June 1, 2018
Two more died this May. There will be no obituaries for them but at least we can name them. We can name them because they were a blip in the news, like so many other blips, one outrage succeeding another with little emotional space left to process them, and with little time to digest before the next shock rules the day.
One was called Claudia Gomez Gonzales, a 20 year-old Guatemalan seeking refugee in the US and shot in the head by Texas border control who changed their story multiple time after other witnesses appeared.
The other was Roxana Hernandez who, as a transsexual, was persecuted in Honduras, and died under unresolved circumstances during detention by ICE.
I just finished a book that, among other things, describes the fate of those tortured in their own country and then seeking refuge in other countries. The historical romance (well, that’s my description) spans parallel stories of 17th Century Jews fleeing the Inquisition in Portugal and 20th Century historians sleuthing a cache of papers left hidden in a cupboard by one of the refugees who ended up in London, a geniza now up for sale by a pair of unmoored Yuppies.
https://newrepublic.com/article/142959/theres-new-literary-celebrity-town-name-baruch-spinoza
Despite thinking of Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink as a mix between Enid Blyton adventure books and a philosophy primer, (or as beach reading without the embarrassment, since the 600 pages sport enough intellectual treatises to give you cover,) the story got its hooks into me. That’s mostly because it centers on two women, centuries apart, whose intellectual drive prompts their decisions regardless of consequences. The plot gets increasingly and deliciously ridiculous, which is understandable if you spend 10 years on writing a novel without a plan for how it is to unfold, letting it carry you where it wants while you desperately try to learn philosophy on the way. (This as per the author’s own report.)
https://daily.jstor.org/summoning-17th-century-scholars-researching-the-weight-of-ink/
Throw an odd couple into the mix, or two, a lot of detailed Jewish history and plenty of Gentiles who are cowardly at best, an angry mob next, torturing Inquisitors at worst, situate it during the plague, and voila, plenty of action. Be warned, there is not a single character in the book who is happy, or even content – they are all struggling, including not one, or two, but three librarians who are the quintessential stereotypes of old maids, the stern but ultimately helpful kind.
Come to think of it, spend your time with A.S. Byatt’s Possession instead, same basic plot without the Jewish twist. Or better still, with Byatt’s estranged sister, Margaret Drabble, whose The Peppered Moth is still one of the most fascinating psychological studies of female emancipation that I’ve read ever.
In the meantime let us remember those who were denied refuge – here and now.
sis
Magnificent pictures to accompany a distressing and, as you say, repetitive tale. I’ve made a note of the Drabble novel….