A Feast Day and a Book Recommendation

Today is the feast day of St. Maximilian Kolbe, who was executed by the Nazis. Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan who led an interesting life, including founding a monastery in Nagasaki, before he ran afoul of the National Socialists and ended up in Auschwitz. At Auschwitz, when ten prisoners were selected for death by dehydration and starvation in retaliation for an escape, Maximilian Kolbe voluntarily took the place of one of the selected, because that man was married with children. You can read more of his inspiring story here and here.


This is a good place for a book recommendation I've been meaning to make: When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, by Judith Kerr. I came across this three or four weeks ago while looking for another book in the juvenile Ks. I'd never heard of it before, but I was intrigued by the title and took it home. It turned out to be better than what I'd been looking for. (Escape to Witch Mountain, FWIW.) The book is written for children, but it never talks down to them and is such a well written account of refugee life that it will appeal to adults. Briefly, it is about a little German girl named Anna, whose father is a prominent writer who opposes the Nazis. On the eve of Hitler's being elected to power, they leave the country before their passports can be taken and Dad imprisoned; they think they will be able to go home again but are soon disabused of this idea. The story is about how the family must adapt to refugee life, first in Sweden (where at least they speak the same language) and then in Paris. In addition to language and cultural problems, the family must for the first time learn to get along with little money and no housekeeper. Their situation may be rooted in a particular historical time, but their efforts to make a life in a new and strange place could apply to people in many different situations and time periods. The details of the way they adapt will interest a variety of people; personally I found the process of language acquisition especially interesting. It all rang very true to life, possibly because the story was at least partly autobiographical. I also liked the illustrations; in fact, the only thing I think isn't particularly good about the book is the title, but I suppose that has the virtue of making people notice it.

For the "Knitting in Fiction" file, there's an amusing passage where the mother, who'd never been trained in any kind of housewifely arts, tries to knit a sweater to save money. She knits very tightly, stabbing the wool with the needles so that every stitch is an attack. (It sounds like the way Akane Tendo cooks.) The final result is a functional sweater, but one that looks as if it's made of tweed.

Anyway, the ISBN is 0698115899. It was originally published in the early 1970s and reissued in 1997 and seems to be in print, so I encourage people to buy it or look for it at the library. Caution to people buying the book for young children: Although the focus is refugee life, there are a couple of bits that could (and should) be upsetting. The suicide of a gentle, harmless family friend is touched on briefly, but it is given in such terms that many small children would not understand what had happened, only that the poor man had died. The most disturbing part of the book is when Anna overhears the story of a distinguished professor who was chained up and driven mad by the Nazis. It disturbed her and it should disturb everybody. May God have mercy on us all for allowing such things to happen.

(Now I think of it, maybe it's not coincidence that the Divine Mercy chaplet came into being in the 1930s.)

Random Thoughts

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Two words you never want to hear together: creative cruelty.

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I once read that Jews have a Yiddish term that means "a shame to the goyim" to describe Jews who disgrace themselves publically in such a way that it could make all Jews look bad. It's long past time Christians had such a term for those who make us look bad to non-Christians.

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Although I like patriotism, I've sometimes found myself sitting at redlights, staring at the automobile ahead of me and wondering what good those magnetic Support Our Troops ribbons do for anyone other than magnetic ribbon manufacturers. And I think I've figured it out. The War on Terror (more accurately, the War on Islamofascism) is as much a war of ideas as of bullets, and "American fighting men deserve our support" is an idea--not the largest idea in the war, but an idea nevertheless. Good on those people who propagate that idea for everyone to see.

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Can't we as a nation agree that we've heard far too many jokes about prostate exams and encourage comedy writers to move on?

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Why did we need a law against taking a minor across state lines for an abortion without parental permission? I thought it was illegal to take a minor across state lines without parental permission for ANY reason.

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One result of making the morning-after pill available OTC that no one mentions is that stores would have a new high-theft item to worry about; people (teenagers, presumably) already steal condoms surprisingly frequently. But I guess theft is low on the list of potential problems.

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I saw a teenaged boy at mass wearing brown corduroy slippers. Maybe he thought if girls can get away with wearing pajama pants all over town, there's no reason he shouldn't wear bedroom slippers in public.

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There's something mildly odd about turning over an "I <3 America" product and seeing a "Made in China" sticker. We can't even make our own patriotica?

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Being "heteronormative" is like being right-handed normative, only even more so, as there's a lot more left-handed people than there are homosexual people. I see protest potential--lefties, start those protests at the scissor companies and the letter-writing campaigns against people who use "right hand man" as a compliment. Oh, and against all churches that use the Apostles or Nicene creed.

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The Three Investigators (children's series book characters) had the perfect (late) childhood setup. But the series was also very much a boy's fantasy. Does that mean the perfect childhood is a boy's childhood?

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Brenda Ueland (or was it Natalie Goldberg?) said writers expect more from the most peewee of efforts than any other artists-craftsmen. I think sometimes we religious folk are like that--we expect a continuous supply of enormous blessings when we're barely willing to give God a few minutes at the end of the day.

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Re Jonah Goldberg's "Welfare Kings" article: As disgusting as our current state of farm subsidies may be and as nice as it might be to give Third World a chance to prosper (see sixth paragraph), I can't help but think it would be unwise to leave much of our food production to others.

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I know it's good to pray for peace and all, but given that war is one of the things there is a season for (Ecclesiastes 3), sometimes it makes more sense to me to pray for the strength to do what needs to be done.

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At the bookstore I saw a boy of about eight dressed in a shirt at least two sizes too big, denim shorts with the crotch hanging down to his mid-thigh, and large athletic shoes--and I couldn't tell if he was dressed that way because his parents were poor and a bit neglectful or if they'd voluntarily paid good money to have him dressed like an urchin.