Fugitive Pieces 5 page short stories are also due on Tuesday of next week (Week 5 of marking period which ends Oct. 14). Continue to work on these.
WRITING CONTESTS
Bennington Contest:
www.bennington.edu/NewsEvents/YoungWritersCompetition/YW_Submission.aspx
Nancy Thorpe contest:
www.hollins.edu/academics/english/thorp.shtml
Young Arts:
www.youngarts.org/apply
www.pomegranatewords.com/magazine/teen_writing_contests.html
Book II, The Drowned City Analysis
The eighth chapter begins Book II, in which a new narrator takes over. Ben, no last name ever mentioned, teaches at the University of Toronto, having been mentored by Maurice Salman, Athos's old colleague. Maurice encourages the young man to coordinate his interests in weather and biography, a combination of which Athos and Jakob would approve. Ben finds that Jakob's poetry helps him understand his own parents, whose names are never mentioned. They are deeply-scarred survivors of the Holocaust. Much of the chapter, addressed personally to the late Jakob Beer, describes Ben's growing up, failed marriage, and snippets of his career as a scholar.
The psychological effects of surviving the Holocaust are laid out in Ben's parents. Mother opens up to the sensual joys of life, while Father closes down. He refuses to live in an ethic neighborhood for fear that the authorities will round them up. He is spooked while signing up for Canadian Social Security when what appears to be an ex-camp official challenges his birth certificate and when a neighbor pounds on his door to warn him to flee the path of Hurricane Hazel. The family barely escapes with their lives. Father moves them into a small apartment, where all doors look alike. Recall Jakob's life-long trauma cause by the kicking in of his family's door when the Nazis come for them. Father forbids talk about murdered relatives, but Mother fills Ben in on those who have been lost. The secret bonds them. Ben has a hard time as an adolescent in asserting his independence and through college remains a loner. He confesses that he never understands his father until his father commits suicide. The revelation of this act at the close of the chapter is unexpected, given Ben's description of dealing with his parents' physical decline in old age. For a while, Ben nearly avoids seeming churlish.
Music remains a major theme, as Ben's father is a former conductor
demoted after the war to piano teacher. He dissects scores as he listens
to recordings and only while listening to music does he open up to his
son. Ben recalls lying on his father's lap listening to music. His eyes
fall on the pale camp tattoo on his father's arm. During forced marches
between camps, Father plays Beethoven in his head to keep his sanity.
Ben's wife, Naomi is also devoted to music of all kinds. Naomi tells
Jakob about the Jewish opera singer Liuba Levitska, who dies in the
camps when she will not abandon her mother. Levitska has all of the
inmates singing "Tsvey Taybelech" (Two Little Doves; pg. 240). Another
inmate defies the Nazis by composing a song that fills the camps. Recall
that a major goal of the Nazis is to de-humanize their victims, so
composing music is a major act of defiance.
While Athos has broad interests in literature and poetry, which he
imparts to his war, Ben devotes his professional career to combining
meteorology throughout history with literature, biography, and history.
For his thesis he pictures accompanying Dostoevsky into the square where
he is subjected to a mock execution before being marched to exile in
Siberia. Many details of this incident, which transforms the great
Russian writer's life, are included. Ben writes two books and the
summary takes rapid note of a plethora of writers, musicians, and
historical figures and events that weather has influenced. Ben observes
that even the most reticent figures in history (e.g., Henry James, who
burns his correspondence) can have their stories reconstructed, but the
successful biographer penetrates the assumptions by which the subject
lives. Ben has difficulty figuring out the assumptions of his own
parents and wife. Between descriptions of Ben's research and his wife's
eclectic interests and penchant for trivia and non-sequiturs, the
chapter abounds in seemingly random but fascinating anecdotes. Besides the historical hurricane and flood, which occasions the chapter title, tornadoes are described as arbitrary. Many examples of survival side-by-side with utter destruction and bits of whimsy - lakes having their water sucked up and dropped again, people, animals, and objects being transported vast distances but then set down intact, etc., are quoted. Mother, hearing them, thinks instinctively about the evil winds of Nazism that are planned out and arbitrary. Her three focal points are the camps, Kristallnacht (mentioned in Book I in conjunction with the invention of nuclear fission), and the SS.
Ben's beautiful, intelligent wife Naomi is introduced and, like Jakob's first wife, Alex, is rather swiftly dispatched. Naomi bonds with his parents in ways that he cannot understand. She gives them the space that they need and Mother opens up to her, telling her about the two children that perish in the camps. Ben's parents had apparently agreed not to tell him. Naomi reveals that they call him Ben, not a proper name but the Hebrew word for "son," hoping that he will be spared if he is not named. There is a veiled reference to the Exodus 12. Recall earlier mentions of how Jews throughout history identify morally with the founding event in their history. It is always a "now" event, undertaken by them as well as their ancestors.
Jakob takes an obvious interest in Naomi when they first meet at a party and she, uncharacteristically, tells him all about her and Ben's family. Ben finds himself jealous, but fights it because Jakob is his hero and develops into the true specialty of his academic career, as seen in the concluding chapters. Ben is less tolerant of Naomi's good relations with his parents and, when she suggests that he go to Idhra to collect Jakob's papers, he follows through. This destroys their already shaky marriage. Passages describing the beginning of their relationship are unusually lyrical and erotic. There is another passage that evokes the Christian sacrament of penance, as Jakob listens to Naomi's stories not like a priest, but as a sinner seeking redemption, and his words makes them afterwards feel clean. Ben notices a physical transformation in Naomi, brought about by love.
Ben's adolescent interest in bog people and how they differ from from
pictures of Holocaust victims reaches back to the early chapters of
Book I, detailing Athos' research. This helps link the two parts, as do
the two narrators' marital troubles. Neither disguises his
responsibility for the failures. The long chapter establishes the
intellectual debt that Ben owes to Jakob, and thus to Athos. As the
chapter ends, Ben is bound, like Jakob before him, for Greece.
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