Peter Pan - Never say goodbye.

 

La Steppe Infinie, by Esther Kautzig

A decade or so ago, a fellow French teacher in my area was retiring and she bequeathed me a carload full of materials.  Literally, I hauled the contents of her trunk -full to the brim- up three flights of stairs to my tiny one-bedroom apartment.  It was a treasure trove of novels, books, CDs, and so on.  I have since then shared the wealth with my own students, keeping a few novels for myself.  There are still a handful of them that I have yet to read, but one that I stumbled across a few weeks ago was La Steppe Infinie, by Esther Kautzig (b. Rudomin).

Originally published in English under the title The Endless Steppe (1968), I had somehow never heard of Esther (Rudomin) Hautzig; her story wasn't even remotely familiar to me.  A Polish Jew during WWII, La Steppe Infinie is something of a coming-of-age story that calls to mind The Diary of Anne Frank.  Equally true, Hautzig shares her story with us through the lens of hindsight, putting pen to paper about 20 years after the events she describes.  (Yes, she survived.  Spoiler.)  The result is a fascinating memoir of shock, tragedy, loss, hope, desperation, courage, and survival.

A ten-year-old daughter of a wealthy family, Esther is the only child of two educated and refined parents living in Vilnius, Poland (now Lithuania).  Esther's family occupies an apartment in the much larger mansion-like home of her paternal grandparents.  Hers is a privileged life surrounded by the aunts, uncles, and cousins who have the same living situation.  Fancy dresses, beautiful toys, gardening with grandpa, extravagant parties and outings, a private governess (nanny? teacher?), everything a girl her age could want...is all suddenly torn from her life as two Russian soldiers burst into her family home, arresting her grandparents, parents, and her for being capitalists (read: successful business owners) in 1941.  At gunpoint, they are given just moments to gather their belongings before being transported to some clandestine location.  At the station, Esther's grandfather is separated from the group and sent to a work camp.  After an abrupt and tearful goodbye, the remaining four are loaded into cattle cars -along with some familiar faces from around Vilnius- and their long journey to somewhere begins.

After weeks of living in squalid and claustrophobic conditions on board the cattle cars, Esther's family and the rest of the surviving passengers finally arrive in BFE Russia.  Because they have long since passed the Ural Mountains, they know that they are somewhere in Siberia.  Observing the arid landscape around them, the plateau seems vast, strange, and frightening.  Almost immediately, everyone is put to work in the gypsum mines.  Fortunately, they have arrived in summer, before the fabled Siberian winter sets in, but winter is never far off in Siberia.  Even under the scorching sun with the warm winds whipping around and the flies biting, winter is on everyone's minds -including the locals'- because summer farming means winter survival.  As such, Esther is put to work in a potato patch.  At the end of the day, she rejoins her parents and grandmother in the barracks they share with the rest of the Polish slaves.   Indeed, they are the lucky ones, because they haven't been sent to the Nazi work camps like many of their family and friends.  

But the tides of war change and, with it, the allegiance of the Red Army.  No longer an ally of Nazi Germany, Russia has joined with the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, along with others.  But Poland remains occupied by Nazi forces, and the Rudomins must remain in Siberia.  While they and their fellow Polish exiles are no longer prisoners, they must now adapt to living as refugees until the unknown end of the war.  Or death.  Whichever comes first.

Their exile ultimately lasts for five long years, during which the Rudomin family experiences both the unimaginable and the mundane - often at the same time, somehow.  Esther goes through puberty and, as she herself states [my translation from the French, back into English], "The heart of a young girl is indestructible.  In spite of the cold and the hunger, in this land of exile, mine beat wildly.  I had fallen in love for the first time."  In short, Esther experiences her first crush, reminding us that the everyday still happens, even when you're starving and freezing in Siberia.

No detail appears to be withheld in this candid account of life on the steppe.  Scares with the Russian secret police (YIKES!), hunger, cold, fear, and longing are abundant in this story, but humor is found in strange places.  A mesmerizing read, La Steppe Infinie was a difficult book for me to put down.  I appreciate Hautzig's straightforward and direct narrative style (especially when I'm reading in a different language), and her story -while moving and unbelievable- is a simple one that will remain with me for years and years to come.

D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, by Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire

I finally did it.  I got my hands on a hard copy of D'Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths.  Actually, it's very accessible and readily available on Amazon; I just had to apply my powers of recollection to track it down.  Regular readers may recall that I mentioned this beautifully illustrated collection of Greek mythology in a previous post on Celtic Mythology for Kids (Pinard).  In that post, I mentioned my childhood babysitter Majel and how she sparked within me a deep love for Greek mythology.  This year, I was able to truly share that love with my own kids who begged me so often to tell them these stories that I found the most obvious solution that I ought to have come up with much sooner:  buy them this book.

The original publication of this book featured a bright yellow cover.

The modern publication features the same image on a black background.

Despite a few aesthetic changes to the cover, I found a paperback edition of this 1962 publication of retellings and illustrations by husband and wife duo Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire.  The 2017 copy that we now own features all of the gorgeous original illustrations along with an Afterword that includes biographical information about the authors/illustrators, along with some of their original sketches.  After being prodded daily to read from this book, I'd say we got our money's worth.  The retellings are accurate (from my understanding of the ancient myths) without being too graphic or explicit.  It's safe to say that Zeus was a ladies' man...but that consent from the other party wasn't exactly a requirement in his "relationships".  The d'Aulaires still share some of the darker aspects of mythology (think: Oedipus, Persephone, or -my personal favorite- Prometheus), but in a way that I would consider age appropriate.  While stating that Zeus "had a lot of wives" or "many children with women other than Hera [his main wife]" isn't the entire picture, it's enough for young readers.

Kids will loves the story of Hermes, one of the few characters of the Greek pantheon we meet as a baby.  Clever, witty, and full of mischief, even the most austere of the Olympians are fond of him -- and so are we.  Pan, the ugly god of nature is reminiscent of SNL's "goat boy".  As unlikely as it sounds, Pan and the Olympian Apollo are equally unlucky in love as the objects of their desire (Syrinx and Daphne, respectively) opt to turn into plants rather than marry them -- an aspect of the story that my kids found wildly amusing.  And, despite its dark(ish) end, isn't it kinda funny that Narcissus wastes away and dies because he falls so deeply in love with his own reflection that he forgets to eat or drink?  Well, we thought so.  Dumb ol' King Midas turning his family into gold wasn't enough; he had to go make a big deal out of a music competition and ended up with donkey ears.  (Read it.  It makes sense.)  His ultimate demise recalls the story of Abou Hassan from One Thousand and One Nights.  [Quick Context Comparison:  King Midas is so ashamed by his donkey ears that he leaves his throne and flees to the woods.  Abou Hassan is a wealthy merchant who, at his elaborate wedding feast, lets out such a huge fart that he flees the country -leaving his beautiful new wife- for ten years on account of his embarrassment.]

Naughty baby Hermes is perhaps one of our family favorites.

The stories of ancient Greece are great.  Weird, often disturbing, and usually gross...but somehow great.  But it isn't just this fabulous publication that makes these stories as much fun as they are.  For me, there is a great deal of nostalgia involved.  Better yet, I get to share that with my kids now.  They crave these stories for their action and excitement.  We currently are loving a children's podcast called Greeking Out (National Geographic), where many of the same stories are told in different ways for kids.  My daughter loves listening to the tales of Atalanta and the wars between the Olympians and the Titans on repeat.  My son delights in the ingenuity of the Trojan horse. 

My oldest -ever the creator- made a family tree for the main Olympians
(and a few of their Titan ancestors).

There is truly nothing like getting to share great literature with the people you love most.  So we have this adventure on order...