content was too sketchy to my taste, at times. Three women's lives to be made "palpable" couldn't be an easy task of course. The witch trial episodes were not that convincing...
“In story after story, epicene young men, difficult children, or wild beasts set out to shake up the stifling complacency around them.”
Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916) – Saki – was born #OTD, 18 Dec, in Akyab (now Sittwe), in Myanmar. Although born in the Raj & raised in England, his parents were Scots & he considered himself to be Scottish, too. Fatema Ahmed looks at his fierce, funny, & wicked fiction
Saki’s “Tobermory”, “The Boar-Pig”, “The Lumber Room”, & many others are hilarious (as is “Esmé”, if you don’t mind all the blood…). But his horrifying winter tale “The Interlopers” is a work of #Gothic art, worthy of the tradition of James Hogg & #RobertLouisStevenson
#history#reference / Peretz, Dekel. 2022. Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine. De Gruyter.
Introducion: Zionism for the Diaspora: Bridging the Gap between German
and Zionist Historical Narratives [p. 6]
An important step towards interlinking these narratives is to contextualize Oppenheimer and like-minded Zionists in a period when Germany’s colonial and imperial aspirations were peaking. It seems to go without saying that historical research needs to consider contemporaneous geographical, political and intellectual conditions. Yet this basic staple of the historian has been often neglected by researchers of German colonialism and of German Zionism in respect to the correlation between these two coetaneous affairs. It is not the purpose of this book to examine the causes of this neglect. Nevertheless, I would like to make some hypothetical suggestions.
First, Germany did not have a long-established colonial apparatus of the size and quality of France and England. There were certainly fewer Jews active within the German colonial service and, apart from a few prominent protagonists mentioned in this book, research into this matter is sparse. However, the lack of active service within the colonial bureaucracy alone is not indicative of the level of enthusiasm and advocacy of German colonial ambitions among German Jewry. There were other spheres in which support for colonial undertakings could manifest themselves
Second, due to the racialist and outright racist aspects of colonialism as well as the ultimate devastation that German colonial and imperial ambitions brought on the Jews during the Second World War and the Holocaust, it retroactively seems unfathomable that Jews could have ever been involved in any way with
German colonialism.
Third, the Zionist narrative is shaped by a teleological perspective. The focus of Zionist historiography on the contributions made to building the state of Israel, together with the ideology of diaspora negation¹⁷ – preaching total separation and distancing from Europe – blurred out conceptions of Zionism in which the establishment of Jewish sovereignty did not contradict a continued Jewish life in Europe or even envisioned realizing this sovereignty in places other than Palestine. During the First World War, Oppenheimer and his Zionist contemporaries proposed the establishment of Jewish cultural sovereignty or autonomy within (Eastern) Europe, in remarkable affinity with the anti-Zionist Bundism prevalent in Eastern Europe, revealing the diversity of opinions within early German Zionism. Furthermore, the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent British endorsement of Zionism overshadowed earlier attempts by German Zionists to integrate
Zionism into a broader German colonial scheme.
Fourth, further clouding the vision is the tension in Zionist historiography between the depiction of the intellectual origins of the Zionist movement within the context of European nationalism on the one hand, and the conceptualizing of Zionism as an anomaly of nationalism with independent roots in the ethnic, messianic character of Judaism on the other. The international nature of the movement makes it from the start a difficult object for comprehensive study.¹⁸ Finally, and probably most importantly, the negative association of colonialism with violent subjugation, foreign transgression, and unjustifiable occupation made it an unlikely candidate for integration by a Zionist historiography charged with constructing the national narrative of a Jewish state in a long-running conflict with indigenous and neighboring populations.
#hisotry#reference / Between Prague and Jerusalem : the idea of a binational state in Palestine. Dimitry Shumsky (2010). [Hebrew; German edition 2013]
Prof. Dimitri Shumsky, a Russian-born historian at Hebrew University, argues that the Zionist vision prior to 1948 was for a bi-national political entity in Israel/Palestine, not an ethnic Jewish nation-state as exists today.
Most early Zionist thinkers and leaders, across ideological camps, advocated some form of bi-national framework that would provide collective rights for both Jews and Palestinian Arabs. This view changed drastically after 1948.
Shumsky says the bi-national vision broke down due to the Holocaust, World War II, and the 1948 war, which led to Jewish sovereignty and control rather than a power-sharing agreement.
He sees reviving the civic currents in Zionist thought as a way to "re-Zionize" and make more inclusive the Israeli state today, though he recognizes the challenges given dominant Zionist nationalism that resists such change.
Shumsky situates himself as trying to uncover suppressed Zionist intellectual streams that were responsive to the reality of a land shared by two peoples, not just idealistic notions. Bringing these to light can impact views today.
Climb into the Fictionable archive, with exclusive #ShortStories from @mjohnharrison Joyce Carol Oates, Ali Smith, Sarah Hall, Diana Evans, Etgar Keret, Sabba Khan and more …
For #DecRecs 18, allow me to DecRecommend Ed Yong's book 'An Immense World', which is a fascinating exploration of how animals perceive the world, and what sensory perception is, anyway. I picked it up a year and a half ago, because I LOVED 'I Contain Multitudes' and respect Yong's work as a scientific journalist enormously. But I've never cracked it until now, and I don't even regret delaying, because now it means I get to enjoy his work over this break!