A Friendly Slap in the Face from St. Mark

July 2, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Gustave Doré, "Raising the Daughter of Jairus"

It is probably borderline blasphemous to play favorites with the Bible, but Mark is far and away my favorite of the four Gospels. It’s the oldest Gospel, so far as we know, though not the oldest book of the New Testament—Paul’s letters get that distinction. But it is the oldest attempt to tell the story of Jesus’s life.

I don’t like Mark best because of its “accuracy,” though, as if being earliest made it by default the most historically reliable. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Luke makes some cryptic comments to the effect that his predecessors weren’t quite as “orderly” as he intends to be. See, Luke wants to help you get it. So do his buddies Matthew and John. All three of them are so helpful, so concerned and caring. Matthew wants to help his fellow Jews sort out just how this Jesus character really is the Messiah promised to Israel, and he scours the Scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) for every interpretive lens and motif he can find to bring meaning to the traumatic cross. Luke takes another tactic, pointing his Jews toward the growing faith of Gentiles and helping those Gentiles get a handle on the Jewish roots of their new faith, and he even writes up a volume 2, what we call Acts, as an introductory guide to the new community called “church” that believers in Jesus are going to find themselves in. And John is so freaking enraptured by the love of the heavenly Father poured out in the incarnate flesh of the Son and spread abroad by the Advocate-Comforter-Holy Spirit that he explains it to death. Love love love light light light bread bread bread for chapters chapters chapters!

These three guys, Matthew, Luke and John, are your ideal pastors, anticipating your every doubt, providing well-thought-out, intelligent, sensitive answers, tossing out soft cushions for your newborn faith to land on.

Then there’s Mark…

Slovak Novels in English #6: The House of the Deaf Man

June 23, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This should have been a great work.

It certainly is grand in its ambition: a retelling of Slovakia’s history from the rise of fascism in the 1930s up to the present, almost a century in all, from the perspective of one family. Big, epic historical fiction renders the distant past rivetingly present and aims to overturn the convenient and cheap moral judgments we place on our ancestors by illustrating the agonies of their decisions without the benefit of our hindsight.

Krištúfek was clearly going for this kind of effect…

An Encyclopedia for Little Comrades

June 16, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

One of the most fascinating discoveries I’ve made in working on my memoir is the Detská encyclopédia, published in Czechoslovakia first in the early 60s and re-issued in the early 80s. Author Říha was director of the State Publishing House for Children’s Literature from the late 50s (right after the show trials died down) through 1967, just before the Prague Spring, but he became part of the leadership of “normalized” Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion—all of which is to say, he probably was a true believer in the red dawn. The encyclopedia he penned for children is charmingly written, lavishly illustrated, and laced with all kinds of good moral instruction—and a few well-placed threats—for the youth of the socialist tomorrow. Here are my own translations of a few of my favorite entries…

Barefootery

June 1, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In recognition of National Go Barefoot Day, here’s my testimony to having my own two feet planted firmly on the ground!

First things first: our culture is really weird about shoelessness. I would say it’s the last taboo, but there are, thank God, a few more left in place. Let’s say it’s the last taboo of zero moral significance. Americans, and probably North Atlantic/Westerners generally, equate shoes with civilization. To have no shoes is to be poor, destitute, uneducated, probably stupid, and maybe pregnant. Twice I believe myself to have been mistaken for a prostitute, once in the U.S. and once in Germany, because, despite my definitely not sexy attire, I was out in public shoeless…

Three Memoirs of Slovak Communism

May 12, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

There’s nothing to put American political vagaries in radical context like reading a whole bunch of books about communism. My string of Slovak novels in English has had to give way for awhile to piles and piles on the twentieth century’s strangest political experiment, not to say the bloodiest. I must admit, having grown up on Cold War rhetoric on the American side and having not a few issues with the runaway consumerism of this society, I had been inclined to think it was ever so slightly possible that communism was not as bad as Reagan and his predecessors had made it out to be.

I was wrong. It was worse…

Twelve Brothers and a Thirteenth Sister

May 1, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

As I’ve been working on my memoir and making better acquaintance with Slovak literature, I’ve also discovered Slovak fairy tales. There are analogs to the British/French/German fairy tale tradition that Americans are more familiar with—a Rumpelstiltskin-type story, a Tom Thumb, a Cinderella (but also a Cinderel or “Ashboy”). There are definitely distinctives, too, like making Jesus or even the Heavenly Father a character in the tale, and above all the abiding passion for the tátoš or fairy horse. What has delighted me most, though, is this story, “Twelve Brothers and a Thirteenth Sister.” It was a favorite of nineteenth-century Slovak feminists, who appreciated the very unusual plot device of a girl rescuing a whole bunch of helpless, bewitched, and hedged-in boys. Eat your heart out, Sleeping Beauty! …

Reading “Silence” on My First Visit to Japan

April 18, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

I have known about Silence for a long time, and its basic plot, and deliberately avoided it because it seemed too painful to bear. But on our first trip to Japan, amidst the beautiful cherry blossoms in full bloom and warm welcome by our future colleagues, I decided I was ready to brave it. I am glad I did...

Slovak Novels in English #5: Don’t Cry for Me

March 20, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

If Judy Blume had been Slovak, this would be the result.

At first blush, it’s a pretty straightforward young adult novel. Told in the first person, the story is the stream-of-consciousness narration of fourteen-year-old Olga, who lives in Bratislava with her parents and Granny. She endures all the straightforward troubles of early adolescence: the romance that is desired but withheld or lost set in contrast with the repulsive advances of the undesirable; parents who don’t understand and yet are desperately loved and needed all the same; friends who are sometimes devoted and sometimes unreliable; school stresses; emotional highs and lows that pass through the soul unannounced like a gale-force wind...

Can French Food Be Cooked Outside of France?

March 7, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Julia Child says yes. I say no.

Back when I was still in graduate school and living on a considerably severer budget than I am now, I did not buy cookbooks. Instead, I got them out of the library and typed up any recipes I thought I might like to fit when printed on an index card. Actually, this is not a bad strategy, if you don’t count the loss of valuable time in typing. I still vet potential cookbook purchases at the library.

Anyway, I ran across a reference to a revered French cookbook, Bistro Cooking by Patricia Wells...

Slovak Novels in English #4: The Ugly

February 25, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is a “Slovak novel in English” in a rather different sense from the ones I’ve discussed so far. The author is a Slovak national, and the hero is a Slovak—though of an imaginary tribe of Siberian Slovaks who got tired of capturing that vast snowscape at the end of World War I, got off the trans-Siberian railroad, and stayed put in an idyllic valley called Verkhoyansk—though, according to Business Insider, the real valley of Verkhoyansk is “the most miserable place in the world,” which makes it for sure a genuine choice of oppressed peasantry...