Slovak Novels in English #15: St. Elizabeth’s Square

March 1, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

I ordered this book as a matter of course, simply because it’s another Slovak novel in English. But as soon as it arrived, I became even more intrigued by the circumstances of its publication than its plot. Because this novel, which first came out in 1958 in Slovak, was translated and printed in English in 1964 by a publisher in Prague. In other words, during the severe censorship of the immediate post-Stalinist era, this book was selected not only for public consumption in Czechoslovakia but to send a message to the hostile outside capitalist world of English speakers. How and why did this happen?

My suspicions, of course, were that author Rudolf Jašík must have been a true believer in the Communist cause, and from what I can find out about him, my suspicions were correct. After five months imprisoned by the Nazis for distributing Communist leaflets in 1940, Jašík came out more convinced than ever of the evils of fascism and the righteousness of the Reds. He fought in the Slovak puppet state’s army on the side of the Axis but sabotaged his own regiment, for which he was again imprisoned. Jašík didn’t waste either bout in prison but worked on his Russian and even tried to join the Soviet army at one point. After his second release from jail, he joined the partisans in the Slovak National Uprising. This most revered moment in Slovak national history actually failed, but it put Jašík in good stead with the regime change of 1948. He held prominent jobs in industry and the arts, organized study groups in Marxist-Leninist thought, and was allowed to publish his handful of novels and poetry.

I came to this, his most famous novel, expecting a work of pious and overt propaganda. In fact, it is considerably more subtle than that…

Lutheran Saints #1: Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682–1719)

February 22, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg was only twenty-three years old when he landed at the south Indian fortress of Tranquebar on July 9, 1706, but his reputation already preceded him. The governor of this Danish colony refused to let him disembark for three days, and when he finally relented, denied Ziegenbalg lodging amidst the other Germans and Danes. The young man and his colleague Plütschau had no choice but to shift for themselves among the poor and despised Portuguese-speaking Indians of the city.

Their crime? They had arrived to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with the local Tamil population.

This did not fit the agenda of the Danish East India Company or its governor at all. For one thing, they held the locals in contempt, as dark-skinned savages; for another, the Tamils’ becoming Christians would interfere with the nominally Christian Danes’ abuse of them; and finally, their own habits of drinking, whoring, and slaveholding—already inspiring disgust on the part of the Tamils—would come in for closer scrutiny. Anyway, the King of Denmark had never consulted with them about this mission business. He just decided by his absolute authority to sponsor Ziegenbalg and Plütschau because of his guilty conscience after the death of his mistress and their infant child. The board of the Danish East India Company back home had got a messenger to Governor Hassius before the missionaries arrived and instructed him in no uncertain terms: prevent them from doing what they’re there to do…

Two Cookbooks That Made Me a Cook and One That Made Me a Writer

February 11, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Childhood is one astounding new fact after another; a hurricane of surprises, delights, and alarms. A great deal of adulthood is trying to recapture that incessant novelty and the richness of experience it imparts.

Among the many surprises of human existence, one that most impressed itself on me came when I was four or five: the realization that you could talk about people you had never met in person! Humanity was not restricted to your immediate circle. You could be casual and matter-of-fact about these unknown personages, referring to these people only by their last names. Heck, they could even be dead!

This revelation came to me as I studied the back cover of my very first cookbook, Many Hands Cooking: An International Cookbook for Girls and Boys, published by UNICEF. The authors, smiling young women in their back cover photograph, were Terry Touff Cooper and Marilyn Ratner. The illustrator was Tony Chen. I read their brief bios many times over and thought to myself, “All right, well, if Terry Touff Cooper and Marilyn Ratner come in conversation, I’ll be ready!”

To date, neither Terry Touff Cooper nor Marilyn Ratner has ever come up in conversation. But by golly, if you’re game, I’m still ready! …

Slovak Novels in English #14: The Camp of Fallen Women

February 1, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

So often in writing about books I’m inclined to give two reviews: one of what the book intended to be, and the second of what the book actually was. The Camp of Fallen Women is one of those books.

The premise is fantastic: the actual, historical effort of the new communist state in Czechoslovakia to “re-educate” a cohort of prostitutes from a notorious neighborhood in Bratislava by interning them in a concentration camp. Forced to wear underwear, earn a respectable living by learning to sew and embroider, and subjected to long lectures on proletariat ideology, these “fallen women” try to make sense of what has happened to them and figure out how to survive in the strange new world of communism.

As a political satire, the book is sharp, pointed, and often funny. It shows how ideology can seriously interfere with sex drive—but also how sex drive can seriously interfere with ideology…

Memoir Update, plus, the Best Writing Book Ever

January 24, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Late last fall I finished a second draft of my memoir about moving to the newly minted Slovak Republic when I was seventeen and all the adventures, both linguistic and romantic, that befell me there. Then it was time to let the book lie fallow for awhile—since, you know, I had other things going on at the time, like getting used to living in Japan and all. Since then the book’s been farmed out to a handful of trusted readers for feedback, and next month I plan to launch into the third edit, which hopefully will bring it to a place ready to seek publication. Eeek!

The idea of a fallow period is a bit misleading, though, because in this time between edits I have made a marvelous discovery that—I do not exaggerate—has changed my life. It is The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne and the companion podcast he does with Tim Grahl (whose Book Launch Show podcast is also awesome).

First, an embarrassing admission: this is actually the second time I’ve discovered The Story Grid, which just goes to show that if the life-changing thing comes along when you’re not ready for it, life doesn’t actually change. (Apply this wisdom to your own life as appropriate.) I read a library copy a couple years ago and thought it was really cool, but for whatever reason was not in a place to implement its strategy.

Then this past November I had about drained my podcast queue dry and was casting around for something new, so I looked for writing-related podcasts. There are zillions of them, and most of them bored me so I quickly moved on. Then I got to the Story Grid Podcast and frankly binged on approximately 150 episodes. I was so disappointed when I caught up to the present that I bought the book, read, marked, and inwardly digested its contents, and life will never be the same! Or at least writing…

A Reasonably Quick Guide to Spiritual Gifts/Charismata

January 16, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

For Pentecostals, a powerful encounter with the Holy Spirit entails a bestowal of divine gifts of new powers and abilities. They are personally enriching, to be sure, but their primary purpose is the building-up of the church, both through missional outreach and congregational edification. The most common term to describe these gifts is charismata (singular: charisma), a transliteration of the Greek term that Paul uses for divine gifts.

Paul appears to have invented the term “charisma” himself. It has virtually no counterpart in any other Greek literature of his period or before. It derives from the Greek word charis, which means “grace,” so charismata can be understood to mean “graced-things.” You can also see the word charis hiding in one of the terms for the Lord’s Supper: eucharist, which has the more specific meaning of “thanksgiving”…

Slovak Novels in English #13: Out of This Furnace

January 7, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Like Alexander Boldizar’s The Ugly, Thomas Bell’s Out of This Furnace is a “Slovak Novel in English” on account of a certain sleight of hand on my part. It was written and published in English and to my knowledge has never been translated into Slovak. But like The Ugly, it concerns the lives of Slovaks in America at the wrong end of the justice system—though where Boldizar’s story is comical and absurdist, Bell’s is realistic and humane.

Out of This Furnace spans three generations, from patriarch Kracha’s emigration from his small eastern Slovak village to Pennsylvania, to his daughter Mary and her husband Mike’s failed expectations to rise above the poverty and backbreaking labor of their parents, to grandson Dobie’s gradual politicization into the role of a union activist. Bell knew whereof he spoke: no small amount of the story tracks with his own family history, though unlike his third-generation counterpart Dobie, Bell escaped the drudgery of the steel town as a young man and never went back. But he certainly looked back, and in so doing recorded the emblematic story of Slovaks in America…

Carp! The Herald Angels Sing

December 21, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In the spirit of Christmas, here’s an extract from my memoir recalling the thrill of being in three countries in one day for “holiday shopping,” which turned out instead to be “holiday liver consumption.” Plus, somewhat more tastily, a recipe for a Christmas cookie you’ve probably never tried before.

As for the “carp” reference in the post’s title… that will have to wait till you read the whole book! (Or until you Google “carp+Slovakia+Christmas.” If you want to cheat.)

❧

Imagine, if you will, that under the communist regime from which you have recently emerged, you were required to create a “trade union” for the church’s seminary, so State Security could recruit informers and keep an eye on “subversive” activity.

And suppose that, after forty years of starvation of funds and personnel, your seminary has found itself in a borderless world awash in sudden and unaccustomed competition, such that its shoddy facility, lack of reading material, and underpaid, overworked faculty are a poor return on the enthusiasm of the hundreds of new students pouring through your doors.

Now suppose that you have some money left over from that defunct trade union. What will you do with it?

The answer is obvious. You will charter a bus to take the professors and their wives (and in one case, a professor’s daughter) to Austria and Hungary for a day of Christmas shopping…

Cauliflower and Yuzu, or, In Praise of a Japanese November

December 4, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

When we arrived in Japan four months ago, I knew that I would of course continue to cook Western food (洋食, youshoku) but wanted to dive right into Japanese food as well (和食, washoku—和/wa is the oldest Japanese word for “Japan” and still appears in words like wagyu, i.e. super expensive artisal Japanese beef).

However, this ferverous intention was thwarted first of all by the delayed arrival of our kitchen equipment, then the approximately seven typhoons that struck the island in our first six weeks, and finally by my abject illiteracy in the local grocery stores.

But even as weather and language lessons began to cooperate with my culinary ambitions, I was checked by the unexpected unavailability, or extreme price, of certain ingredients. For instance, celery is crazy expensive in Japan, which may explain why it tends to be packaged one stalk at a time! And though milk, butter, and yogurt are available and not too pricy—though sour cream and buttermilk appear to be nonexistent—they cost so much more than, say, tofu (29¥ a box, which is about a quarter) or beansprouts (19¥), that said dairy products got mentally transferred from the category of “daily necessity” to “luxury items.

What particularly afflicted me, though, was the matter of cauliflower and yuzu…

Slovak Novels in English #12: Seeing People Off

November 16, 2018 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In English we say "to each his own," and the French say chacun son goût. I have no idea what the proper way to express this in Slovak is, but what we used to say when we lived there was Každá ma svoj faktor; literally, "Each [woman] has her own factor," as in SPF. It came from one of the most outrageous instances of nascent capitalism in mid-90s Slovakia: a billboard showing five female bottoms, clad only in string bikinis, ranging from very pale on the left to tawny and tanned on the right—with the slogan printed across the bottom(s).

The point of mentioning this is not, actually, to expose the lurid epiphenomena of consumerism unleashed on long-deprived central Europeans. It's to say that every culture recognizes that, to use another English proverb, "there's no accounting for taste." On some level, people like what they like, and at some level, it's not a matter of good or bad—it just is.

All of this is my clever decoy in hopes of not disappointing the literati when I say that I did not like Seeing People Off, I did not understand it, and I cannot fathom why it won the 2012 European Union Prize for Literature. Now you know the truth: I'm a Philistine…