Slovak Novels in English #20: The Democrats

August 22, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This novel is another in the series produced by Artia, a Communist-era publishing house based out of Prague. Artia overwhelmingly favoring Czech authors, Jesenský’s book is one of only three (so far as I can tell) by Slovak authors that got translated into English. Therein lies a tale of its own.

What, exactly, was the motivation for a state-run publisher to produce English-language versions of its national literature? It takes little imagination to see the propaganda angle at work. For example, Rudolf Jašík’s St. Elizabeth’s Square recounts the horrors of growing anti-Semitism in pre-war Slovakia leading to collaboration with the Nazi occupiers, a very popular point of contrast for true-believer communists like the author—and one conveniently ignoring the totalitarian and anti-Semitic policies at work in the so-called workers’ paradise. But Jašík fit the bill so nicely that two of his novels were seen fit for wider a readership (a review of his Dead Soldiers Don’t Sing will be forthcoming) and hence comprise two-thirds of Artia’s modest Slovak translation program.

The prolific Janko Jesenský, author of The Democrats, didn’t quite have Jašík’s bonafides, but at least he had the good sense to die in 1945 after having openly expressed his opposition to fascism…

Lutheran Saints #6: Lajos Ordass

August 8, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

On that day in March 1948 there was another Hungarian with Lajos Ordass (1901–1978) on the plane to Zürich, a senior of the Methodist church. Visibly upset, he asked Lajos for a private meeting once they’d landed. Upon their safe arrival in Switzerland, the man told his story: how he’d been arrested in Budapest, interrogated about his overseas contacts—and asked what he knew about Lajos. He’d only been allowed to leave the country on the condition that he spy on Lajos during the trip, but in defiance of government pressure he turned over to Lajos the list of questions he’d been instructed to ask. He only dared to tell Lajos these things at all because he was planning to escape, never to return to Hungary.

Despite the warning Lajos returned home, bracing himself for the onslaught…

Lutheran Saints #5: Anna Sarah Kugler

July 24, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

“With only one life to live, why throw it away by going to India?” a friend once asked Anna Sarah Kugler (1856–1930). Deliberately adopting a turn of phrase from her new country, the doctor replied, “It was written on her forehead by the pen of Brahma,” which is to say: she was called to it by God and dared not disobey.

In the late nineteenth-century America, it was uncommon for women to be doctors, much less missionary doctors forsaking their homeland to serve on the other side of the world. But Anna had known that was what she would do ever since as a little girl she first heard a missionary to India speak about the work there…

Slovak Novels in English #19: The End of Freddy

July 10, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is the third and final installment in Rivers of Babylon trilogy, so named for its first novel and continuing in its second book, The Wooden Village. As I’ve remarked before, Pišťanek’s principal goal seems to be to explode the myth that Slovakia is the land of peaceable beekeepers, trodding their way silently through history, hoping that the surrounding exploiters will just leave them be.

If Pišťanek’s telling is at all accurate, then Slovakia can supply plenty of exploiters on its own, thank you very much…

Slovak Novels in English #18: Fleeting Snow

June 26, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In previous reviews I’ve been pretty hard on literary novels lacking action and only following in the vaguest and most unsatisfying way the meandering thoughts of the protagonist. So I’m especially happy to report that Pavel Vilikovský’s Fleeting Snow has singlehandedly redeemed the literary novel for me.

First up for praise is the language: this short novel is beautifully but also vividly and playfully written. Much credit should be given to the translators for their excellent work, not least of all in the sections where the characters discuss rare and evocative Slovak words—not the easiest thing to pull off in a second language! The story is told in the first person, granting us intimacy with the narrator’s thoughts as they range from matters philosophical to historical to painfully personal—and yet always expressed light-heartedly. It’s not an easy juxtaposition to pull off…

Lutheran Saints #4: Onesimos Nesib and Aster Ganno

June 12, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

The Oromo people of western Ethiopia received the gospel from freed slaves.

It wasn’t like foreign missionaries hadn’t been trying. They had, for years. One setback after another prevented them from reaching the enormous tribe whose language is the second-largest indigenous one in use in Africa. And it certainly didn’t help that the Amhara emperors and their vassal kings were in the process of conquering Oromia at the very same time.

But just as Joseph’s sale into slavery ultimately meant the salvation of his people (Genesis 37), so did the enslavement of many Oromos. One particular Oromo boy named Hika, whose name prophetically meant “translator,” lost his father and therefore his protection at the age of four, whereupon he was kidnapped by a slaver. Over the next dozen years, he was stolen twice and sold four times, though one master was kind enough that the boy willingly took the man’s surname Nesib as his own.

His horrific existence ended in 1870 when a Swiss explorer and diplomat named Werner Münzinger bought him and turned him over to the care of the Swedish Evangelical Mission, run by Pastor Bengt Peter Lundahl in Massawa on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea. No longer a slave but a student, he threw himself wholeheartedly into his studies and the faith of his liberators. At his baptism on Easter day in 1872, he took the Christian name Onesimos, after the runaway slave that St. Paul had liberated and sent home free to be reconciled to his master Philemon.

Onesimos found his new community among not only the Swedish missionaries in Massawa but also many other freed Oromo slaves. Despite having left his homeland at such an early age, his one passion was to return and share the gospel with his own people…

Slovak Novels in English #17: Away! Away!

May 29, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

How do you review a book that was not written for you?

This is the second novel by Jana Beňová I’ve read, and I was not a fan of the first, Seeing People Off. While I enjoyed Away! Away! marginally more, it was not something I would have read past the first two pages had I not made the (admittedly arbitrary) commitment to read every Slovak novel in English I could find.

But this time, it doesn’t seem quite fair to complain that the book has no plot to speak of, nor characters and emotions that compel me in the slightest. It is not meant to be that kind of book, so it’s a trifle unjust to charge it with failure. This time I’m trying to meet it where it’s at…

Slovak Novels in English #16: The Wooden Village

May 15, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This book is the sequel to Rivers of Babylon, which as I noted in my review was the perfect antidote to the uplifting, wholesome, and charming portrait of Slovakia in my forthcoming memoir. True to its predecessor, The Wooden Village recounts in lurid detail the squalor of Slovakia’s seamy underside.

The title refers to the frequently seen stations of wooden booths throughout Slovakia offering toilets, beer, and in this particular novel, prostitution. Several of the characters, who have continued on from the last story, find themselves slowly squeezed out of their meagerly paid positions in the wooden village as the transitions to the new post-communist economy move faster than they can adapt to.

After a brief uptick in income due to a disenchanted wealthy girl’s brief tenure as a hooker, Eržika, Feri, and Freddy Piggybank find themselves destitute again, briefly opting for the horrifying if hilarious job of luring kids on expensive bikes with ice cream, only to rob them of their valuable vehicles. Not very talented criminals any of them, it’s a short-lived enterprise…

Lutheran Saints #3: Elisabeth Cruciger (1500–1535)

May 1, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Elisabeth Cruciger’s hymn in the Erfurter Enchiridion.

Third in a series on Lutheran saints. Here we meet Elisabeth Cruciger and see how, when the gospel breaks through, “your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17). Proposed date of commemoration: May 2.

Elisabeth was born to the noble family von Meseritz around the turn of the sixteenth century. In her early life she was educated and eventually took vows as a canoness at the Mariensbusch abbey in the city of Treptow in the German region of Pomerania (today’s Poland). Marienbusch followed the Premonstratensian order, which had its own liturgical rite and placed great emphasis on the paschal suffering of Christ.

Like Katharina von Bora and many other nuns, Elisabeth fled her abbey in early 1522. Knowledge of Reformation ideas had arrived via Johannes Bugenhagen, who was at that time the rector of Treptow’s city school. She made her way to Wittenberg, where she lodged with the Bugenhagen family until in 1524 she married Caspar Cruciger, a reformer, teacher at the school in Magdeburg, and friend of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon.

Elisabeth and Caspar had two children: a daughter named Elisabeth who eventually married Luther’s son Hans, and a son named Caspar. The elder Caspar was later suspected of holding unacceptable ideas during intra-Lutheran disputes; the younger Caspar was actually imprisoned in Wittenberg and then exiled under suspicion of holding “crypto-Calvinist” ideas on the Lord’s Supper. Elisabeth herself died quite young in May of 1535, long before these accusations were leveled against her family members. Nothing else is known of her life other than her one long-standing contribution to Reformation music, the hymn “Lord Christ, the Only Son of God” (Herr Christ der einig Gotts Sohn)…

Flatbreads & Flavors & Fandom

April 17, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Years ago when Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything was my Bible, I studied every page like a good little novice, and approximately 882 pages later I came across the no doubt often overlooked section, “Fifty Cookbooks I’d Rather Not Live Without.” This led to many happy finds but none so happy as Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, which in due course upended HtCE as All-Time-Favorite-Cookbook.

Is this the point at which I mention that I hung out last week with Naomi Duguid? No, that’s spoiling the surprise too soon.

Anyway…

So I got my copy of F&F in 2005 and away I went. You see, for years already then (and still now) I’d been haunted with guilt because the first time I attempted to make bread from scratch I forgot to add the yeast. It was only once I had a supple dough in hand that I realized my mistake and—close your eyes, here it comes—thinking there was nothing more to be done about it, I threw it out.

I sometimes feel that when I face Judgment Day, that wasted bread dough will be dangled in front of my nose, an outrageous combination of wastefulness and ignorance…