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 Tim Judah and Fintan O’Toole on War Crimes in Ukraine

May 26, 2022 / Volume LXIX, Number 9

Ruth Franklin: Who Betrayed Anne Frank?

Laura Miller: Olga Ravn’s Workers in Outer Space
Cass Sunstein: Three Cheers for the Administrative State!
Brenda Wineapple: The Mysterious Mary Lumpkin
E. Tammy Kim: POW Archives of the Korean War
Susie Linfield: How Radical Movements Begin
“Lahiri explores her relationship
with literature, translation, and the
English and Italian languages in
this exhilarating collection.”
—Costica Bradatan, Washington Post
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A fascinating biography of one
of the most outrageous figures in
modern Jewish intellectual life.”
—Vivian Liska, author of German-
Jewish Thought and Its Afterlife
“[This] book shows us why
Tocqueville remains a
vital, necessary figure for
understanding our world.”
—David A. Bell, author of
Men on Horseback
“The picture of Mann that emerges
from his book is rich, multilayered
and always fascinating.”
“This much-anticipated
volume brings us Sahlins
at his iconoclastic best.”
—Marilyn Strathern,
author of Relations
“Alpert bridges philosophy and
self-help to envision something
that seems to be slipping from
our grasp: a livable world.”
—Gabriel Winant, author of
The Next Shift
“This engaging, illuminating,
and encouraging book proposes
realistic reforms.”
—Steven Poskanzer, President
Emeritus, Carleton College
“A thorough, unflinching look at
what it would take to eradicate
racial barriers in American
higher education.”
—Library Journal
“Dreams of a Lifetime compellingly
argues that dreams tell us about
our essences—who we are and
who we want to be.”
—Terence E. McDonnell, coauthor of
Measuring Culture
“The most authoritative
single-volume treatment of
the religious order.”
—Simon Ditchfield, University of York
“These aphorisms proceed
in a way that feels at once
unexpected and profound.”
—Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone
Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
“Old Truths and New Clichés
is game-changing for
our understanding of
Isaac Bashevis Singer.”
—Debra Caplan, author of
Yiddish Empire
Contents
4 Geoffrey O’Brien Molière: The Complete Richard Wilbur Translations
10
14
Fintan O’Toole
Laura Miller
Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes
The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century by Olga Ravn,
translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken
THE
16
17
Camille Ralphs
Julian Bell
Poem
Surrealism Beyond Borders an exhibition at Tate Modern, London
EMBODIED
Catalog of the exhibition by Stephanie D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale,
with contributions from Dawn Ades, Patricia Allmer, and others
MIND
20 Ruth Franklin The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation by Rosemary Sullivan
23 Joshua Jelly-Schapiro Monkey Boy by Francisco Goldman
25 Susie Linfield The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas
by Gal Beckerman
30 Brenda Wineapple The Devil’s Half Acre: The Untold Story of How One Woman Liberated
the South’s Most Notorious Slave Jail by Kristen Green
32 E. Tammy Kim The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History
by Monica Kim
34 Gavin Francis Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy
Alfabet/Alphabet: A Memoir of a First Language by Sadiqa de Meijer
42 Tim Judah The Russian Terror
48 Cass R. Sunstein The Chevron Doctrine: Its Rise and Fall, and the Future of the
Administrative State by Thomas W. Merrill
NOG A A R IK H A
49 Dan Chiasson Poem
51 Helen Epstein Africa’s Last Colonial Currency: The CFA Franc Story by Fanny Pigeaud
and Ndongo Samba Sylla, translated from the French by Thomas Fazi THE CEILING
The CFA Franc Zone: Economic Development and the Post- Covid Recovery
by Ali Zafar OUTSIDE
54 Letters from Robert Goldman and Wendy Doniger
The Science and Experience
CONTRIBUTORS of the Disrupted Mind
JULIAN BELL is a painter based in Lewes, England. His E. TAMMY KIM is a contributing writer at The New Yorker,
new book, Natural Light: Adam Elsheimer and the Horizons a 2022 Alicia Patterson Fellow, and a Fellow at Type Media
of 1600, will be published later this year. Center. She is a cohost of the podcast Time to Say Goodbye.
DAN CHIASSON’s fifth book of poetry is The Math Camp- SUSIE LINFIELD teaches cultural journalism at NYU. She
“Astute, compassionate,
ers. He teaches at Wellesley. is the author of The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Po- and brilliant, The Ceiling
HELEN EPSTEIN is Visiting Professor of Human Rights litical Violence and The Lions’ Den: Zionism and the Left
and Global Public Health at Bard. She is the author of An- from Hannah Arendt to Noam Chomsky. Outside is finally an
other Fine Mess: America, Uganda, and the War on Ter- LAURA MILLER is a Books and Culture columnist for
ror and The Invisible Cure: Why We Are Losing the Fight Slate. She is the author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s
adventure story in the
Against AIDS in Africa. Adventures in Narnia and editor of The Salon.com Reader’s bewildering drama of being.”
Guide to Contemporary Authors.
GAVIN FRANCIS is a primary care physician in Edin-
burgh. His most recent book, Recovery: The Lost Art of GEOFFREY O’BRIEN’s latest books are Where Did Poetry — S IR I HU S T V E D T,
Convalescence, was published in the UK in January. Island Come From and the poetry collection Who Goes There. author of Memories of the Future
Dreams: Mapping an Obsession was published in Italian last FINTAN O’TOOLE is a columnist for The Irish Times and
year. the Leonard L. Milberg Professor of Irish Letters at Princeton.
RUTH FRANKLIN’s latest book, Shirley Jackson: A His new book, We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal His-
Rather Haunted Life, won the 2016 National Book Critics tory of Modern Ireland, was published in the US in March. “Noga Arikha is a poet
Circle Award in Biography. She is writing a biography of CAMILLE RALPHS’s poetry pamphlets are Malkin: An and a painter with the soul
Anne Frank. Ellegy in 14 Spels and uplifts & chains. She is the Poetry Edi-
JOSHUA JELLY-SCHAPIRO is the author, most re- tor at the Times Literary Supplement. of a scientist.”
cently, of Names of New York and, with Leah Gordon, CASS R. SUNSTEIN is the Robert Walmsley University —ANTONIO DAMASIO,
PÒTOPRENS : The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince. He Professor at Harvard and Senior Counselor at the US De-
teaches at NYU. partment of Homeland Security. author of Feeling and Knowing
TIM JUDAH is the author of In Wartime: Stories from BRENDA WINEAPPLE’s most recent book is The Im-
Ukraine. He has reported for The New York Review from peachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a
Ukraine, the Balkans, Niger, Armenia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Just Nation. She teaches in the School of the Arts at Columbia. “With grace, rigour, and
Editor: Emily Greenhouse Publisher: Rea S. Hederman imagination, Arikha brings
Deputy Editor: Michael Shae Associate Publisher, Business Operations: Michael King
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Founding Editors: Barbara Epstein (1928–2006) and Robert B. Silvers (1929–2017)
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Ŷ Walker Mimms: Saul Steinberg’s Drafting Table Ŷ Jeet Heer: The Anarchist Art of Martin Vaughn-James
— L I S A A P P IG N A N E S I ,
What’s new on
Ŷ Cristina Florea: Ukraine and the USSR’s Long Collapse Ŷ Julian Lucas: Black Cowboys Out of Egypt author of Mad, Bad and Sad
nybooks.com Plus: Christopher Benfey on Stanley Cavell, Carson Ellis on drawing from nature, and more . . .

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On the cover: Ronan Bouroullec, Untitled, 2020 (Ronan Bouroullec). The top painting on page 18 is © 2022 Remedios Varo, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York/ VEGAP, Madrid.
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3

Molière: The Complete
Richard Wilbur Translations
Library of America,
2 volumes, 1,086 pp., $70.00
When Richard Wilbur undertook in
1952 to translate Molière’s The Mis-
anthrope, it was as compensation for
his inability (despite having received
a grant for the purpose) to write verse
plays of his own: “They didn’t come
off. They were very bad, extremely
wooden.” With his first two books of
poetry, The Beautiful Changes (1947)
and Ceremony (1950), Wilbur had been
promptly recognized as an important
young poet working with total confi-
dence in traditional forms, and in the
age of T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry
verse drama seemed a promising move.
As it turned out, translating Molière
became a lifelong commitment, an op-
portunity virtually to inhabit a thor-
oughly congenial alternate identity.
An exciting production of The Misan-
thrope at the Comédie Française in 1948
had first drawn Wilbur to the work, but
his involvement with France and French
theater went further back. As a teenager
he was impressed by Walter Hampden
in Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, in
Brian Hooker’s rousing verse transla-
tion; during World War II he had come
to know France when serving for three
4 The New York Review
Schemes Gone Awry
Geoffrey O’Brien
Molière; illustration by Emmanuel Pierre
years with the Thirty-Sixth Infantry
Division; and afterward, at Harvard,
he became more deeply involved with
French poetry through his friendship
with the poet André du Bouchet.
The Misanthrope translation was pro-
duced with great success by the Poets’
Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
in 1955, and when Eric Bentley included
it in his anthology The Classic Theatre:
Six French Plays (1961) he described
it—voicing an opinion widely shared—
as “perhaps the first Molière in English
to be a delight from beginning to end.”
Over the next five decades Wilbur (who
died in 2017) translated nine more—all
the major verse plays along with the
prose Don Juan—which are now col-
lected in a two-volume set from Library
of America, along with his illuminating
introductions.1
1 to Borges and Brodsky—a line of sep-
Of the verse plays, he omitted only
the “heroic comedy” Dom Garcie de
Navarre and the spectacularly staged
“comedy ballets” written wholly or
partly in verse. Dom Garcie was for
understandable reasons a catastrophic
flop in its day—Molière’s otherwise in-
fallible theatrical instincts desert him
in this humorless portrait of paranoid
jealousy, but it would have been inter-
esting to see what Wilbur would have
done with its unusually knotty verse
and obsessive quibbling. The play was
T hese are not the first translations
to figure in Library of America; pre-
vious volumes include Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America newly rendered
by Arthur Goldhammer and Ezra
Pound’s Poems and Translations, con-
taining those versions from the Chi-
nese, Greek, and Provençal that in so
many ways expanded the possibilities
of American poetry. But this new set
seems to open wider the welcoming
prospect of more volumes addressing
literary translation as an art not mar-
ginal but central, and still too rarely
recognized as such.
In Pound’s case, translation and orig-
inal poetry were mutually enmeshed,
different facets of the same project. For
Wilbur, while translation was likewise
a constant practice—his poetry col-
lections are interspersed with versions
of poets from Villon and Baudelaire
aration was clearly drawn. If Pound
sought the freedom of radical recast-
ing, not only of the original text but of
English poetic diction, Wilbur asserted
that “one shouldn’t bother with it at all
unless one is willing to be slavish to
try to get over into English everything
obviously important to Molière, who
incorporated chunks of it into The
Misanthrope.
that’s there in the original.” Charac-
teristically, he chose to approximate
Molière’s rhymed couplets as closely as
possible, only substituting iambic pen-
tameter for alexandrines. He saw this
as far more than a matter of personal
preference, laying out in his introduc-
tion to The Misanthrope a multitude of
aspects otherwise lost, not least
the frequently intricate arrange-
ments of balancing half-lines,
lines, couplets, quatrains, and
sestets. There is no question that
words, when dancing within such
patterns, are not their prosaic
selves, but have a wholly different
mood and meaning.
His translations even on the page sug-
gest an operetta whose music resides
entirely in the volleying of words. They
capture precisely Molière’s sustained
cadence of argument and counterar-
gument, punctuated by the percussive
thrust and counterthrust of monosyl-
labic interjections and ripostes. There
are no rests—even when Molière’s char-
acters hesitate or temporize, they do so
with urgency—and it is easy to move
through these volumes, from scene to
scene and play to play, as if on a single
gust. The particular merit of Wilbur’s
versions is the cohesive fluency with
which they progress from beginning to
end, a fluency that encompasses, beyond
meter and rhyme, textures of speech
and movements of thought. “I spent so
much time,” he once commented, “try-
ing to figure out how to translate lines
that an actor would like to speak.”
His language neither updates nor
historicizes: “The diction mediates be-
tween then and now, suggesting no one
period.” There is a ’twould here and
a naught there, but the overall tone is
never antiquarian. On the other hand,
Wilbur was resistant to aggressive at-
tempts to drag Molière into the present
day, complaining about productions
recasting Tartuffe as a beaded 1960s
guru or The Misanthrope’s Alceste as
“a hippie who ‘tells it like is.’” As much
as possible he goes for a pointed, plain-
spoken exactness:
You could at least have beaten me
more gently. (The Bungler)
We have but one death, and it
lasts so long! (Lovers’ Quarrels)
Let’s put off friendship, and
get acquainted first. (The
Misanthrope)
He manages to make speaking in
rhymed couplets the most natural thing
in the world:
All this fine talk, so flowery and
so polished,
Is something I’d be glad to see
abolished.
It’s a vile custom: most men waste
two- thirds
Of every day exchanging empty
words. (The School for Wives)
And he achieves the uncluttered trans-
mission of lines of argument, so that
even the most elaborate speeches of The
Misanthrope do not get lost in syntactic
 “A terrific read and an
invaluable reference in
the debate of human
verses robotic space-
“An invaluable flight.”
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of the creation of a
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— Washington Post

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A Brief History of Equality
is a route into Piketty’s
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is riveting from start to
finish.”
—Susannah Cahalan,
author of Brain on Fire

hup.harvard.edu

May 26, 2022 5

thickets, as in Célimène’s mocking ob-
servations on a frequenter of her salon:
A man of mystery from top to toe,
Who moves about in a romantic
mist
On secret missions which do not
exist.
His talk is full of eyebrows and
grimaces;
How tired one gets of his momen-
tous faces;
He’s always whispering something
confidential
Which turns out to be quite
inconsequential;
Nothing’s too slight for him to
mystify;
He even whispers when he says
“good- by.”
Wilbur’s aim was “thought-for-
thought fidelity,” and, given his self-
imposed limits of lineation and rhyme
scheme, any gloss or clarification must
fit within a narrow groove, never weigh-
ing down the life of the line. He achieves
this with acrobatic grace. A similar mas-
tery can be found in his lyrics for Leon-
ard Bernstein’s Candide, with “Glitter
and Be Gay” a supreme example. One
might also bear in mind his training as
a military cryptographer and his predi-
lection for crossword puzzles. He spoke
more than once of an entire day spent
translating a couple of lines, but the re-
sults convey an air of spontaneity.
In its modes and imagery, Wilbur’s
own poetry could not be more remote
from what is found in Molière. His first
books especially bring an almost ro-
coco artifice to bear on matters of life
and death; in “The Death of a Toad,”
he opens on “A toad the power mower
caught,/Chewed and clipped of a leg”
and within a few lines has him gazing
“Toward misted and ebullient seas/And
cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s
emperies.” The elegance establishes the
poem as a separate realm of language
into which the evidence of the senses is
translated: bird voices “fountaining in
air,” fallen leaves “held in ice as dancers
in a spell.” Even while he preserves an
ordered surface, he does not deny the
deceptiveness of surfaces, as in “Mined
Country,” where French children after
the war walk cautiously through tran-
quil countryside in fear of land mines:
“Some scheme’s gone awry./Danger is
sunk in the pastures, the woods are sly.”2
Molière’s verse, as Wilbur notes, is
“almost wholly free of metaphor.” It
is free of natural imagery as well. His
plays are restricted to the human sphere
(putting aside the antique gods of Am-
phitryon and the supernatural visita-
tions of Don Juan). Neither weather
nor flora nor fauna enter into them,
nothing but human cravings and anx-
ieties staged in a generic setting, city
street or drawing room, for maximum
comic effect. Of schemes gone awry
there are many—almost their whole
concern is schemes gone awry—but as
long as the play lasts, there is no harm
done. This is not life but comic theater,
where lovers can be expected to scam-
per off happily freed from all obstacles
and clever servants to be left relishing
the success of their stratagems.
If it were not comic theater, of
course—and by the time Molière got
to Tartuffe and Don Juan and The Mis-
2
All quotes are from Richard Wilbur,
Collected Poems 1941–2004 (Harvest,
2004).
6 The New York Review
anthrope he was testing the limits—it
would end not with a last-minute rev-
elation or ingenious bit of trickery to
save the day, but in the harsh reality of
bitter old men marrying reluctant wards,
hypocrites engaged in predatory seduc-
tion and property theft in the name of
religion, honest men vengefully accused
of political disloyalty, and children sac-
rificing their own happiness to the irra-
tional demands of authoritarian parents.
When Wilbur writes of Molière’s words
“dancing within such patterns,” he pro-
vides by extension a definition of the
playwright’s singular genius for durable
comic delight in a world whose patterns
were, as the plays constantly imply, laid
down with capricious ferocity.
T he plays Wilbur translated do not
constitute the full range of Molière’s
theatrical life. Clearly he preferred the
particular challenge of verse transla-
tion, but it would have been interesting
to see what he did with The Ridicu-
lous Précieuses, The Doctor in Spite
of Himself, The Trickeries of Scapin,
George Dandin, and the great final trio
of comically unbalanced protagonists
in The Miser, The Bourgeois Gentle-
man, and The Imaginary Invalid. I
particularly regret that he did not turn
his hand to those two one-act pendants
to The School for Wives (written in
response to the controversy stirred by
that play’s alleged lewd suggestiveness,
insults to women, and mockery of the
sacredness of marriage), The Critique
of the School for Wives and The Ver-
sailles Impromptu. In the first of these
Molière put on stage a salon full of
his own fiercest critics (with himself
playing the most fatuous), and in the
second his own troupe in chaotic and
constantly interrupted rehearsal, offer-
ing a glimpse of himself as a harried
professional, beleaguered by his actors’
complaints and struggling to keep up
with the demands of his royal patron—
the patron who at the play’s end rescues
him by granting more time to rehearse.
The plainness of the dialogue might
be taken for realism, while bearing in
mind that the production was staged for
the Sun King in the first place. One pre-
sumes that Louis XIV was sufficiently
amused by Molière’s long speech to
his actors about the urgency of getting
the show in shape: “What kings like
is prompt obedience. . . . We shouldn’t
consult our own convenience in the
things they ask us to do. We are here
only to please them.”3 Molière’s ability
to keep the king amused was essential
to upholding his always precarious po-
sition as favored entertainer, at once
actor, writer, manager, and impresario.
Such a position must often have
seemed a remote prospect during the
long stretch when, after the failure of
his Parisian company L’Illustre Théâtre
in 1645 and a very brief imprisonment
for debt, he toured the provinces with
his fellow players for a dozen years. He
had walked away from the career his
family intended for him—to inherit
his father’s profession as a master up-
holsterer—and definitively chosen the
theater, evidently with the ambition
of succeeding as a tragic actor. By the
time the troupe returned to Paris in
1658, Molière had long since assumed
its leadership, absorbed a vast amount
of repertoire and technique in all
3 4
Eight Plays by Molière, translated by
Morris Bishop (Modern Library, 1957).
genres, and begun to supply the com-
pany with scripts of his own, steeped in
the influence of commedia dell’arte.
The earliest plays translated by Wil-
bur, The Bungler and Lovers’ Quar-
rels, draw directly on Italian sources.
From the outset Molière was a perpet-
ual scavenger of plots, character types,
situations, and jokes, mined in Plautus
or Terence or his Italian, Spanish, and
French predecessors and contempo-
raries. French scholars have dutifully
tracked down every appropriated scene
or line, although few have contested that
out of that mass of borrowed material
something distinctly and consistently
original was made. This was not a body
of work created in leisurely calm. The
Versailles Impromptu’s self-portrait of
an overworked showman is no exaggera-
tion, given that in addition to the steady
stream of plays supplied to Parisian
theaters in the 1660s, Molière was on
call to produce material for ever more
elaborate celebratory royal pageants.
These were full-fledged musical affairs
with ballet and song, framed by the
deployment of fireworks and immense
stage machinery, and at times cameo
appearances by king and courtiers. One
can think of the playwright as a perfec-
tionist working under extreme pressure,
taking whatever he needed from his ca-
pacious store of materials and devices to
achieve the precise effect envisioned.
Molière was insider and outsider, at
once royal favorite and someone who,
being an actor, was deemed unwor-
thy of burial in consecrated ground;
a merchant’s son mingling with nobil-
ity and sometimes taking mockery too
far. Surviving by talent alone, dodging
scandalous allegations and accusations
of impiety, he imparted to his plays the
dynamic of a balancing act in circum-
stances always fraught. If he celebrated
anything it was the triumph of intelli-
gence over pedantic obscurantism, and
clear-sighted honesty over delusion and
obsession; but the plays resist being re-
duced to any simple formulation, and
he was too wary a strategist to be easily
pinned down. When Tartuffe was re-
peatedly banned as “absolutely injurious
to religion and capable of producing very
dangerous effects,”4 he asserted vigor-
ously that it was nothing of the kind, and
then followed it in 1665 with the quickly
prohibited Don Juan, whose fascination
consists precisely in the way it provokes
opposite readings that resist resolution.
The Don is “indeed a monster,” as
Wilbur has it, a libertine foreshad-
owing the protagonists of Laclos and
Sade. Consider his declared intentions
regarding a couple he has just caught
sight of: “Never had I seen two people
so enchanted by each other, so radiantly
in love. . . . From the moment I saw
them I found their shared happiness
intolerable; . . . I began to consider how
I would mar their felicity.” Yet he totally
dominates a play in which there is no
one else to root for except, at moments,
his clownish servant Sganarelle (played
originally by Molière), whose seemingly
sincere expressions of naive goodwill
and religious faith are undermined by
his submissive complicity and trans-
parent corruption. Master and servant
seem locked together; even the exuber-
ant nihilist Don Juan needs someone to
talk to. When Sganarelle undertakes to
As reported in La Gazette, May 17,
1664.
refute the Don’s atheism—“I’d like to
ask you who made those trees, those
rocks, this earth, and the sky we see
up there, and if all those things created
themselves?”—he becomes caught up,
like one of Molière’s farcical doctors or
philosophers, in his own argumentation:
Isn’t it marvelous that I’m here, . . .
and can make my body do whatever
it likes? I can choose to clap my
hands, lift my arms, raise my eyes
to Heaven, bow my head, shift my
feet, move to the right, to the left,
forward, backward, turn around . . .
In so doing he falls to the ground, giv-
ing Don Juan the punch line: “There
lies your argument with a broken nose.”
The gag surely got a laugh, but for some
must have left an unsettling aftertaste.
To execute such a gag effectively
required a virtuosity acquired over
decades, applying the techniques of
farcical pantomime to a very different
end: a pratfall embedded in a theologi-
cal discussion. By contrast, in The Mis-
anthrope, the highest of high comedies,
Molière avoids low devices entirely
except for some patented vaudeville
involving Alceste’s dim-witted valet to
bring the curtain down on act 4. The
Misanthrope—admired but not espe-
cially successful in its day—represents
an ultimate refinement of style, going
beyond jokes and even plot to sound out
the nuances of its characters’ interrela-
tions. The stage becomes a prism where
everyone can be viewed from multiple
angles; above all Alceste, the most
sympathetic of Molière’s obsessives,
who insists on an honesty of speech
that would upend all ordinary social
relations, yet can hardly be faulted for
disdaining the fawning, complacent,
and finally treacherous aristocrats who
flutter around the irresistible but thor-
oughly unreliable Célimène. Wilbur
makes the most of the marquis Acaste’s
third-act monologue, turning it into a
patter song of inane self-regard:
I’ve wit, of course; and taste in
such perfection
That I can judge without the least
reflection,
And at the theater, which is my
delight,
Can make or break a play on
opening night,
And lead the crowd in hisses or
bravos,
And generally be known as one
who knows.
I’m clever, handsome, gracefully
polite;
My waist is small, my teeth are
strong and white.
The play’s delicacy can be gauged by
how much it hinges on Alceste’s un-
favorable critique of a sonnet, and its
force by an ending that for once refuses
to restore even a semblance of harmo-
nious resolution. After everyone’s bluff
has been called, and Célimène has fi-
nally told Alceste that she really is not
prepared to live alone with him in a
“wild, trackless, solitary place,” he sim-
ply bolts, leaving his friends with the
unlikely hope that they might somehow
change his mind.
In his introductions and interviews,
Wilbur emphasizes that the plays, being
“thoroughly written,” need not rely on
physical business to make their points
 Mark Fox
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 or get their laughs. This is certainly the
case with the verse plays he translated.
They are woven of argument, quar-
rels, pointed accusations and rebuttals,
coaxing and protests. Much crucial ac-
tion occurs offstage, like the slapstick
episode in The School for Wives of
Horace falling from a ladder as he at-
tempts to climb into the bedroom of his
beloved Agnès. In Tartuffe, we learn
only at second hand how the religious
hypocrite gained his ascendancy over
is the nonanswer answer, brought into
play when the real answer is not known,
or if given would lead to a beating.
T he casual bravura is breathtaking.
At the end of Sganarelle, as Wilbur
notes, “the four principals converge,
each speaking out of a different—or
differently weighted—misunderstand-
ing of the situation,” all this interwo-
ven with as much musical deftness as a

THE WALL
BY MARLEN HAUSHOFER
TRANSLATED BY SHAUN WHITESIDE
AFTERWORD BY CLAIRE LOUISE-BENNETT
“The Wall is a wonderful novel. It is as
absorbing as Robinson Crusoe.”
—Doris Lessing
the affluent bourgeois Orgon; by the
time Tartuffe finally appears onstage
(in the third act) we’ve been given,
from various sides, an almost novel-
istic sense of what he has wrought in
this particular family. Later, when Tar-
tuffe attempts to seduce Orgon’s wife,
Elmire, the dramatic effect lies not in
his frustrated gropings, however much
they lend themselves to sight gags, but
in her calling him out in words as he
does so, and he in turn unloading a se-
ries of outrageously specious justifica-
tions for his predatory moves.
In the one-act farce Sganarelle, or
The Imaginary Cuckold, Wilbur notes,
“much of what might have been ex-
pressed by physical violence . . . is real-
Mozart quartet, but a lot more noisily.
In The School for Husbands, Isabelle,
engaged against her will to her de-
tested guardian Sganarelle, must reject
her preferred suitor Valère while her
guardian watches. She manages this by
delivering a long speech perfectly con-
trived to mean one thing to Sganarelle
and the opposite to Valère.
Balzac, who alluded to Molière more
than to any other writer, admired his
ability to present both sides of a given
situation.6 The audience is invited to
laugh at the gulling of the self-beguiled,
yet the plays strike a tenuous balance be-
tween derision and sympathy. Arnolphe
in The School for Wives is a middle-aged
bachelor so consumed with the fear of

ALINDARKA’S
ized instead on the verbal plane.” Yet being cuckolded that he adopted a four-
the Punch-and-Judy threat of physical year-old girl to be his future wife, raising

CHILDREN
violence is always latent. In Molière’s
vocabulary one word recurs frequently
at crucial junctures: batôn. To beat
BY ALHIERD BACHAREVIČ someone with a stick, or threaten to do
so, is the last resort after verbal persua-
TRANSLATED BY JIM DINGLEY & PETRA REID sion has failed: this world is thoroughly
accustomed to husbands beating wives,
fathers beating children, masters beat-
“A dark fantasy by one of Belarus’s most ing servants. In Amphitryon a god
original contemporary writers.” —Jaroslaw beats a mortal, and in Tartuffe a female
Anders, New York Review of Books servant even threatens a bailiff serv-
ing a legal writ: “Monsieur Loyal, I’d
love to hear the whack/Of a stout stick
across your fine broad back.”
Language has its limits, and Molière
tests how far it is possible for his char-
her in total ignorance—“I told the nuns
what means must be employed /To keep
her growing mind a perfect void”—on
the theory that a clever wife is “unbeat-
able at plots and strategies.”
From the start it is clear his plan
will come to nothing, as the innocent
Agnès displays a natural gift for plots
and strategies to unite her with young
Horace; Arnolphe, even when apprised
of Horace’s desires, is so blissfully con-
fident of controlling the situation that
he deigns to feel pity for the young
man doomed to disappointment in
love. While Arnolphe thinks he has
the upper hand, the spectators know

CHINATOWN
BY THUʜN
TRANSLATED BY NGUYʴN AN LÝ
“Chinatown is a fever dream, a
hallucination, a loop in time and life. I
was completely immersed in this spell-
binding novel.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen
acters to go before transgressing them.
We are given speech as combat, se-
duction, sales pitch, con job, menacing
aggression, calculated outburst; a vir-
tual taxonomy of the uses and misuses
of language. Specialized jargons are
brought into play, of law enforcement,
real estate, religious precept, philo-
sophical speculation, formal etiquette,
and literary pretension. The literary
vanity of the strenuously ungifted, male
or female, coupled invariably with the
snobbery of the fierce social climber,
was a frequent target. It is a repertoire
of routines, deployed in successive
episodes that are (in the playwright
Jacques Audiberti’s phrase) “traps for
characters.”5 Some fall into the trap;
others wangle a way out; others, having
he does not: a double cruelty, with both
audience and lovers in league against
him. The domineering ogre thus be-
comes a victim and unavoidably an ob-
ject of some sympathy, especially when
he realizes that he has truly fallen in
love with Agnès and tries fumblingly to
woo her in a romantic rather than dom-
ineering spirit. Not being of the servant
class, Arnolphe will not be beaten with
a stick, but he will undergo the excruci-
ating alternative of public ridicule.
Many of the plays describe conspir-
acies to thwart the overreaching au-
thority of the seriously deluded and
unbalanced, conspiracies in which those
with nothing to lose—desperate lovers,
oppressed wives and daughters—often
rely on the assistance of cunning ser-

BLOOM
set one trap, go about setting another.
(“Long live chicanery and artifice!”
declares Mascarille in The Bungler.)
BY XI CHUAN Characters regularly misunderstand,
or mishear, or do not hear at all. “Think-
TRANSLATED BY LUCAS KLEIN ing himself alone” (a favorite stage di-
rection), a dupe will reveal his thoughts
“Xi Chuan’s surprising poems reach into in monologue to a nearby eavesdropper
or, fooled by appearances, will enthu-
tight corners of mind and matter, imper- siastically help to bring about the out-
sonal but intimate, new to be heard but come he least desires. A self-absorbed
also oddly familiar.” person will mistake terse noncommit-
—Gary Snyder tal interjection for heartfelt agreement.
A coward will stoutly resolve to face up
to a confrontation before predictably
caving in. Two people will endlessly
delay coming to the point by means of
exaggerated politeness. And then there
vants with a talent for deception. Since
the authority of parents cannot be legit-
imately defied, it must be evaded and
subverted by every form of subterfuge.
After all the concealment, imperson-
ation, and sleight of hand comes the
scandal of truth-telling. This moment
may arrive through perfunctory means:
an improbable revelation of hidden par-
entage, or a last- ditch bit of mischief in-
volving veils or forged documents. All
that matters is that, at last, deference and
circumlocution are sidelined, the truth
cannot be denied, and as a result mono-
maniac guardians lose their power and
hapless dupes have their eyes opened.
What has been going on all along is out
in the open and the comedy is done. Q

5 6
Molière, Dramaturge (Paris: L’Arche, Graham Robb, Balzac: A Biography
1954). (Norton, 1995), p. 375.

8 The New York Review


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Bob Dylan, Oral Cultures,
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9
 Our Hypocrisy on War Crimes
There is the war, and then there is the
war about the war. Vladimir Putin’s
assault on Ukraine is being fought in
fields and cities, in the air and at sea.
It is also, however, being contested
through language. Is it a war or a “spe-
cial military operation”? Is it an un-
provoked invasion or a human rights
intervention to prevent the genocide of
Russian speakers by Ukrainian Nazis?
Putin’s great weakness in this linguis-
tic struggle is the unsubtle absurdity of
his claims—if he wanted his lies to be
believed, he should have established
some baseline of credibility. But the
weakness of the West, and especially
of the United States, lies in what ought
to be the biggest strength of its case
against Putin: the idea of war crimes.
It is this concept that gives legal and
moral shape to instinctive revulsion.
For the sake both of basic justice and of
mobilizing world opinion, it has to be
sustained with absolute moral clarity.
The appalling evidence of extraju-
dicial executions, torture, and indis-
criminate shelling of homes, apartment
buildings, hospitals, and shelters that
has emerged from the Kyiv suburb
of Bucha and from the outskirts of
Chernihiv, Kharkiv, and Sumy gives
weight and urgency to the accusation
that Putin is a war criminal.* By late
April, the UN human rights office had
received reports of more than three
hundred executions of civilians. There
have also been credible reports of sex-
ual violence by Russian troops and of
abductions and deportations of civil-
ians. According to Iryna Venediktova,
Ukraine’s prosecutor general, by April
21 Russia had committed more than
7,600 recorded war crimes.
Yet the US has been, for far too long,
fatally ambivalent about war crimes.
Its own history of moral evasiveness
threatens to make the accusation that
Putin and his forces have committed
them systematically in Ukraine seem
more like a useful weapon against an
enemy than an assertion of universal
principle. It also undermines the very
institution that might eventually bring
Putin and his subordinates to justice:
the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There have long been two ways of
thinking about the prosecution of war
crimes. One is that it is a universal duty.
Since human beings have equal rights,
violations of those rights must be pros-
ecuted regardless of the nationality or
political persuasion of the perpetra-
tors. The other is that the right to iden-
tify individuals as war criminals and
punish them for their deeds is really
just one of the spoils of victory. It is
the winner’s prerogative—a political
choice rather than a moral imperative.
Even during World War II, and in
the midst of a learned discussion about
what to do with the Nazi leadership
after the war, the American Society of
International Law heard from Charles
Warren, a former US assistant attorney
general and a Pulitzer Prize–winning
historian of the Supreme Court, that
“the right to punish [war criminals] is
not a right conferred upon victorious
*For more on the atrocities in Ukraine,
see Tim Judah’s “The Russian Terror”
in this issue.
10
Fintan O’Toole
Town council leader and lawyer Khalid Salman by the graves of his sister and her children,
who were among the twenty-four Iraqi civilians killed by US Marines in the
2005 Haditha massacre, Haditha, Iraq, 2011
belligerents by international law, but it
flows from the fact of victory.” Warren
quoted with approval another eminent
American authority, James Wilford
Garner, who had written that “it is
simply a question of policy and expedi-
ency, to be exercised by the victorious
belligerent or not.” “In other words,”
Warren added, “the question is purely
political and military; it should not be
treated as a judicial one or as arising
from international law.” As the Polish
lawyer Manfred Lachs, whose Jew-
ish family had been murdered by the
Nazis, wrote in 1945, this idea that the
prosecution of war crimes is “a matter
of political expediency” would make
international law “the servant of poli-
tics” and “a flexible instrument in the
hands of politicians.”
It is hard to overstate how import-
ant it is that the war crimes that have
undoubtedly been committed already
in Ukraine—and the ones that are
grimly certain to be inflicted on inno-
cent people in the coming weeks and
months—not be understood as “a flex-
ible instrument in the hands of politi-
cians.” They must not be either shaped
around or held hostage by “policy and
expediency.” This is a question of jus-
tice. Those who have been murdered,
tortured, and raped matter as individ-
uals, not as mere exemplars of Putin’s
barbarity. The desire to prosecute their
killers and abusers stems from the im-
perative to honor that individuality, to
restore insofar as is possible the dignity
that was stolen by violence.
But it is also, as it happens, a ques-
tion of effectiveness. If accusations of
Russian war crimes are seen to be in-
strumental rather than principled, they
will dissolve into “whataboutism”: Yes,
Putin is terrible, but what about . . . In-
stead of seeing a clean distinction be-
tween the Western democracies and
Andrea Bruce/ NOOR /Redux
Russia, much of the world will take
refuge in a comfortable relativism. If
war crimes are not universal violations,
they are merely fingers that can point
only in one direction—at whomever we
happen to be in conflict with right now.
And never, of course, at ourselves.
E ven before Putin launched his inva-
sion on February 24, the Biden admin-
istration seems to have had a plan to
use Russian atrocities as a rallying cry
for the democratic world. That day, The
New York Times reported that “admin-
istration officials are considering how to
continue the information war with Rus-
sia, highlight potential war crimes and
push back on Moscow’s propaganda.”
This was not necessarily cynical—
Putin’s appalling record of violence
against civilians in Chechnya and Syria
and plain contempt for international
law made it all too likely that his forces
would commit such crimes in Ukraine.
But this anticipation of atrocities, and
deliberation about how to make use of
them, underlines the administration’s
perception of the accusation of war
crimes as a promising front in the ideo-
logical counterattack against Putin. As
early as March 10, well before the un-
covering of the atrocities at Bucha, the
US ambassador to the United Nations,
Linda Thomas-Greenfield, told the
BBC that Russian actions in Ukraine
“constitute war crimes; there are at-
tacks on civilians that cannot be justi-
fied . . . in any way whatsoever.”
A week later, and still a fortnight be-
fore the first reports from Bucha, Biden
was calling Putin, in unscripted re-
marks, a “war criminal.” At that point,
he in fact seemed a little unsure about
the wisdom of making the charge—ini-
tially, when asked if he would use the
term, he replied “no,” before asking
reporters to repeat the question and
then replying in the affirmative. Sig-
nificantly, Biden was responding not
to ground-level assaults by Russian
troops on civilians but to the shelling of
Ukrainian cities. This may perhaps ex-
plain his hesitancy: civilian casualties
from aerial assaults by drones, rockets,
and bombs are a sore subject in recent
US military history.
Having crossed the line and made
this charge directly, Biden had little
choice but to raise the stakes when the
terrible images from Bucha were circu-
lated. First, on April 4 he went beyond
deeming Putin a criminal by calling
specifically for him to face a “war crime
trial.” Then on April 12 he pressed the
nuclear button of atrocity accusations:
genocide. “We’ll let the lawyers decide,
internationally, whether or not it quali-
fies [as genocide], but it sure seems that
way to me.” He also referred to an un-
folding “genocide half a world away,”
clearly meaning in Ukraine.
Biden did so even though his national
security adviser, Jake Sullivan, had told
a press briefing on April 4:
Based on what we have seen so far,
we have seen atrocities, we have
seen war crimes. We have not yet
seen a level of systematic depriva-
tion of life of the Ukrainian people
to rise to the level of genocide.
Sullivan stressed that the determina-
tion that genocide had been committed
required a long process of evidence-
gathering. He cited the recently an-
nounced ruling by the State Department
that assaults on the Rohingyas by the
military in Myanmar/Burma consti-
tuted genocide. That conclusion was
reached in March 2022; the atrocities
were committed in 2016 and 2017. The
State Department emphasized in its an-
nouncement that it followed “a rigorous
factual and legal analysis.”
It is obvious that no such analysis
preceded Biden’s decision to accuse
Putin of genocide. When asked about
genocide on April 22, a spokesper-
son for the UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights said, “No, we have
not documented patterns that could
amount to that.” Biden’s careless use of
the term is all the more damaging be-
cause, however inadvertently, it echoes
Putin’s grotesque claim that Ukraine
has been committing genocide against
Russian speakers in Donbas.
The problem with all of this is not
that Biden is wrong but that it distracts
from the ways in which he is right. This
overstatement makes it far too easy for
those who wish to ignore or justify what
the Russians are doing to dismiss the
mounting evidence of terrible crimes
in Ukraine as exaggerated or as just an-
other battleground in the information
war. In appearing overanxious to inject
“war criminal” into the international
discourse about Putin and making it
seem like a predetermined narrative, the
US risked undermining the very stark
evidence for that conclusion. By inflat-
ing that charge into genocide, it substi-
tuted rhetoric for rigor and effectively
made it impossible for the US to endorse
any negotiated settlement for Ukraine
that leaves Putin in power: How can
The New York Review
 RICHARD PRINCE
Hoods

Gagosian New York

May 26, 2022 11

you make peace with a perpetrator
of genocide? Paradoxically, it also
risked the minimization of the actual
atrocities: If they do not rise to the level
of the ultimate evil, are they “merely”
war crimes?
What makes these mistakes by Biden
truly detrimental, however, is that the
moral standing of the US on war crimes
is already so profoundly compromised.
The test for anyone insisting on the
application of a set of rules is whether
they apply those rules to themselves. It
matters deeply to the struggle against
Putin that the US face its record of hav-
ing consistently failed to do this.
On November 19, 2005, in the Iraqi
town of Haditha, members of the First
Division of the US Marines massacred
twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including
women, children, and elderly people.
After a roadside bomb killed one US
soldier and badly injured two others,
marines took five men from a taxi and
executed them in the street. One marine
sergeant, Sanick Dela Cruz, later testi-
fied that he urinated on one of the bod-
ies. The marines then entered nearby
houses and killed the occupants—nine
men, three women, and seven children.
Most of the victims were murdered by
well-aimed shots fired at close range.
The official US press release then
falsely claimed that fifteen of the ci-
vilians had been killed by the roadside
bomb and that the marines and their
Iraqi allies had also shot eight “in-
surgents” who opened fire on them.
These claims were shown to be lies
four months later, when Tim McGirk
published an investigation in Time
magazine. When McGirk initially put
the evidence—both video and eyewit-
ness testimony—to the marines, he
was told, “Well, we think this is all al-
Qaeda propaganda.”
This was consistent with what seems
to have been a coordinated cover-up.
No one in the marines’ chain of com-
mand subsequently testified that there
was any reason to suspect that a war
crime had occurred. Lieutenant Col-
onel Jeffrey Chessani, the battalion
commander, was later charged with
dereliction of duty for failing to prop-
erly report and investigate the inci-
dent. Those charges were dismissed.
Charges against six other marines were
dropped, and a seventh was acquitted.
Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich, who led
the squad that perpetrated the killings,
was demoted in rank to private and lost
pay, but served no time in prison.
In his memoir Call Sign Chaos (2019)
the former general James Mattis, who
took over as commander of the First Ma-
rine Division shortly after this massacre
and later served as Donald Trump’s sec-
retary of defense, calls what happened
at Haditha a “tragic incident.” It’s clear
that Mattis believed that at least some of
the marines had run amok:
In the chaos, they developed
mental tunnel vision, and some
were unable to distinguish gen-
uine threats amid the chaos of
the fight. . . . In the moments they
had to react, several Marines had
failed, or had tried but were un-
able, to distinguish who was a
threat and who was an innocent.
I concluded that several had made
tragic mistakes, but others had lost
their discipline. . . . The lack of dis-
cipline extended to higher ranks.
12
Specifically, it was a gross over-
sight not to notice and critically
examine a tragic event so far out of
the norm. I recommended letters
of censure for the division com-
mander—a major general—and
two senior colonels.
Mattis nowhere uses phrases or words
like “war crime,” “massacre,” “atroc-
ity,” or “cover-up.” He was determined,
too, to exonerate the lower-ranking sol-
diers who participated in the violence
at Haditha that day. “You did your
best,” he reassured them, “to live up to
the standards followed by US fighting
men throughout our many wars.”
How does the “tragic incident” at
Haditha differ from the murders of ci-
vilians by Russian forces in Ukraine?
There are some important distinctions.
American army staffers organizing stacks of German documents to be used as evidence in
prosecuting war crimes at the Nuremberg Trial, Nuremberg, Germany, 1945–1946
Unlike in Russia now, the US had media
organizations sufficiently free and in-
dependent to be able to challenge the
military’s account of what happened. It
had elected politicians who were will-
ing to condemn the atrocity—in 2006,
for example, Joe Biden suggested that
then defense secretary Donald Rums-
feld should resign because of Haditha.
Senior military commanders, including
Mattis, were obviously repelled by the
atrocity. Putin ostentatiously decorated
the Sixty-Fourth Separate Motorized
Rifle Brigade for its “mass heroism
and courage” after that unit had been
accused by Ukraine of committing war
crimes in Bucha. There was no such of-
ficial endorsement of the First Marine
Division. These differences matter—
false equivalence must be avoided.
Yet uncomfortable truths remain.
One of the most prestigious arms of the
US military carried out an atrocity in a
country invaded by the US in a war of
choice. No one in a position of author-
ity did anything about it until Time re-
ported on it. No one at any level of the
chain of command, from senior leaders
down to the soldiers who did the kill-
ings, was held accountable. And such
minor punishments as were imposed
seem to have had no deterrent effect.
In March 2007 marines killed nineteen
unarmed civilians and wounded fifty
near Jalalabad, in Afghanistan, in an
incident that, as The New York Times
reported at the time, “bore some strik-
ing similarities to the Haditha killings.”
Again, none of the marines involved or
their commanders received any serious cepted its jurisdiction. That leaves two
punishment. countries that ended up in precisely the
Perhaps most importantly, nothing same contradictory position: Russia
that happened in these or other atroc- and the US. Both signed the Rome stat-
ities in Iraq or Afghanistan changed ute—Russia in September 2000, the
the way that deliberate acts of vio- US three months later. And both then
lence against foreign civilians are pre- failed to ratify it. Putin, presumably
sented in official American discourse. because of international condemnation
The enemy commits war crimes and of war crimes being committed under
lies about them. We have “tragic inci- his leadership in Chechnya, declined
dents,” “tragic mistakes,” and, at the to submit it to the Duma in Moscow.
very worst, a loss of discipline. When George W. Bush effectively withdrew
bad things are done by American from the ICC in May 2002, follow-
armed forces, they are entirely untyp- ing the US-led invasion of Afghani-
ical and momentary responses to the stan and his declaration that “our war
terrible stresses of war. The condition- against terror is only beginning.”
ing that helps make them possible, the The US then began what Yves
deep-seated instinct to cover them up, Beigbeder, an international lawyer
and the repeated failure to bring per- who had served at the Nuremberg Trial
petrators to justice are not to be under- in 1946, called “a virulent, worldwide
stood as systemic problems. Nowhere is campaign aimed at destroying the le-
gitimacy of the Court, on the grounds
Charles Alexander/US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C./ NARA
of protecting US sovereignty and US
nationals.” Against the backdrop of the
“war on terror,” Congress approved
the American Service-Members’ Pro-
tection Act (ASPA) of 2002, designed
to insulate US military personnel (in-
cluding private contractors) from ICC
jurisdiction. The ASPA placed numer-
ous restrictions on US interaction with
the ICC, including the prohibition of
military assistance to countries coop-
erating with the court. Also in 2002,
the US sought (unsuccessfully) a UN
Security Council resolution to perma-
nently insulate all US troops and of-
ficials involved in UN missions from
ICC jurisdiction. In late 2004 Congress
approved the Nethercutt Amendment,
prohibiting assistance funds, with lim-
ited exceptions, to any country that is a
party to the Rome statute.
These attacks on the ICC culmi-
nated on September 2, 2020, when the
Trump administration imposed sweep-
ing sanctions on Fatou Bensouda, a
former minister of justice in Gambia,
who was then the ICC’s chief prosecu-
American exceptionalism more evident tor, and Phakiso Mochochoko, a lawyer
or more troubling than in this compart- and diplomat from Lesotho, who heads
mentalizing of military atrocities. a division of the court. The US acted
under an executive order that declared
their activities a “national emergency.”
T he only way to end this kind of The emergency was “the ICC’s efforts
double standard is to have a single, to investigate US personnel.” Trump’s
supranational criminal court to bring secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, de-
to justice those who violate the laws nounced the ICC as “a thoroughly bro-
of war—whoever they are and what- ken and corrupted institution.”
ever their alleged motives. This idea A year ago, the Biden administration
has been around since 1872, when it lifted these sanctions against Bensouda
was proposed by Gustave Moynier, and Mochochoko, saying they were “in-
one of the founders of the Interna- appropriate and ineffective.” But the
tional Committee of the Red Cross. US did not soften its underlying stance,
It seemed finally to be taking shape in which is that, as Biden’s secretary of
the aftermath of World War II and the state, Antony Blinken, put it,
Holocaust, when a statute for an inter-
national criminal court was drafted by we continue to disagree strongly
a committee of the General Assembly with the ICC’s actions relating to
of the UN. This effort was, however, the Afghanistan and Palestinian
stymied by the USSR and its allies. In situations. We maintain our long-
the 1990s the combination of the end standing objection to the Court’s
of the cold war and the hideous atroc- efforts to assert jurisdiction over
ities committed during the breakup of personnel of non-States Parties
Yugoslavia and in Rwanda gave the such as the United States and Israel.
proposal a renewed impetus. This led
to the conference in Rome in June and In principle, this hostility to the ICC
July 1998, attended by 160 states and is rooted in the objection that the court
dozens of nongovernmental organiza- is engaged in an intolerable effort to
tions, that finally adopted the charter bind the US to a treaty it has not rat-
for the ICC . This statute entered into ified—in effect, to subject the US to
force in July 2002, and the ICC began laws to which it has not consented. If
to function the following year. this were true, it would indeed be an
Of the five permanent members of unacceptable and arbitrary state of
the UN Security Council, one (China) affairs. But this alleged concern is
opposed the adoption of the ICC’s groundless. The ICC does not claim
statute. Two (the United Kingdom any jurisdiction over states—it seeks to
and France) supported it and fully ac- prosecute individuals.
The New York Review
 This distinction was vital to the
Nuremberg Tribunal, which stressed
that “crimes against international law
are committed by men, not by abstract
entities, and only by punishing individ-
uals who commit such crimes can the
provisions of international law be en-
forced.” Moreover, the US is already
a party to the treaties that define the
crimes the ICC is empowered to pros-
ecute. The ICC follows the precedents
and practices of international crimi-
nal tribunals that the US enthusiasti-
cally supported and participated in:
the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials after
World War II, and the courts estab-
lished in the 1990s to prosecute those
responsible for atrocities in Yugoslavia
and Rwanda. If the ICC is illegitimate,
so were those courts.
people. This means that if there is to be
any prospect of bringing Putin and his
accomplices to justice for murder, rape,
and torture, it must lie with the ICC. The
“war crime trial” that Biden called for
on April 4, if it were ever to be possible,
could be conducted only at The Hague.
The Biden administration knows this
very well. On April 11 Charlie Savage
reported in The New York Times that
officials are “vigorously debating how
much the United States can or should
assist an investigation into Russian
atrocities in Ukraine by the Interna-
tional Criminal Court.” But the admin-
istration is simultaneously spreading a
fog of vagueness over this very ques-
tion. In his April 4 press briefing Jake
Sullivan, the national security adviser,
said, “Obviously, the ICC is one venue
where war crimes have been tried in
the past, but there have been other
examples in other conflicts of other
mechanisms being set up.” He prom-
ised that “the appropriate venue for
accountability” would be decided “in
consultation with allies and with part-
ners around the world.” Yet all of those
significant allies are members of the
ICC , and the most important of them,
Ukraine, has specifically given the
court the job of trying to bring the per-
petrators to justice.
Why continue to avoid this obvious
truth? A yawning gap has opened be-
tween Biden’s grandiloquent rhetoric
about Putin’s criminality on the one
side and the deep reluctance of the US
to lend its weight to the institution cre-
ated by the international community to
prosecute such transgressions of moral
and legal order. It is a chasm in which
all kinds of relativism and equivocation
can lodge and grow. The longer the US
practices evasion and prevarication, the
easier it is for Putin to dismiss Western
outrage as theatrical and hypocritical,
and the more inclined other countries
will be to cynicism.
It has been said repeatedly since Feb-
ruary 24 that if the democracies are to
defeat Putin, they must be prepared to
sacrifice some of their comforts. Ger-
many, for example, has to give up Rus-
sian natural gas. What the US must give
up is the comfort of its exceptionalism
on the question of war crimes. It can-
not differentiate itself sufficiently from
Putin’s tyranny until it accepts without
reservation that the standards it applies
to him also apply to itself. The way to
do that is to join the ICC . Q
—April 28, 2022

T he brutal truth is that the US aban-

doned its commitment to the ICC not
for reasons of legal principle but from
the same motive that animated Putin. It
was engaged in aggressive wars and did
not want to risk the possibility that any
of its military or political leaders would
be prosecuted for crimes that might
be committed in the course of fight-
ing them. That expediency rather than
principle was guiding US attitudes be-
came completely clear in 2005. The US
decided not to block a Security Coun-
cil resolution referring atrocities in the
Darfur region of Sudan to the ICC pros-
ecutor. (It abstained on the motion.) It
subsequently supported the prosecution The Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers bids fond farewell to the
at the ICC of Sudanese president Omar
al-Bashir and the use by the Special Class of 2021–2022
Court of Sierra Leone of the ICC facil-
ities in The Hague to try former Libe- Rich Benjamin Jonas Hassen Khemiri
rian president Charles Taylor for crimes
committed in Sierra Leone. David Wright Faladé Maaza Mengiste
This American support was welcome, Julia Foulkes Nara Milanich
but it has been almost as damaging to
the ICC as the outright hostility of the Kaiama L. Glover Michael Prior
US had been. It suggested that in the David Greenberg Josephine M. Rowe
eyes of the US, the only real war crimes
were those committed by Africans. Lewis Hyde Avi Steinberg
To date, the thirty or so cases taken Karl Jacoby Madeleine Thien
before the ICC all involve individuals
from Central African Republic, Côte Matthew Karp
d’Ivoire, Sudan, Democratic Republic
of the Congo, Kenya, Libya, Mali, or ͽ
Uganda. This selectivity led the African
Union to label the ICC a “neo-colonial …and welcomes with pleasure the
court” and urged its members to with-
draw their cooperation from its prose- Class of 2022–2023
cutions. However false the charge, it is
easy to see how credible it might seem Rozina Ali Patrick Phillips
when the US has alternately endorsed
the legitimacy of the ICC in prosecuting Daphne A. Brooks Daniel Saldaña París
Africans and called the same court cor- Colin Channer Maurice Samuels
rupt and out of control when it explores
the possibility of investigating war Raghu Karnad Brandon Taylor
crimes committed by Americans. Margaret Kelleher Erin L. Thompson
After the Russian invasion of
Ukraine, more than forty member Claire Luchette Francesca Wade
states of the ICC, most of them Euro- Neil Maher C Pam Zhang
pean but also including Japan, Chile,
Colombia, and Costa Rica, formally Sarah Maza
asked the court “to investigate any acts
of war crimes, crimes against humanity
and genocide alleged to have occurred
on the territory of Ukraine from 21 No- The Cullman Center is made possible by a generous endowment from Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in
vember 2013 onwards.” The ICC pros- honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by Mrs. John L. Weinberg, The Andrew W.
ecutor Karim Khan has begun to do Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, The von der Heyden Family Foundation, John and
this. Crucially, though Ukraine is not
itself a party to the ICC, it had already Constance Birkelund, and The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, and with additional gifts from Helen
accepted the court’s jurisdiction in re- and Roger Alcaly, The Rona Jaffe Foundation, The Arts and Letters Foundation Inc., William W. Karatz,
lation to war crimes on its territory, Merilee and Roy Bostock, and Cullman Center Fellows.
first in 2014 and again in 2015, the sec-
ond time “for an indefinite duration.”
It is Ukraine’s choice that the ICC
be the body that investigates and pros-
ecutes Russian atrocities against its

May 26, 2022 13


The Employees:
A Workplace Novel
of the 22nd Century
by Olga Ravn, translated
from the Danish by Martin Aitken.
New Directions, 125 pp., $19.95
The first fictional spacecraft were
thrilling, vehicles for exploration and
discovery, but it wasn’t long before
writers realized that spaceships would
also be workplaces like their water-
borne counterparts, with tight quarters
where repetitive tasks and interper-
sonal friction are occasionally inter-
rupted by interludes of existential peril.
The most familiar pop- cultural depic-
tion of this, Ridley Scott’s 1979 film
Alien, opens with the groggy crew of
Nostromo, a star freighter and ore re-
finery en route to Earth, coming out of
stasis to scratch, stretch, make coffee,
and bicker about money—until, that is,
they are terrorized and picked off by a
hideous unknown creature.
Gnomic and elliptical where most
science fiction is expository, Olga
Ravn’s The Employees follows a not
dissimilar pattern. It is the first book
by the Danish poet, novelist, and liter-
ary critic to be translated into English
and was shortlisted for the Interna-
tional Booker Prize in 2021. Presented
as a collection of records, primarily
the transcripts of statements made by
the crew of the Six Thousand Ship to a
committee of unspecified composition,
it documents the breakdown of the
ship’s mission after the vessel arrives
at a planet called New Discovery and
the crew brings aboard a selection of
objects found there.
But the objects—which are referred
to only as “the objects,” the most re-
ductive and nondescriptive term for
pretty much anything—aren’t mon-
sters and don’t chase the crew members
around. None of the speakers offer a
full description of these things (or crea-
tures?), but Ravn has said they were in-
spired by the sculptures of the Danish
artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund, with
whom she has collaborated. From the
fragments of information offered, they
appear to resemble living stones. (Hes-
telund’s marble sculptures look like
fleshy blobs.) They come in varying col-
ors, patterns, and textures. They hum,
and they change temperature. One
secretes a resinlike substance when
exposed to sunlight. Another inter-
mittently produces what appear to be
eggs. Above all, they emit fragrances
that most (but not all) of the crew find
soothing. Some crew members like to
sleep with their faces covered by cloths
saturated in the resin.
At the outset, the committee ex-
plains that it has collected statements
from the employees “with a view to
gaining insight into how they related to
the objects and the rooms in which they
were placed.” The ultimate purpose of
this is “to assess to what degree” the
objects
might be said to precipitate reduc-
tion or enhancement of perfor-
mance, task-related understanding,
and the acquisition of new knowl-
edge and skills, thereby illuminat-
ing their specific consequences for
production.
14
Under Their Skin
Laura Miller
Olga Ravn; illustration by Olivier Schrauwen
Since research is the motive for most
fictional and real-life space travel, the
assumption that the mission of the Six
Thousand Ship is to gather information
about the objects comes easily, almost
unconsciously, into the reader’s mind.
But it is not so. The crew members de-
scribe the rooms where the objects are
kept as “recreation rooms,” not cargo
holds or labs.
What the employees on the ship have
been hired to produce remains a mys-
tery. Unlike the objects, which they
struggle to describe, the nature of their
work is taken for granted by interview
subjects and interlocutors alike. They
may talk about production and tasks
and workflows, but only three mem-
bers of the support staff—a laundress,
a cleaner, and a funeral director—dis-
cuss in any detail what they’ve been
hired to do by the firm known only as
“the organization.”
T he fragmented, disorienting narra-
tive of The Employees arises from ev-
erything the characters know that the
reader does not. The transcripts are
uniquely numbered, and the speaker of
each is unidentified, although at times
the speaker in a previous transcript
(the funeral director, the captain) is ev-
idently interviewed again. Some state-
ments are multiple pages long, some
as brief as a sentence or two. Certain
events, particularly the “transfer” of
“the third officer” and “Cadet 04,”
bother several of the speakers and in-
deed have unsettled the whole crew,
but the reason for the transfers—or
how exactly someone can be trans-
ferred from a ship so far out in space
that many of the crew expect to die on it
before it returns to “Homebase”—also
goes unexplained. What the reader can
quickly ascertain is that only some of
the crew will die, because only some
of them were born in the first place.
The rest are “made,” humanoids rather
than humans, and this difference will
eventually determine the fate of the
ship.
At first, however, the great contrast
is between the language and expecta-
tions of the organization and the pre-
occupations of the crew members who
have fallen under the influence of the
objects. Early on, a humanoid em-
ployee expresses bafflement when his
human coworker remarks that there’s
more to a person than the work they
do. “But what else could a person be?”
he asks the committee. “Who would
keep you company? How would you
get by without work and without your
coworkers? Would you be left standing
in a cupboard?” The first three ques-
tions might have come from any worka-
holic American, but the last betrays the
speaker as an appliance.
Purpose-built, the humanoids know
nothing but work and needn’t worry
about wasting their lives on it when
their memories can be downloaded
into a new body once their current one
wears out or is destroyed. Nevertheless,
strange thoughts and desires creep into
the humanoids’ statements. One gets
caught up in a spiral of neurotic wor-
ries that he might unwittingly act in a
way that would at a later point contra-
vene the interests of “the program,”
the organization’s overarching mission
(whatever that is!). “If I carry out an
action,” he tells the committee,
that unbeknown to me is counter-
active to the program’s momen-
tum, I can do nothing but hate
myself for it. But since I have no
way of knowing whether an ac-
tion in any given instance is anti-
programmatic, how am I to know
if I’m to hate myself or not?
Perhaps, he muses, he should just pre-
emptively hate himself. “Why do I
have all these thoughts if the job I’m
doing is mainly technical?” he asks.
“Why do I have these thoughts if the
reason I’m here is primarily to increase
production?”
Meanwhile, the humans brood over
their memories of Earth. This problem
has been anticipated by the organiza-
tion; one of the crew says he was hired
“to make sure the human section of the
crew don’t buckle under to nostalgia
and become catatonic.” Holograms of
children have been supplied as consola-
tion to those whose own children have
died, and some have become almost
addicted to them. Others seem to have
left living children behind, but offer no
explanation for why they have chosen
to do so.
The presence of the objects increases
the humans’ pining for Earth. All of
them miss the weather, descriptions of
which haunt their statements: the pink
mists of morning, rain on the beach,
blue light pouring over trees, “the
smell of the soil, and warm asphalt,
the sounds of animals and birds.” The
sterile physical environment of the ship
matches the corporate language of the
committee and the organization, a lan-
guage that constructs the crew’s con-
ceptual environment. They inhabit an
idea of life that consists only of work.
Even the most fundamental bodily
functions must be disciplined. “I find it
hard to sleep, which I hope you’ll for-
give me,” one statement reads. “I real-
ize sleep is our own responsibility here
on the ship, and I am actually trying to
do something about it.”
Into this artificial kingdom seeps the
organic. At the end of the book, the
corporate jargon framing the state-
ments dilates, unfolding itself into
prefabricated clauses stripped of speci-
ficity and emotion:
In the case that this idea of uti-
lizing the present record for edu-
cational purposes is pursued, the
collection of empirical material
may fruitfully be continued, inso-
far as the afterreactions of readers
may be taken to provide a basis for
deeper understanding of the influ-
ences exerted by the objects.
So reads the committee’s conclusion.
By contrast, in their statements, the
crew members increasingly describe
intense dreams of being pursued by or
encased in plants, of trees with leaves
“that turn and spin like mirrors in the
summer air.” The language they use to
describe their dreams and memories is
compressed and vivid, the language of
a poet in Martin Aitken’s crystalline
English translation. When their state-
ments escalate into strings of clauses,
the result is not numbing but incan-
tatory, an ecstasy of remembrance,
mourning, and hope:
And what would it mean to know
that these two rooms contained
every space we ever occupied,
every morning (November on
Earth, five degrees Celsius, sun
dazzling low in the morning sky,
the child in the carrier seat on
the back of the bicycle), every day
The New York Review
 Great Performances:
Anything Goes
May 13 9/8c
Enjoy Cole Porter’s classic musical
led by Tony winner Sutton Foster
directed by Kathleen Marshall

Great Performances: Merry Wives Great Performances: Keeping Company

May 20 9/8c with Sondheim — May 27 9/8c
Experience Shakespeare’s comedy from the An inside look at the re-imagined
Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park. production as it returns to Broadway.

pbs.org/broadwayonpbs

May 26, 2022 15

 (the ivy reddening in the frost on
the outside of the office building)
and every night (in the room below
the stone pines, someone’s breath
upon your eyelid), and that every
place you ever knew existed there
in these two recreation rooms,
like a ship floating freely in dark-
ness, encompassed by dust and
crystals, without gravity, without
earth, in the midst of eternity;
without humus and water and
rivers, without offspring, with-
out blood; without the creatures
of the sea, without the salt of the
oceans, and without the water lily
stretching up through the cloudy
pond toward the sun?
Just how much of this imaginative
invasion can be put down to the influ-
ence of the objects? In an interview,
Ravn acknowledged that the cause
could instead be the committee’s ques-
tions about how the work is going. The
very suggestion that it’s possible for
the workers to have a range of feelings
about what they’re doing is like an in-
fection that encourages them to self-
reflect, to consider which feelings they
might prefer instead. And yet there is
something about the objects that gets
under the skin, literally.
In The Employees, the organic is a
vital alternative to the totalizing life-
lessness of the organization—a famil-
iar motif—but it can also be terrifying
and repellent. There’s something awful
about the relentless ways other species
reproduce. One crew member recalls
pulling up some floorboards back on
Earth to find “a puffy white mold” that
“had been growing right under our feet
without us knowing. Growing in the
dark, it was. We got rid of it, only it kept
coming back.”
Recurring symptoms among the
human employees are “skin eruptions”
and dreams that black seeds are em-
bedded in their pores. (This is not a
novel for trypophobes.) Images of in-
human fertility torment a crew mem-
ber prone to staring at the objects for
minutes at a time:
Does a human being need to have
been born? Or can I be a living
human expelled from a sac of
slime, hatched out of an accumu-
lation of roe, a clump of spawn in a
pond, a cluster of sticky eggs con-
cealed among cereal crops or wild
grasses?
Because the objects also come in
clusters, described as multiplying on
the hillsides of New Discovery like “a
kind of eczema,” these afflictions do
seem related to their presence. One of
the crew members, convinced that “the
best way of establishing contact with
the objects is through smell,” chews bay
leaves upon entering the room in which
they are stored, encouraged by the
scent the objects produce in response.
To some employees, the objects’ scent
is pleasant, like “citrus fruit, or the
stone of a peach,” while to others it is
sinister. “The fragrance in the room
has will and intention,” one statement
reports. “It’s the smell of something old
and decomposing, something musty.
It’s as if the smell wishes to initiate the
same process in me: that I become a
branch to break off, rot, and be gone.”
A humanoid crew member declares
the room and its smells “erotic,” al-
though we later learn that her kind
16
has been made without “reproductive For their part, the humans languish oid complains, “even though no one
organs,” because these were deemed in terrestrial nostalgia, reminisc- I know loves in that way, or lives that
“ethically unjustifiable to duplicate.” ing about strawberries, concerts, TV kind of a life. Yet these are the dreams
Smell, like taste, is a scent dependent shows, and that perennial subject, the you’ve given us.”
on penetration and merging. To smell weather—although this talk is far from The rebellion happens in the can-
something is to absorb tiny particles small. Several express the weary senti- teen, a violent event whose details are
of it into the membranes of the nose ment that their time is over, that they only alluded to. It results in one human
and to breathe it into the lungs. A hu- don’t expect humanity “as a category” death, and the humanoid who commits
manoid describes the unfamiliar at- to survive, and that the future belongs this murder tells the committee that it
tachment she feels toward one of the to the humanoids. “I want to stop. I felt good to do it. “I’m a pomegranate
objects as “like a ticklish splinter close can’t go on any longer,” the captain ripe with moist seeds,” the humanoid
to the heart, a splinter travelling slowly complains. continues, demonstrating an align-
through the flesh.” There are amusing echoes here of ment with creatures that cluster and
the sort of intergenerational work- teem, “each seed a killing I’m going
place conflicts that newspaper feature to carry out at some future time.” The
Yet when morale aboard the Six reporters like to write about, stories in infestation of the Six Thousand Ship
Thousand Ship finally breaks down, which managers from an older genera- is complete. Like any property owner
the conflict isn’t over the objects. Per- tion puzzle over the manners and ex- confronted with a termite’s nest or rat
haps the objects have caused it by in- pectations of their younger colleagues droppings, the organization does what
sinuating unprecedented thoughts and while acknowledging that eventually has to be done.
feelings into the humanoids, or perhaps these perplexing people will be run-
they have simply drawn forth a division ning things. In what must be the most
that was lying dormant. The human- alarming development for their cor- T he most striking aspect of this weird,
oids begin to separate themselves from porate masters, the humanoids exhibit beautiful, and occasionally disgusting
their human coworkers in the canteen. inklings of collective bargaining. “You novel is not, as its subtitle implies, its
They speak only to one another. “Some wouldn’t like to know what’s going on portrayal of working life on the space-
of them are friendly,” a human crew in our wing,” a humanoid tells the com- ship. Most of Ravn’s characters are too
member observes, “others seem as mittee. “No, that’s not a threat. We’re obsessively inward-looking to get up
though they’re being torn up inside by negotiating, that’s all.” to much in the way of office politics or
rage. Some are on the brink of tears. What are the humanoids? At first banter. Rather, it’s the objects them-
Others are completely out of it.” they appear to be robots or cyborgs, selves—impossible to visualize or fully
The humanoids regularly upload but despite the uploads and updates, it imagine, so unlike any form of known
their memories and receive software turns out they’re not machines. Instead, life that not everyone on board the Six
updates, but the updates aren’t working according to one speaker, they were Thousand Ship is sure they’re alive at
as they once did. A humanoid tells the “hatched from a series of violet pods of all. They are utterly alien, and yet for
committee that she has experienced biomaterial” in a lab back in Denmark. most of the crew members the objects
“sadness” at the knowledge that she’ll The speaker recounts tending to the are also comforting, even familiar.
never have a child, but that ripening pods, talking to them and in- The organization has cataloged them
jecting them with “the good hormones” with numbers, but the crew has given
it’s not hard to bear; it’s more like so that they would become attached to each one a name: peculiar names, like
a delicacy. Another reason I appre- their human makers. But their origins “the Reverse Strap- On” and “the Half-
ciate such a sadness is that I know link them to plants, insects, fungi— Naked Bean,” but also human ones,
it’s a deviation from the emotional all the nonhuman life-forms whose like Rachel, Ida, and Benny.
behavior I was allocated, and I procreative methods give the human The valley on New Discovery where
know too that deviating emotional crew members the creeps. Humans the objects were found is even more en-
behavior can be a sign that you’re have programmed them with a limited trancing. As the ship orbits the planet,
starting to disengage from the set of emotions, some of which are as the crew gathers to watch the valley
update. dysfunctional as the acculturation of come into sight from a viewing deck,
human beings. (Ravn has written in the “humans and humanoids,” as one state-
Some humanoids’ statements to the past about how ill-fitting she finds the ment describes it, “one big bunch of us
committee take an ominous tone. received model of womanhood, which together, all of us uplifted by the sight
“Impending violence is by no means leads, as she told one interviewer, “to of the valley, it’s the same every time.
inconceivable,” one remarks. “We’re having a feeling of being synthetic or It looks quite like what we know from
only just beginning to understand what false.”) “All of us here are condemned home.” It’s a pleasure in which “the cat-
we’re capable of.” to a dream of romantic love,” a human- egories don’t apply.”
That humanity should travel to the
ends of the universe only to find a place
that feels like home and creatures that,
however strange, seem to welcome
us—this ought to be a blessing. So why
does it all go so wrong? Perhaps the ob-
jects are not what they seem, are a kind
AFTER GEORGE HERBERT of booby trap, but I’m inclined instead
to agree with one of the humans, who
points out, “It’s a dangerous thing for
Come, my Motorway, my Equals Sign, my Higher Race,
an organization not to be sure which of
Such a Motorway as wheels with stars,
the objects in its custody may be con-
Such an Equals Sign as time plus space, sidered to be living. It raises questions.”
Such a Higher Race as cable cars. Some of those questions have to
do with the status of the humanoids,
Come, my Bedside Light, my Takeaway, my Calloused Hand, several of whom insist, in response to
Such a Bedside Light as lanternfish, apparent disbelief, that they, too, are
Such a Takeaway as takes a stand, alive. But what The Employees cap-
Such a Calloused Hand as makes a wish. tures best is humanity’s ambivalence
about life itself, its sticky messes and
Come, my Costume Play, my I Will Yes, my Organ Note, unappealing functions, the goo that
connects us to everything that crawls
Such a Costume Play as none can dress,
and mindlessly self-propagates, not to
Such an I Will Yes as none can quote,
mention that obliterating payoff at the
Such an Organ Note as plays in yes. end of it all. It is our best beloved and it
turns our stomachs. We build antiseptic
—Camille Ralphs vessels like the Six Thousand Ship, or
for that matter the organization itself,
to control its chaos, and then pine for
it once we’ve shut it out. “I’m not sure I
still feel pride in my humanity,” one of
the crew members confesses. And who
can blame him? Q
The New York Review
 An Impulse Felt Round the World
Julian Bell
Surrealism Beyond Borders

Jan Švankmajer
an exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York City,
October 11, 2021–January 30, 2022;
and Tate Modern, London,
February 24–August 29, 2022.
Catalog of the exhibition by Stephanie
D’Alessandro and Matthew Gale,
with contributions from Dawn Ades,
Patricia Allmer, and others.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
383 pp., $65.00; $40.00 (paper)
(distributed by Yale University Press)

“The surreal today is measured on the

scale of our defeats.” Georges Henein,
a founding member of a Cairo group of
Surrealists, was responding to a ques-
tionnaire that a Paris review had sent
him concerning the state of the move-
ment in 1946, twenty-two years on from
André Breton’s inaugural Manifeste du
surréalisme. What defeats had Henein
in mind? For him and his painter col-
leagues in al-Fann wa-l-Hurriyya (Art
and Freedom), the recent clashes of
foreign armies on Egyptian soil had not
been the issue. Rather, what they faced
now, as the war against Nazism made
way for Stalin’s triumph and the age of
atomic terror announced at Hiroshima,
was a pervasive global power system
more outrageous in its operations—in
that sense, more “surreal”—than any-
thing artists could dream up.
Henein’s sympathies were with
the politics of Leon Trotsky, as were
Breton’s, and the socialist cause now
seemed terminally cornered, if so-
cialism entailed “the right not only
to bread but to poetry” that the Rus-
sian revolutionary had demanded. As
Henein went on to explain, “Nearly
everything we still consider desirable
is claimed or bargained away by the
current state of the world. The result is
this everyday surreality, made of all the
moves not made by us.” When it came
to those desiderata, Breton had defined
them as “the future resolution of these
two states, dream and reality.” Com-
pleting a further questionnaire, Henein
held out for some “point of extreme
purity at which literature replaces life.”
The Coptic intellectual’s impos-
sibilism offers one prospective han-
dle on an exhibition about a creed
of bewilderment that has itself been
designed to bewilder. “Surrealism Be-
yond Borders,” jointly conceived by the
Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Steph-
anie D’Alessandro and Tate Modern’s
Matthew Gale, has now moved from
her museum to his in London. Across
eleven galleries, the curators have
tumbled out a delirium of films, pho-
tos, drawings, paintings, pamphlets,
and what Alberto Giacometti liked to
call “disagreeable objects.” Besides a
wooden assemblage by that artist—his
so- called Cage—you may chance upon
Salvador Dalí’s Lobster Telephone,
Max Ernst’s painted construction Two
Children Are Threatened by a Nightin-
gale, and sundry other curios by those
who, between the world wars, joined
Breton’s table at Montmartre’s Café Le
Cyrano.
Pieces by the luminaries they looked
up to, Picasso and Duchamp, also fea-
ture. But a greater swirl almost sub-
merges these fixtures of Paris- centric
art history: the surrealisms of Korea,
Ivan Kraus in Jan Švankmajer’s film The Flat, 1968
Mozambique, Haiti, the Philippines,
and Turkey— a constellation of non-
convergent points across the globe.
D’Alessandro and Gale are proposing
that the thoughts voiced by Breton in
1924 were latent in multiple disparate
urban centers, only awaiting his coin-
ing of a movement identity.
Their curiosity, trained chiefly though
not exclusively on the succeeding half-
century, has been heroic. They have
hunted down, for instance, some photo-
collages that illustrated a self-help col-
umn in a 1950s Buenos Aires women’s
weekly; a magazine that was handmade
in the home of a Utrecht artist during
the Nazi occupation of Holland—a sin-
gle copy per issue; and some tiny Po-
laroids discreetly transmogrified by the
filmmaker Kaveh Golestan not long
before the Iranian Revolution.
The chase runs wild. As it happens,
Golestan, so a Tate caption informs
me, “did not identify with Surrealism.”
Nor, the curators concede, did others
whose works have been included, such
as Rafael Ferrer in Puerto Rico. But
no matter. When, as cited in the cata-
log, the Argentinian artist Julio Llinás
argued in 1952 that “Breton must be
shown that Surrealism is not him,” he
was only continuing a tussle with the in-
tellectual impresario that was as old as
the movement itself and that had like-
wise been pursued by Breton’s Paris
adversary Georges Bataille. For every
printed “declaration” (and the Tate’s
vitrines exhibit many), there awaited a
contradiction.
In which case, let confusion flourish,
and let D’Alessandro and Gale, who
boast that their survey is “neither sin-
gular in its narrative nor unbroken in
its chronology,” have license as its con-
noisseurs. Staggered but persuaded by
their assiduity, I accept that the show’s
incoherence gathers a certain cohesive
flavor.
W hat tang might that be? If some-
thing is “beyond borders,” it is not to
be defined. Yet a characteristic tac-
tic united, say, the African American
“Surrealist jazz poet” Ted Joans cutting
away the heads from shots of social oc-
casions to create “outographs,” Artur
Cruzeiro Seixas in Luanda inscribing
verses on a shell fragment mounted on
a buffalo’s hoof, and the Tokyo-based
artist Koga Harue painting a Pop Art–
like montage of imported publicity
materials.
The Surrealist, as characterized by
D’Alessandro and Gale, liked to posit
an x, a variable not in algebra but in
discourse and visual culture. His or
her gesture was to reach for anoma-
lous content and hold out a handful of
the bizarre or the serendipitous that
could be brandished as nonnegotiable.
In theory— and Breton was a voluble
theoretician—that item in its uncanni-
ness could serve as a release valve for
the unconscious, but how many Surre-
alists actually kept Freud in their sights
is uncertain. What was more constant
was the background for the gesture,
and here Henein’s perspective has
purchase.
You opened your eyes and looked
around— supposing that you were
young and critically alert, wherever
you might stand in that constellation
of twentieth- century urban centers—
and a diagnosis suggested itself. You
were witnessing an accountancy- driven
compression of human potential within
a global interlock of power, money,
mechanization, and mass media. This
condition, which Breton termed “ratio-
nalism,” seemed to underpin all extant
forms of governance, whether capitalist,
Stalinist, colonial, or fascist. (A sliding
scale, argued the Martinican Surreal-
ist Aimé Césaire, for the violence the
Nazis inflicted on Europe simply built
on the precedent of violence inflicted
by Europeans on others.) Surrealism
offered a certain route out of that his-
torical claustrophobia. Flaunting your
anomaly—your disobliging, disagree-
able x—you not only affirmed your
personal intransigence but also signed
on to an energizing counterconspiracy.
Most famously, via the collaborative
drawing game invented by the original
Surrealists that was known as cadavre
exquis. Joans’s largest project, pursued
over three decades, was to persuade
every sympathizer he encountered to
sketch little caprices— spooky, sexy,
or sardonic— onto slips of computer
paper that could be pasted together
to form a single continuous strip: the
result, nearly thirty-five feet long and
involving 123 friends and luminaries,
is as near as the exhibition comes to a
backbone. A great feat of organization
on Joans’s part, it is clear, and in fact
the corporate nature of the Surreal-
ists’ collective adversary is suggested
by the way they aped its administra-
tive procedures—their fretting over
membership lists and directives and
questionnaires; their “Bureau de re-
cherches surréalistes” in Paris, staffed
by officials who were required to keep
the doors open six days a week from
4:30 to 6:30 PM ; their resourceful
media strategies. Which might lead
to public success, which in turn might

May 26, 2022 17

lead to Surrealism’s co- optation by
the world as it stood, “claimed or bar-
gained away” by the very forces it op-
posed. For this worldwide subculture,
defeat forever hovered in the wings.
D ream and reality would regu-
larly hook up, decades before Breton
launched his dating agency, within the
medium of cinema, and it is in the film
shorts on view that you most
dramatically face the tensions
of Surrealism—the tug between
the wish to escape reductive
definition and the expecta-
tion that you must eventually
submit.
At Land, shot on Long Is-
land in 1944 by the young
Ukrainian-born cinéaste Maya
Deren, puts forward some char-
acteristic Surrealist promises.
A protagonist, a dreamer—
Deren herself— emerges from
the sea, a castaway dashed by
waves onto a beach, and fi-
nally exits into the light, a fig-
ure fleeing over its sun- dazzled
sands. In between she meets
shape-shifting impediments.
Dead branches over which
she clambers lead to a dining
table across which she crawls,
amid oblivious chattering so-
cialites. From a chessboard on
that table a pawn drops, only
to reappear on the shoreline
after other figures— a walking
companion of inconstant vis-
age, a father dying in a shroud-
draped bedroom— have passed
by on the heroine’s cryptic
pilgrimage, while harsh rock
faces and burdensome stones
likewise confront her. All is ob-
stacle, yet she herself remains
inviolate, assured in possession
of her own photogenic allure. In
Deren’s romantic salute to spir-
itual freedom, the object world
and the social world are them-
selves no more than contents of
a dream.
The Flat, the product of an-
other young filmmaker—Jan
Švankmajer, in the Prague of
1968—inverts the tale of me and
not-me into nightmarish slap-
stick. The door slams behind a
sublimely hangdog comedian
(Ivan Kraus; see illustration on
page 17), leaving him trapped
inside a moldering apart-
ment in which everything—
via Švankmajer’s stop-motion
legerdemain— contradicts his
demands. He turns on a tap and
it spurts not water but coal. He
hungrily raises a soupspoon and
it drains like a colander. A mir-
ror merely shows him the back
of his head. The bed he lies
down in crumbles, burying him
in sawdust, and then between
battered doorways a mysterious mus-
tachioed maître d’ glides through,
vouchsafing him an axe.
Our hero uses the axe to break down
one of the doors, only to face a wall on
which many a previous prisoner has
penciled his name. “JOSEF,” he deject-
edly adds, and the film closes just as he
begins the downstroke of the succeed-
ing letter “K.” This arch nod to Kafka’s
The Trial merely underlines what the
film’s Keaton- era styling and dowdy
decor imply— that retro is never to be
18
escaped and that déjà vu is another
form of the uncanny. Švankmajer’s
was an old, old Prague, and the sources
of his phlegmatism lay far deeper
than the passing political dramas
of 1968.
In fact Surrealists, on this exhibition’s
evidence, generally preferred dilapida-
tion to lucid form. The weathered and
the fractal looked promising as ways of
resisting “rationalist” modernity. And
Remedios Varo: Embroidering the Earth’s Mantle, 1961
A still from Len Lye’s animated film Tusalava, 1929
yet the sensibilities on display could
twist the styling quite otherwise. One
of the earlier pieces included is a ten-
minute animation released in London
in 1929, the debut of a New Zealander
named Len Lye. Flaunting a radical
new graphic idiom, his Tusalava is as
brash and immediate as anything by
Disney. Its screen is split into vertical
bands in contrasting shades. Seed-
shaped blobs swim up them, then link
to form wriggling water-worms, whose
insides and outsides, nuclei and mem-
branes, then emerge. A pod in the
dark band swells and multiplies and
spews into the white a twisting spawn.
Suddenly these two separated entities
crystallize into schematic skeletal fig-
ures. Now the son’s pincer arms lunge
backward to pierce or possess the
mother in her lair. A mortal struggle
ensues, climaxing in explosion: rings
burst, collapse, recede to a final black
hole.
Lye was not an enrolled group
member, but he had certainly read
his Freud. He had also, en route from
Christchurch to London, spent time in
Samoa and in a Sydney library study-
ing books about Aboriginal art. He
was fusing its dots, concentric loops,
and “X-ray” figures with the graphics
of cellular biology to present a myth of
evolution in fast-track: a myth not
of upward progress but of circular self-
cancellation. Tusa lava, Lye explained,
is a Samoan phrase implying that what-
ever may happen, the same situation at
last returns.*
Here, then, was an artist from settler
stock leaning on Oceanic traditions.
Elsewhere, because of the reverence
that Surrealists felt for it, we are shown
Picasso’s Three Dancers (1925), an
achievement ultimately informed by
African art; and then we are shown Wi-
fredo Lam’s Bélial, empéreur
Remedios Varo/Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco
des mouches, a similarly large
canvas from 1948 in which the
Cuban quasi- Surrealist redi-
rected Picasso’s example to
deliver a fresh mythological
synthesis, more answerable to
his own African roots.
The curators’ global outlook
entangles them in the convo-
luted debates about “primitiv-
ism” that these examples could
prompt. Facing Tusalava they
place a wall text lamenting the
“fantasy of shared perspectives”
in which works from local tradi-
tions across the world, “included
for their perceived aesthetic
value within a European context,
were stripped of place, maker
and their original meaning.” As
far as it concerns the makers
themselves, the “stripped” in
that phrasing is an idle reproach.
This is simply what artists are al-
ways bound to do: look at what
other artists have been mak-
ing, wherever it may have come
from, and make products in re-
sponse that will inevitably bear
differing connotations.
In fairness, however, an ex-
hibition examining a cultural
movement interprets artifacts
NgƗ Taonga Sound & Vision/Len Lye Foundation
that have already been inter-
preted, and in the case of the
Surrealists, this was by voices
so insistently political that their
rhetoric can hardly go unques-
tioned. Some of the clamor came
from makers voicing their own
agendas, yet the overall tone—
despite the curators’ wish to de-
center the narrative— stemmed
from the so- called Pope of
Surrealism himself. For it is re-
markable how Breton is rarely
more than one degree of sepa-
ration away, whichever regional
nexus the survey alights on. His
persiflage— portentous, prickly,
shot through with flashes of
warmth— inspired cardinals of
the church ranging from Henein
and Joans to Eugenio Granell, a
fighter for the Spanish Republic
who, following its defeat, fled to
the Caribbean, where he prop-
agated Surrealism among many
an island flock.
And from pontiff to vil-
lage priest, this creed was
anticolonialist and— as Effie
Rentzou argues in her catalog
essay—“universalist.” She attributes
Surrealism’s “exceptional longevity”
to its willingness to take on the fun-
damental question “What is man?”
The more it “bypassed national struc-
tures” and rationalist mores, the more
it amassed “ethical urgency.”
*See Ann Stephen’s illuminating essay
“The Oceanic Primitivism of Len Lye’s
Animation Tusalava (1929),” Art His-
tory, Vol. 40, No. 3 (June 2017).
The New York Review
 We might feel awkward about these
ambitions with hindsight. We might
berate— along with Partha Mitter in
his catalog essay—the Café Le Cyrano
seditionaries for imputing a naive ex-
pressivity to non-European art, rather
than the sophisticated agency these
Parisians considered themselves to
possess. We might reckon that the Sur-
realists’ fondness for Trotsky was for a
mere mosquito politics of scant social
benefit. But such judgments fall in with
a “conventional time-based narrative”
that D’Alessandro and Gale want to es-
cape with their “transhistoric” project,
and at points they do convey what it’s
like to break free.
Most spectacularly, they include a
seven-minute clip from a documentary
made by the New York filmmaker Wil-
liam Klein about the Pan African Festi-
val that was held in Algiers in July 1969.
This event, staged by the Organization
of African Unity at a moment when it
looked as if familiar hegemonies might
be upended, became a crossroads for a
hundred postwar dreams of liberation,
drawing in the hopeful from across the
Sahara, the Mediterranean, and the
Atlantic. We meet Joans again, now
on stage with his friend Archie Shepp,
who, djellaba’d and raining sweat in
the roasting summer night, rips deep
gouges on his tenor sax, his footholds
on the wall of percussion behind him—
Gnawa drummers from the Maghreb,
beating rhythms sideways to jazz.
Klein’s camera cuts to onlookers:
pale Parisian hipsters in their shades;
jet-set girls in beehives and slinky
Motown-style outfits; Black Panther
brothers raising fists in zealous awe;
lines of haughty Tuareg women, scowl-
ing in dark satins. That disdain of theirs
only underlines the message that this is
a night that has veered into the radi-
cally unexpected and that normal time
has broken down. Here, if anywhere,
we witness the triumph of the Surreal.
T hat is not exactly what the exhibi-
tion’s static imagery has to offer. I was
introduced to many haunting little pho-
tographs and to a few arresting paint-
ings—in particular, to Embroidering
the Earth’s Mantle (1961) by Reme-
dios Varo. Her canvas depicts a Gothic
aerie in which a sisterhood sits stitch-
ing, obedient to an abbot with a book
and an alembic who is himself surveyed
by a shrouded background watcher.
The needlewomen’s handiwork winds
through apertures to descend into the
mists outside—fabric that unfolds to be-
come our physical world below. If Plato
had stopped penning his allegory of the
cave to pick up a brush instead, the results
might have looked somewhat similar—
not simply because of the shared ideal-
ism, but because it is expressed through
such an intricately developed artistry.
The micro-engineering of Varo’s tower
workshop and her beeswing-fine veils of
siennas and cold blues stretched my ex-
pectations of what a twentieth-century
painting might deliver.
Varo was a Spanish artist painting
in Mexico City, having arrived there
by a path crisscrossing those of many
Surrealists: early years in a Barcelona
cenacle who styled themselves “the logic-
fearers”—los Logicofobistas; departure
for boho life in Paris with Breton and
gang; then leaving Marseilles, come
1941, on a boat bound for the New
World. Her turn to the esoteric— she
joined a Gurdjieff group—was hardly
May 26, 2022
out of step with a movement that
claimed to seek “magic,” and the rebuke
POLICING THE CITY
to outward reality issued by her painting
overlaps with that of Deren’s film.
From the buoyant art scene that Varo
settled down in we are also presented
with a tremendous still life by Maria
Izquierdo, closer in manner to those
of the Mexican muralists. Elsewhere,
there is the classically ambitious Wi-
AN ETHNO-GRAPHIC
fredo Lam, among other modernizers
of the business of figure composition.
And disarmingly, a trompe l’oeil ex-
ecuted by the Parisian circle’s Marcel
Jean greets you in the show’s opening
gallery—wardrobe doors opening onto
distant horizons, a delightful touch of
magic indeed.
But the longer I browsed the framed
canvases that succeeded, the more a
frustration set in, as if from eating too
many spicy snacks with no entrée in
sight. Surrealism, being a cult of sur-
prise, worshiped play, generating many
a new game to be explored: yet for the
artists who subscribed to it, an agenda
of work still remained, delivering gal-
lery items by which to earn a living.
The dominant format for these items—
the main dish—is represented in the
show by that canvas the Surrealists
looked up to, Picasso’s Three Dancers.
Here, as elsewhere in the easel paint-
ing tradition, you are invited to relish
a rectangle’s worth of internal formal
relationships and to freight them as you
will with your knowledge of the world.
The distinctively Surrealist aim,
however, was to thwart that process of
imaginative digestion, as if to insist,
“This painting is not about what you
already know.” Of necessity, the rect-
angles they put up for sale retained
formal relationships, but Surrealists
tended to deal with these in an off-
hand or parodic manner. The show’s
sole Magritte, his steam-train-through-
fireplace canvas entitled Time Trans-
fixed, provides an obvious instance. A
fine stand-alone shock: but shocks in “A MUST-READ…LUCIDLY WRITTEN
AND EXPERTLY ILLUSTRATED,
multiplicity hardly amount to a fulfill-
ing diet. I began longing for richer fare,
in line with those many painters who
moved on from youthful Surrealism to Policing the City is a provocative exploration of
a deeper respect for the terms of their the expansion of police power and criminalization
own trade. of nonwhite and immigrant communities.”
It is not that the exhibits here lack
savor. You encounter so many differ- —Max Felker-Kantor, author of Policing Los Angeles:
ent defiances as you tour what virtually Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD
amounts to an alternate history of the
twentieth century: the paintings of He-
nein’s 1940s colleagues, for instance. “BY EXPOSING THE REALITIES
OF EVERYDAY ‘ANTICRIME’ POLICING,
The concerned young Egyptians of al-
Fann wa-l-Hurriyya—men and women,
DIDIER FASSIN EXPLODES THE MYTH
from both Muslim and Christian stock—
adopted, as a vehicle for their anxieties
about the nation’s predicament, the
naked female figure. Fouad Kamel
mutilates her, Kamel el-Telmissany nails THAT POLICE ARE THE SOLUTION
her to a tree, Amy Nimr dissects her
corpse. Their sour post-sunset palettes
of red and yellow stains against cyan
TO SERIOUS CRIME.”
—Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing
and black ratchet up the pathos. It is like
overhearing a distressing conversation,
glimpsed through a door ajar that you
might not wish to fully open. But part of “URGENT AND PROVOCATIVE”
the pathos is projected: it turns on the —Publishers Weekly
fact that you stand outside and are not
“HIGHLY RECOMMENDED”
quite sorry to remain so.
Whatever “everyday surreality” our
digital age may possess is different in
texture to that of the foregoing cen- —Library Journal (starred review)
tury. In this sense, not all that much of
“Surrealism Beyond Borders” achieves
a “transhistoric” liftoff, away from the
piquancy of retrospect. But then, it is OTHER PRESS OTHERPRESS.COM
exactly history’s business to be handed
the last word. Q
19
 Beyond the Betrayal
The Betrayal of Anne Frank:
A Cold Case Investigation
by Rosemary Sullivan.
Harper, 383 pp., $29.99
On the morning of August 4, 1944,
everything seemed normal at Prin-
sengracht 263, a tall, narrow building
along a canal in Amsterdam’s Jordaan
neighborhood. On the ground floor,
the workers in the warehouse of a pec-
tin and spice producer formerly known
as Opekta/Pectacon—now registered
under a false name, since its Jewish
founder, Otto Frank, was no longer al-
lowed to own a business—had the doors
open to the summer warmth. Upstairs,
the office employees were filling orders
and doing other paperwork. A little
after 9 AM, Miep Gies, a secretary, went
to the back room of the second floor
and pushed aside a bookcase against
the far wall, revealing a secret door.
When Gies ascended the staircase,
the eight people living in the back half
of the building were waiting for her.
They were always eager to see her, one
of their few points of contact with the
outside world. As the Nazi persecution
of the Dutch Jews intensified in early
1942, Otto Frank had decided to cre-
ate a hiding place for himself, his wife,
Edith, and their two daughters, Margot
and Anne, in the unused annex of his
own office building. The annex, with
two levels of living space and an attic,
was big enough for another family to
join them—Otto’s colleague Hermann
van Pels, his wife, Auguste, and their
son, Peter. Later the Franks and Van
Pelses also took in Fritz Pfeffer, Gies’s
Jewish dentist, after he told her he was
looking for a place to hide.
That morning, as usual, Gies visited
her friends and took any requests they
had for food, books, or other supplies.
Then they all returned to their daily rou-
tines. Margot and Anne, ages eighteen
and fifteen, probably read or studied.
Upstairs, Otto helped seventeen-year-
old Peter with his English spelling.
Across the city, Karl Josef Silber-
bauer, an SS sergeant of the Sicher-
heitsdienst (SD) Referat IV B4—also
known as the “Jew-hunting unit”—was
at his desk in Amsterdam’s Gestapo
headquarters. As Rosemary Sullivan
describes the scene in The Betrayal of
Anne Frank, Silberbauer’s superior,
Lieutenant Julius Dettmann, phoned
him to pass along a tip that had just
been called in: Jews were hiding in
a “warehouse complex” located at
Prinsengracht 263. Silberbauer was
assigned two Dutch policemen and a
detective to join him on the raid.
At around 10:30 AM, the men arrived
at the building and entered through the
open warehouse. One of the men may
have shouted, in Dutch or German,
“Where are the Jews?” At least one of
the office workers later recalled that
they went right to the bookcase. Otto
heard footsteps on the stairs to the
upper floor. The door opened, and he
and Peter found themselves face to face
with a plainclothes policeman pointing
a gun at them.
Downstairs, the rest of the house-
hold was gathered with their hands
up. Silberbauer asked where they kept
their valuables, and Otto gestured to-
20
Ruth Franklin
Illustration by Ruth Gwily
ward a small wooden box. Looking for
a place to store its contents, the SS offi-
cer picked up Anne’s briefcase, dump-
ing on the floor her diaries and the
manuscript in which she had spent the
past few months reworking them. Later
Miep Gies and Bep Voskuijl, another
office worker who helped hide the
Franks, found Anne’s papers, which
were then edited by Otto and published
in Dutch in 1947. With the assistance,
in part, of Barbara Epstein, who was
then a young editor at Doubleday (and
later cofounded The New York Re-
view), they were published in English
in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl.
In the decades since, Anne Frank has
become an icon. Her chronicle of the pe-
riod she spent in hiding, now with more
than 30 million copies in print in seventy
languages, is the most famous work of
literature to arise from the Holocaust,
required reading for several gener-
ations of schoolchildren. Her image
can be seen on statues and billboards
worldwide; her name is synonymous
with courage, with resistance to perse-
cution, with the death of an innocent.
Crowds gather to pay homage to her at
Prinsengracht 263, which since 1960 has
been known as the Anne Frank House,
a museum established by Otto Frank
that now welcomes more than a million
visitors per year. An asteroid discovered
in 1942, the year she went into hiding,
was named after her in 1995; saplings
from the chestnut tree in the courtyard
behind the building, which she gazed
at through the attic window, have been
planted at museums and memorials,
including Manhattan’s Ground Zero.
Yet many elements of her story remain
unknown, among them the exact date of
her death, which took place in Bergen-
Belsen sometime in February or March
1945, only weeks before the war ended.
One of the most enduring of those
mysteries is exactly how the Franks’
hideout was exposed. Who might have
made that phone call to Dettmann, and
what was the source of that person’s
knowledge? Over the years, numerous
theories have been proposed. Anne,
together with the rest of the house-
hold, worried that Willem van Maaren,
an employee in the warehouse, might
be untrustworthy; a 1948 inquiry con-
ducted by the Amsterdam police into
the betrayal of the Franks focused on
him but turned up nothing conclusive.
Carol Ann Lee, who wrote a biography
of Anne and another of Otto Frank,
made a case against Tonny Ahlers, a
Dutch Nazi sympathizer and petty crim-
inal, who is known to have blackmailed
Otto.1 Melissa Müller, the author of
another biography of Anne, suspected
Lena Hartog, the wife of one of Van
Maaren’s assistants. Joop van Wijk, the
son of Bep Voskuijl, has accused Bep’s
sister Nelly, who had close connections
with soldiers in the Wehrmacht.2
1
Carol Ann Lee, Roses from the Earth:
The Biography of Anne Frank (Viking,
1999) and The Hidden Life of Otto
Frank (Viking, 2002).
2 torians and others, including employees
Melissa Müller, Anne Frank: The Bi-
ography (Metropolitan, 1998).
In 2016 the Dutch filmmaker Thijs
Bayens and the journalist Pieter van
Twisk opened a new inquiry, building
a team of some two dozen Dutch inves-
tigators, historians, and researchers.
Seeking the perspective of someone “in-
dependent,” they also hired an Ameri-
can, Vince Pankoke, who had recently
retired from a twenty-seven-year ca-
reer as an FBI special agent. Pankoke
treated the Anne Frank House not as
a museum but as a crime scene, ana-
lyzing the little remaining physical ev-
idence. He noticed a mark on the floor
in front of the bookcase that revealed,
to a policeman’s trained eye, the pres-
ence of something behind it—meaning
that even if the Nazis had gone straight
for the bookcase, that didn’t necessar-
ily prove they had been tipped off to its
significance.
With the help of specially designed
software that used artificial intelli-
gence to seek out data patterns humans
might miss, Pankoke and his “Cold
Case Team” spent several years comb-
ing through historical records and po-
lice files, interviewing witnesses and
their descendants, and analyzing new
theories. Among their discoveries was
at least one of great value to historians:
a cache of nearly a thousand receipts
held in a collection of captured Nazi
documents in the US National Ar-
chives, evidence of reward money paid
to Dutch Jew-hunters—the equivalent
of around forty-seven dollars per head.
In a “highly secure” office space
outfitted with a 3D model of Prinsen-
gracht 263 and a soundproof “Mute-
Cube,” Pankoke’s team examined all
the previous suspects as well as a new
list of their own, promising to assess
each against three criteria: Did this
person have the knowledge necessary
to betray the Franks, the motive to do
so, and the opportunity? Meanwhile,
HarperCollins—which, together with
the city of Amsterdam and private do-
nors, provided financial support for the
operation—recruited Sullivan, the au-
thor of the well-received biography Sta-
lin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and
Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva
as well as numerous other books, to
embed with the team and chronicle
their investigation.
In line with the secrecy surround-
ing the entire operation, the book was
under strict embargo so that the team
could announce their conclusions in a
carefully orchestrated publicity rollout
that began on January 16 of this year
with a lengthy segment on 60 Minutes,
two days before the publication date.
The likely betrayer, they said, was Ar-
nold van den Bergh: a wealthy Jewish
notary who belonged to the Jewish
Council, a group that, like its better-
known counterparts in Warsaw, Łód Ĩ,
and elsewhere, served as a liaison be-
tween the Nazi occupiers and the Jew-
ish community whom the Nazis all but
exterminated.
T he announcement was explosive—
though not in the way the team had
hoped. The book came under immedi-
ate and intense attack from Dutch his-
of both the Anne Frank House and the
The New York Review
Anne Frank Foundation (a separate
organization based in Switzerland, also
founded by Otto Frank, that holds the
copyright to most of Anne’s writings).
Critics argued that Pankoke’s team
had made unjustified assumptions and
relied too heavily on circumstantial
evidence. “Although the research is
impressive, the story simply has too
many loose ends,” Johannes Houwink
ten Cate, a professor of genocide and
Holocaust studies at the University of
Amsterdam, said in an interview with
Agence France-Presse.
Ambo Anthos, the publisher of the
book’s Dutch translation, quickly an-
nounced that it was halting further
printings. Two months later, after a
group of prominent Dutch historians
published a sixty-nine-page “refuta-
tion” of the book on the website of
NIOD, the Dutch Institute for War,
Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, 3
Ambo Anthos decided to pull it from
the shelves entirely. The book is still for
sale elsewhere, including in Germany
and the United States.
The Betrayal of Anne Frank is badly
organized and facilely written; it takes
a strikingly uncritical tone toward Pan-
koke and his team and seems to track
every tedious dead end in the investi-
gation. Worse, it offers little historical
analysis of life in Amsterdam during
the war years, particularly regarding
the role of the Jewish Council, whose
members made the fatal but under-
standable gamble of cooperating with
the Nazi authorities, hoping that by
doing so they could mitigate the worst
of the persecution and buy extra time
for the Jewish population. My own
reading turned up poor annotation
and sloppy factual errors, including
mischaracterizations of the circum-
stances around the writing and editing
of Anne’s diary.
But the problems with this project
are bigger than either the book or the
investigation it purports to cover. The
goal of the search, according to Bayens,
was to “begin a public conversation”
about tolerance and distrust as a bul-
wark against “incipient fascism” in Eu-
rope and elsewhere, while at the same
time seeking justice for the Franks.
That conversation has not happened.
To the contrary: by focusing police-
procedural style on the identification
of a single culprit—a Jewish one, at
that—the search for the betrayer of
Prinsengracht 263 obscures the larger
political realities of the Holocaust, in
the Netherlands and elsewhere.
T he software created for Pankoke
and his team projected potential sus-
pects onto a map of Amsterdam as
colored dots, with members of the NSB
(Dutch Nazi Party) appearing as blue,
collaborators red, and informants yel-
low. The dots were “so close together,”
Sullivan writes, “that they appeared
as one large mass” over the neighbor-
hood surrounding Prinsengracht 263.
An SD informant owned a bike shop a
block and a half away. A waiter whose
name appeared on the Resistance’s
“wanted list” lived a few doors down.
Numerous NSB members lived in build-
3 this, the council members hypothesized
“‘The Betrayal of Anne Frank’: A
Refutation,” a report by Bart Wallet,
Petra van den Boomgaard, Bart van
der Boom, Raymund Schütz, Laurien
Vastenhout, and Aaldrik Hermans,
March 2022.
May 26, 2022
ings bordering the courtyard. Pankoke
later told a reporter that instead of who
tipped off the police, the real question
was how the inhabitants of the Secret
Annex—Anne’s name for the hide-
out—stayed hidden.
Indeed, the number of possible sus-
pects demonstrates just how dangerous
the situation was for Jews in the Neth-
erlands. Despite the widespread per-
ception of the Dutch as a nation that
largely resisted the Nazi occupiers—a
perception that has been deeply chal-
lenged by historians in recent years—
around 75 percent of Dutch Jews were
murdered during the war, the highest
death rate of any Western European
country. As of early 1941, when the
Nazis required Dutch Jews to register
with the authorities, the community
numbered around 140,000. About
107,000 were subsequently deported
to camps, of whom fewer than 6,000
returned. About two thirds of the
25,000 or so Jews who went into hiding
survived.
Historians have posited a number
of factors to explain the low survival
rate of Dutch Jews. The Netherlands
is a low-lying, flat country without
the dense forests that partisans and
others were able to take advantage of
elsewhere in Europe. Since Dutch so-
ciety was relatively segregated, Jews
were unlikely to have close non-Jewish
friends who would help them find hid-
ing places or support them in hiding.
(This was not true for the residents of
the Secret Annex, who were sustained
by Otto’s employees.) But most signif-
icant seems to have been the general
Dutch propensity—among Jews as well
as non-Jews—to comply with the law.
This is precisely what the Jewish
Council, formed in Amsterdam in 1941,
has been criticized for. Chaired by
Abraham Asscher, the heir to a major
diamond company, and David Cohen,
a professor and former president of the
Committee for Jewish Refugees, the
council provided services to the com-
munity that the Dutch government was
no longer permitted to offer, such as
education and health care. The council
also created a newspaper that served as
a central organ to disseminate informa-
tion about new Nazi regulations, from
the surrender of businesses and prop-
erty to the prohibition on using swim-
ming pools and sports facilities. When
the Nazis imposed the yellow star, the
council was given 569,355 cloth stars to
distribute—four per person, to be paid
for with ration coupons.
On a Friday in late June 1942, mem-
bers of the Jewish Council were sum-
moned at 10 PM —a standard power
play by the Nazi administration, which
seemed to enjoy forcing them to break
the Sabbath—and told that “police-
controlled labor contingents” were re-
quired for service in Germany. Margot
Frank, then sixteen, was part of this
first group to be called up; her sum-
mons, which arrived on July 5, precip-
itated the family’s flight into hiding.
The previous year, as punishment for
an anti-Nazi demonstration, the Nazis
had rounded up several hundred Jewish
men and deported them to Mauthau-
sen, a concentration camp in Austria.
None returned. Largely because of
that “labor service,” despite all its un-
knowns, was preferable to what they
believed to be certain death in a con-
centration camp. As Sullivan writes,
they “assumed that the Germans had
no intention of removing the entire
Jewish community from the Nether-
lands and that the council’s role was From the
to protect those in the most danger.”
Later, Cohen admitted that he had mis- Man Booker
judged the “unprecedented, murderous
intentions of the Nazis.” But he was far
International Prize-
from the only one to make that mistake. winning author of
The council tried to play for time.
They haggled with the Nazis over how CELESTIAL BODIES
many Jews needed to report for each
transport and tried to finagle as many
exemptions as possible, including for
Jokha Alharthi
council employees. In retrospect, many
have seen the desire to protect their
own as reflecting poorly on the council.
“After the war, many people accused
the Jewish Council of cooperation,
indeed almost collaboration, with the
Germans,” Sullivan writes. The fuzz- “A GORGEOUS AND
iness here—how does one define “al-
INSIGHTFUL STORY
most collaboration”?—is indicative of
a larger lack of sensitivity to the im- OF LONGING.”
possible position in which the council —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
found itself.
In the summer of 1942, Auschwitz
II/Birkenau, the extermination divi-
sion of the camp, had just been estab-
lished. (Auschwitz I, the original labor
camp and administrative headquar-
ters, was created in 1940.) Reports of
mass extermination in Poland—the gas
trucks that were running at Chełmno
and Beł Īec—were still rumors. Going
into hiding, too, was dangerous; people
believed that those who were caught
would be deported immediately to
penal camps. (In reality, nearly all
Dutch Jewish deportees had the same
destination: Auschwitz or Sobibór, an-
other extermination camp on Polish
territory.) As Bart van den Boom, one
of the historians who contributed to the
report challenging the findings of Pan-
koke’s team, has written:
The reality of Auschwitz and So-
bibór was far beyond the imagina-
tion of most of the Dutch. . . . It was
conceivable that the slow death
that loomed with deportation was
less of a risk than the quick death “BLAZES WITH
that would follow if you went into
hiding and got caught. THE STRENGTH OF
GENERATIONS OF
Many also thought that the Germans
OMANI WOMEN . . .
would be defeated within a few months.
After the war, the Jewish Honor AN ILLUMINATING,
Court for the Netherlands, which was IMPORTANT WORK.”
appointed by the Jewish community and
had moral weight but not legal authority, —Kali Fajardo-Anstine,
investigated suspected collaborators, in- author of Sabrina & Corina
cluding members of the Jewish Council.
Cohen was the only one who appeared
in person; Arnold van den Bergh and
four others were judged in absentia
when they chose not to participate. For
having “assisted in a number of anti-
Jewish measures, including distributing
the Jewish star, unfairly determining the An Omani student
lists of exemptions, and participating
in the selection of deportees,” Van den at a British university is
Bergh was deprived for five years of the caught between the past
right to hold Jewish office or participate
in honorary functions in the commu- and the present in this
nity. (The court drew a distinction be- profound exploration
tween members of the council, such as
Van den Bergh, and the co-chairmen, of social status, wealth,
Asscher and Cohen, who were judged desire, and female agency.
more severely.) Soon after the verdict,
Van den Bergh was diagnosed with
throat cancer; he died in 1950.
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22
back to Amsterdam, arriving home
that summer. The case for Arnold van
den Bergh as his betrayer starts with an
anonymous note that Otto may have
received later that year. (The cold case
team dates the note to late 1945, but the
historians’ report casts doubt on this
detail, as on many others.) It read:
Your hideout in Amsterdam was
reported at the time to the Jüdische
Auswanderung [Jewish Emigra-
tion] in Amsterdam, Euterpestraat,
by A. van den Bergh, a resident at
the time at Vondelpark, O Nassau-
laan. At the J.A. was a whole list of
addresses he submitted.
Van den Bergh worked as a notary,
a profession with duties in the Nether-
lands that are more elaborate than those
of contemporary American notaries. He
was responsible for authorizing business
deals, including witnessing contracts.
Among the transactions over which he
presided was the notorious sale of the
art collection of Jacques Goudstikker,
a Dutch Jewish dealer in Old Masters,
to Hermann Göring. As of February
21, 1941, Jewish notaries were required
to officially surrender their public func-
tions, but Van den Bergh, like Otto
Frank and many other Jews, seems to
have found ways to continue working.
As a member of the Jewish Council,
Van den Bergh, together with his wife
and their three daughters, was initially
exempt from deportation. (The council
disbanded in September 1943 when al-
most everyone involved with it was de-
ported, including Cohen and Asscher.)
As an additional protection, he applied
for and obtained “Calmeyer status,”
which allowed him to be declassified as
Jewish: under Nazi law in the Nether-
lands, Jews could be exempt from per-
secution if they could prove they had
one non-Jewish parent. Many Dutch
Jews sought to exploit this loophole,
creating elaborately forged revisions to
their family trees. The cases were ad-
judicated by a German lawyer named
Hans Georg Calmeyer, who saved sev-
eral thousand Jews by allowing many of
these forgeries to pass.
Van den Bergh’s Calmeyer status
also offered protection to his family.
However, he lost that status in early
1944 when J.W. A. Schepers, a Nazi
who was assigned to take over his no-
tary business, denounced him to the
authorities. (According to Pankoke et
al., Schepers was angry because Van
den Bergh played a “Jew trick” on him
by making the business files inaccessi-
ble; the historians explain the problems
with the takeover differently.)
Pankoke’s team argues that this is
when things started to fall apart for
Van den Bergh. Desperate, he is said to
have called in favors from Nazi connec-
tions he developed through his business
dealings and his former position on the
Jewish Council. He found his young-
est daughter a hiding place through
the Resistance, but he allegedly went
on the run: perhaps, the team suggests
without offering evidence or expla-
nation, to Castle Nijenrode, an estate
south of Amsterdam owned by Alois
Miedl, a German art dealer with whom
Van den Bergh had worked closely. The
castle was a hideout for “anybody that
feared persecution in Germany,” in-
cluding former collaborators, Sullivan
writes. “If the Van den Berghs were at
the castle, sharing space with German
fugitives could hardly have felt safe,”
she continues. “With Miedl now . . .
unable to protect him, Van den Bergh
might have needed to find some addi-
tional insurance.”
That’s a lot of conditionals, but more
are coming. In order to protect his fam-
ily, the team alleges, Van den Bergh sup-
plied the Nazis with a list of addresses
of Jews in hiding that he had supposedly
been holding on to since his time with
the Jewish Council. Sullivan writes:
It’s almost certain that the Jewish
Council had lists of addresses of
Jews in hiding. Through his key
position on the Jewish Council,
Van den Bergh would have had
access to those lists. He may also
have had access to the lists of ad-
dresses collected . . . at Camp West-
erbork. Prinsengracht 263 could
easily have been on a list in 1943 or
1944, placed there by a member of
the resistance who’d been turned
or by an informant.
As the historians demonstrate, it’s far
from certain that the Jewish Council
had such lists. The evidence on which
the team relies is testimony from a
German translator who “claimed to
have overheard” a sergeant in the mil-
itary police talking about the council in
grossly anti-Semitic terms. Mail from
Westerbork, the transit camp where
Dutch Jews were held before deporta-
tion to the east, did not go through the
Jewish Council, and even if it had, there
is no evidence that any was sent to Prin-
sengracht 263, whose inhabitants knew
better than to reveal their address to the
outside world. The unrevised version of
Anne’s diary includes several pages of
heartbreaking letters she wished she
could send to a close friend, as well as
an imaginary reply from the other girl.
Pfeffer did exchange letters with his fi-
ancée, but Gies served as courier.
Even more incomprehensibly, Pan-
koke’s team uses statements by Gies
and Otto Frank that seem to implicate
Van den Bergh as evidence against him,
such as Otto’s telling a Dutch journal-
ist in the late 1940s that the family was
“betrayed by Jews.” But such state-
ments demonstrate only that Frank and
Gies may have believed Van den Bergh
to be the betrayer, thanks to the anon-
ymous note—not that he actually was.
(Note also the plural, “Jews,” which
would suggest that there was a group of
betrayers, rather than only one.) Most
devastating to the team’s argument is
the historians’ revelation that Van den
Bergh, together with his whole family,
was actually in hiding by early 1944. So
much for both motive and opportunity.
If not Arnold van den Bergh, who did
betray the Franks? It is hard to imag-
ine that this question could ever be an-
swered conclusively, simply because so
few of the facts relating to the case can
be relied upon. Indeed, it’s possible that
the initial scenario, according to which
Dettmann receives a tip-off call and
passes the information to Silberbauer,
did not unfold the way Sullivan describes
it. The team argues that the phone call
to Dettmann is a reason to rule out any
suspect without Nazi connections, since
it was unusual both that the call came
directly to him and that the SD immedi-
ately acted on the information. But the
information about the call comes from a
police interrogation of Silberbauer him-
self in 1964, after his part in the arrest
was exposed by the Nazi hunter Simon
Wiesenthal. This was a man so insen-
sitive and ill-informed that he looked
through Anne’s diary after it was pub-
lished to see if his own name was men-
tioned. He may well have fabricated
details to protect himself or others.
If Silberbauer’s testimony is consid-
ered unreliable, a host of other possi-
bilities opens up, including a scenario
postulated recently by researchers at
the Anne Frank House: that the SS
were expecting to find stolen goods
and discovered the people in hiding by
chance. The idea that Anne’s fate was
sealed by a random accident is difficult
to swallow; far more satisfying to have
a person to blame. We want to believe
that things happen for a reason, regard-
less of whether we ascribe the explana-
tion to God, superstition, or human
action. But that theory strikes me as
the most convincing, both because of
the evidence presented and because it
is truer to the way the Holocaust actu-
ally unfolded in the Netherlands.
Contrary to how most people imag-
ine it, the Nazi administration was not
a well- oiled extermination machine.
There was a master plan for the Final
Solution, but how it would be imple-
mented was not self-evident. Decisions
were made at every step of the way that
determined the fates of thousands of
people, from the granting of deporta-
tion exemptions to the number of peo-
ple dispatched on each train. At any
point, those outcomes could have been
different. For instance, Anne’s friend
Hanneli Goslar survived Bergen-
Belsen because her family was able
to buy Paraguayan passports, which
meant that they could be exchanged
for German prisoners of war and thus
had special privileges in the camp; if
the Franks had bought those passports,
they too might have survived.
Those who went into hiding were
perhaps even more at the mercy of
others. Anne was unusual in having a
stable hiding place together with her
family; most Dutch Jewish children
were sent into hiding alone, since they
were easier to hide than adults. There
are many stories of abuse and exploita-
tion of these children by their hosts, in
addition to the larger risks that hiding
entailed. Picture all those dots on the
map: any one of those people could po-
tentially have betrayed the Franks.
Of course, the Nazis were ultimately
responsible for Anne Frank’s death,
from Hitler and Eichmann all the way
down to the lowly functionary Sil-
berbauer and his henchmen. But on a
global level, Anne Frank was betrayed
by all those who had the ability to
help Jews and chose not to. The Dutch
queen betrayed her by abandoning the
nation; one can imagine a different
outcome had Queen Wilhelmina, like
King Christian X of Denmark, stood
up to the Nazi occupiers and defended
the Jews. The US government betrayed
her by declining to approve visas for
the Frank family to travel via New
York to Cuba in 1941—the only real
chance they had to escape the Neth-
erlands. The Allies betrayed her by
declining to bomb the railway lines to
Auschwitz. The nations of the world
betrayed her by turning away Jewish
refugees. In imagining that a single
person could have been responsible for
Anne Frank’s death—and not the tidal
wave of fascism that once threatened to
engulf the world and may do so yet—
are we not betraying her still? Q
The New York Review
 Shadows Across the Decades
Monkey Boy
by Francisco Goldman.
Grove, 323 pp., $27.00; $17.00 (paper)
Some way through Francisco Gold-
man’s Monkey Boy, the novel’s narra-
tor—an accomplished writer in middle
age called Francisco Goldberg, whose
name isn’t his only resemblance to the
author—recalls “the day I became a
journalist.” As an aspiring writer of fic-
tion in his early twenties, he left New
York for his mother’s homeland in Cen-
tral America, intending to hole up in a
house her family owned there and hone
his craft. But the year was 1979. The
country was Guatemala. And those
two facts—as students of cold war his-
tory know now but most Americans
were scarcely aware of then—meant
that young Francisco wasn’t arriving
in a bucolic backwater. He was plung-
ing into what was fast becoming one
of the era’s darkest proxy wars, a hor-
rific conflict that was first sparked in
the 1950s by the United States’ covert
removal of Guatemala’s left-wing pres-
ident, Jacobo Árbenz, and that over
the ensuing decades claimed the lives
of 200,000 people, displaced a million
more, and unleashed the guns and
gangs that rule the country now.
The cottage by a lake to which the
young writer hoped to repair, it turns
out, is off-limits: the area is rife with
guerrilla activity and the military’s
wanton repression. Young Francisco,
stuck in Guatemala City, stuffs short
stories set back home into envelopes
addressed to prospective publishers and
MFA programs in the US. The violence
worsens. Devastating the countryside’s
indigenous peoples, it also spits so many
maimed victims onto the capital’s streets
that on some days, a medical student
with whom Francisco is friendly tells
him, their corpses have “to be stacked
like firewood” in the city’s morgue.
One day she sneaks him in to see:
There weren’t bodies stacked
like firewood that day, but there
were corpses laid out on three of
the concrete autopsy tables. The
cement floor had a wet sheen, as
if just hosed. . . . On the autopsy
table closest to us lay the corpse
of a young man with a trimly
muscular body, a handsome face
with Amerindian features, eyes
serenely closed, skin youthfully
toned and damp, a black mustache,
soft-looking instead of bristly, and
wisps of chin hair. His torso and
arms were speckled with brown-
ish dots . . . cigarette burns. What
looked like a popped blister, circu-
lar and pink, was where his penis
should have been.
What’s striking about Francisco’s rec-
ollection of the experience, though, is
how it changed what he wanted to write.
This was the day he became a journal-
ist, he explains, not because seeing this
murdered young man sent him down
a rabbit hole of ready questions—who
was he, who had done this to him, and
why?—but for other reasons that had
to do, at bottom, with himself:
Probably all of Guatemala knew
who was doing that, to young men
May 26, 2022
Joshua Jelly-Schapiro
Francisco Goldman; illustration by Edel Rodriguez
and women especially, and why. he received the thrilling news that Es-
Then what difference could it make quire wanted to buy two of those sto-
to see it for yourself? Because to ries he had submitted by airmail from
witness something like that impli- Guatemala City—and when an editor
cates you, it allows that reality to there also wondered, intrigued by the
go on living inside you, growing talented young man with that return
darker, more impenetrable, unless address, if he might like to write a re-
you accept the challenge of living ported piece about what he was seeing.
with it and trying to make it clearer Goldman has toggled ever since be-
instead of ever darker and more tween the divergent but linked demands
confusing. of imaginative fiction and investiga-
tive reporting, and he has increasingly
These lines, appearing as they do in a come to operate in the fruitful murk
book by Francisco Goldman, can’t but between them. Monkey Boy is a book
make one think of his work as an in- whose narrator shares its author’s biog-
vestigative reporter who has produced raphy and whose cover has a photo of
vital chronicles of some of this hemi- him in his awkward youth, staring out
sphere’s worst atrocities (including a from under the title that is the nick-
brave inquest into the 1998 murder of name he was given, as a big-eared Jew
Bishop Juan Gerardi, the leading inves- with a funny name and olive skin, by
tigator of human rights abuses during the cruel kids with whom he grew up
the Guatemalan civil war*). But Gold- in a working- class suburb of Boston.
man, like his alter ego in Monkey Boy, It’s clear that we are to take the voice
is a writer whose career began when and memories of this book’s narrator
as its author’s, and though Goldman’s
*The Art of Political Murder: Who experience as a journalist is vital to his
Killed the Bishop? (Grove, 2007); re- backstory here, his focus in Monkey
viewed in these pages by Aryeh Neier, Boy predates that day in the morgue.
November 22, 2007. It involves other realities, dark and
confusing, that go back to the people
who were closest to him in his boyhood
and that have remained crucial to the
mature writer, and thus the novelist, he
would become.
F rancisco Goldman was born in Bos-
ton to a Guatemalan mother and a
Jewish father whose parents were from
Ukraine and whose abusive treatment
of his family, recounted in scary detail
in Monkey Boy, goes some way to ex-
plaining why “Frankie,” as he became
known in the Anglo world of his youth,
fled home as soon as he could. His
first reported piece for Esquire led to
a decade covering Central America’s
wars, which also gave him the mate-
rial for his first novel, The Long Night
of White Chickens (1992), whose nar-
rator’s mother is a guatemalteca much
like his own, and whose plot stretched
from Massachusetts to Mesoamerica
and back again. Two ensuing novels
spanned similar geographies but drew
less from his own life than from history
and the news. The Ordinary Seaman
(1998) is the tale of a Nicaraguan vet-
eran of Central America’s wars who
finds himself, with fourteen fellow
marineros, trapped on a freighter off
Brooklyn that’s been abandoned by
its owner. The Divine Husband (2004)
conjures the life and loves of José
Martí, the nineteenth- century Cuban
statesman, polymath, and poet whose
migrations involved stints in both Gua-
temala and New York. Then came The
Art of Political Murder and a personal
tragedy that would be the subject of
Goldman’s next book.
On a beach vacation in Oaxaca in
2007, Goldman and his beloved young
wife, the writer Aura Estrada, were
playing in the waves when she had a
freak accident and broke her neck.
Goldman’s grief at Estrada’s death
left him, by his own account, suicidal.
But he wrote a heartbreaking memoir
of their love and her death that—be-
cause he felt the need to modify certain
scenes and craft dialogue from Estra-
da’s journals in order to convey, as he
put it, the “emotional truth” of what
happened—he published as a novel,
Say Her Name (2011). It was notable,
in Goldman’s oeuvre, for the raw im-
mediacy of its prose composed in grief.
(He has since published another book
of nonfiction, 2014’s The Interior Cir-
cuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, and
much reporting on the unexplained
deaths of young people in Mexico,
where he now lives.) But Say Her Name
also seems to have given him a mode of
“self-writing” that he has found useful
for reckoning not merely with recent
traumas but with aspects of his deeper
past that may explain why, for example,
he wasn’t able to have a relationship of
real loving depth until he met Estrada,
not long before he was fifty.
“Autofiction” has in recent years be-
come a popular term for novels whose
writer-narrators share much with their
authors. Books by Ben Lerner and
Rachel Cusk, among others, have also
prompted confusion among readers
and critics who wonder what exactly
this vague label describes if not au-
thors’ melding, in ways that are as old
as authorship, of real scenes from their
23
lives with a frame they make up. The
critic Christian Lorentzen has sug-
gested that the autofiction label is best
used to describe works in which “the
book’s creation is inscribed in the book
itself,” and Monkey Boy certainly qual-
ifies. It’s a book about, and also by, a
writer journeying across space but also
back in time, at least in his mind, to the
places that made him.
F rancisco Goldberg’s dusky trek
across New England in winter begins
in the dingy men’s room at New York’s
Penn Station, where, he recalls, Louis
Kahn died of a heart attack. We get
the sense, from the writer’s musings
on the great architect’s sad end and
the soppressata hero he grabs from his
go-to salumeria on Eighth Avenue for
his train ride to Boston, that he’s fa-
miliar with this itinerary. Goldberg is
going to visit his mother in her nursing
home and give an interview on public
radio about a Guatemalan general who
had a bishop murdered there and hates
Goldberg’s guts. His memories of the
sad town where he grew up “amid rocky
field and cold forest” will animate this
journey; he woke up in Brooklyn think-
ing about the sounds his father, Bert,
made when he rose at dawn, in the writ-
er’s boyhood home, before rumbling
off in his Oldsmobile to his job crafting
porcelain dentures for the Potashnik
Tooth Company in Cambridge. Being
reminded of the man whose anger de-
fined his boyhood, “feeling like his
shadow is falling across the decades,”
doesn’t augur well for the trip ahead.
The train leaves the city’s sprawl and
enters Connecticut. On the seat next
to him, Goldberg has his sandwich and
a novel by Muriel Spark. But there’s
nothing like gazing from a moving
train or, here, contemplating “the ruin
and splendor of Bridgeport,” for turn-
ing one’s mind to where one’s been. As
the train rolls from New Haven to the
gray seascape of Mystic, he recounts
parts of his past that will fill the en-
counters of his weekend with meaning:
dining with a girl he adored in tenth
grade, now a prosperous lawyer in Bos-
ton; sitting with his “Mamita” in her
nursing home as she giggles in demen-
tia’s face; meeting with another guate-
malteca who spent years in their house
as a kind of au pair, and who knows
things about the sources of Mamita’s
sadness and Bert’s rage their son never
did. He recalls a motel where his father
brought the family (“Was that motel
around here, in Mystic? Falmouth?
Woods Hole?”), from whose balcony
he looked down “into the pool where
Mamita was swimming laps in a light-
blue bathing suit, her hair tucked under
a bathing cap.”
Most of the memories, though, that
ramify through this landscape and have
echoed through his life are darker—the
first time Bert, enraged by his ten-year-
old son raiding his coin collection to
buy Matchbox cars, hit him; his moth-
er’s chirped protests during all the
beatings that followed (“Bert! Not in
the head!”); his uncanny ability, as
a young reporter, to “flatten out” in
dangerous situations, which he now
attributes to the ways he trained him-
self, as a boy, to weather the fists of a
father who was a kind mentor to several
kids in their neighborhood but couldn’t
stand his own.
There are also memories, from later,
of women loved and lost, and hope-
24
ful thoughts of the future. At forty-
nine, Goldberg may be “the sort of
self-sufficient man people think must
not really require or especially want
anyone to be close to.” The writer has
his books, after all, “and an eventful
past to ruminate on, just look at him,
invited on the radio to talk about his
enemy General Cara de Culo.” But he’s
ready to try again. Or so he imagines as
he sends the cute Mexican woman he’s
recently met in Brooklyn hopefully-
funny text messages about pelicans and
bike rides, and he checks his phone at
anxious intervals throughout the week-
end to see if she’s replied.
The train crosses into Massachusetts.
He ponders its bygone Amerindian sa-
chems and remembers Proust describ-
ing how “a man, during the second half
of his life, might become the reverse
of who he was in the first.” Finally he
reaches Boston’s South Station. His
feet lead him from the station’s doors,
as he says they always do here, to a re-
stored eighteenth- century brig in the
harbor nearby. In high school he had
a job there teaching tourists about the
Boston Tea Party; the vessel holds an-
other telling memory, too. After his
first novel came out, he’d returned to
the city on a book tour and was con-
tacted by a reporter from The Boston
Globe. Thinking the reporter wanted
to profile him, he proposed meeting
by this boat where it all began. But the
reporter, when he arrived, was glum:
“We received a fax at the newspaper
that makes a serious allegation.” The
woman who’d sent it, having read the
Globe’s review of his novel, was an
old classmate from high school: “Lana
Gatto alleges that you are not a His-
panic, err, or a Latino. She says that in
high school your name was Frank and
that you’re Jewish.”
The bemused writer’s riposte to this
nonsense was sharp: “I admit it. I am
Jewish, and all these years I’ve been
hiding my true identity behind the last
name Goldberg.” The reporter skulked
off. But the problem captured in his
queries (which also find the writer
patiently explaining why he didn’t go
around Boston suburbs in the 1970s
waving a Guatemalan flag and insisting
on being called “Francisco”) persists.
The Irish and Italian kids with whom
he grew up, having embraced a white
identity their forebears couldn’t, po-
liced its edges fiercely. Young Frank’s
first joyous experience of making out
with a girl turned into the deep hurt of
showing up at school to find everyone
repeating a rumor that she’d said kiss-
ing Monkey Boy was like being chewed
by an ape.
Little wonder that he was unable to
try to kiss anyone for years afterward—
or that his first “reunion” with anyone
from high school is the dinner, on his
first night in Boston, with a girl from
back then with whom he’s happily able
to recall shared traumas and express
tender memories. As his consciousness
moves backward and forward in time,
he remains tied to Boston Common
in March, with its frozen grass and air
of “everything tired of being dead.”
And he remains tied, too, to the quest
that will find him, the next afternoon,
bringing a tin of his mother’s favorite
butter cookies to the Green Meadows
retirement home out by Route 128,
where she’s concluding her life a long
way from where it began. He makes her
laugh by asking her, as he does every
time he visits, “Ay, Mamita, how did a
niña bien from the tropics like you ever
end up in a joint like this?”
T he answer reaches back to her ambi-
tious parents in Guatemala City, who
helped run a thriving toy store and en-
rolled her in the city’s Colegio Inglés
Americano, before sending her and
her brother to college in California; to
Boston, where in the 1950s she landed
in a Catholic boardinghouse after her
mother determined that she wouldn’t
marry any of her pie- eyed suitors back
home, and where she worked as a bilin-
gual secretary for the Guatemalan con-
sul; to her brief ensuing stint, before
she found a career teaching Spanish
at the Berklee School of Music, in the
employ of a denture company whose
technicians included an athletic Jew
who told her tales of his own immigrant
past at Boston’s best restaurants, while
they were courting, before he moved
her, after they wed, to the lonely suburb
where she’d remain.
Some of this the writer learns from
eighty-year- old Mamita, who’s more
willing, as her memory dies, to mine
its contents for her Frankie. He knows
more from his sister and from his uncle.
Over the weekend, he learns more still
from one of the au pairs who lived in
the room Bert built in their house’s
basement, and who tell him over coffee
about how many times “Yoli” packed
her bags and tried to leave, only to be
scared at the last minute into staying;
about how after she had brought her
young son home to “Guate” it was her
devout Catholic mother, his Abuelita,
who insisted she return to Boston when
little Frankie came down with tubercu-
losis; and about how the true source of
Bert’s rage, when she returned and he
began abusing her, was his impotence.
To the people with whom Francisco
grew up, the Latino side of his heritage
toward which he would gravitate was
even more confounding than his Jew-
ishness. But he’s often wondered, he
admits, why as a young author he didn’t
just adopt his mother’s surname (who
wants to be “another Jewish writer”?)
to avoid confusing the philistines, as
common in publishing as they are in life,
who want us all to be “just one thing.”
It was only through reading other Jew-
ish writers who were steeped in Cath-
olic mores, he says, that he learned to
embrace what Natalia Ginzburg called
her pathos ebraico—a fortifying sense
of his Jewishness, alongside the other
parts of himself, as feeding his outsid-
er’s sense for always seeing how no one
is “just one thing.”
He shares with his mother an old
photo he got from a distant cousin in
Guatemala, which attests that her own
criollo clan isn’t as white as “good fami-
lies” in that part of the world all pretend:
it depicts her mustached grandfather
and his wife from the country’s coastal
lowlands, who’s plainly of African de-
scent. Mamita giggles in her wheelchair.
She giggles louder when Frankie asks
her if it’s true that, back when her only
escape from Bert’s house was the read-
ings and talks she attended at the Latin
American Society in Boston, she’d met
a man there. She takes another cookie.
“Yes, I did.” Miguel was from Mexico
City and worked for Honeywell, which
sent him to Boston to learn about com-
puters. He had long hair and liked to
read, and she loved him. They’d spent
a few months, before he went home,
meeting at the Hilltop Sheraton. “I’m
proud of you, Mami,” says her son.
“That you were brave enough to do
that, to have your love affair.”
Frankie and his father eventually
found, before Bert’s death, a kind of
equilibrium, if not love, in a relation-
ship that “was a failure in pretty much
every way.” It’s to the writer’s great re-
lief that he hasn’t become his father in
the way he treats his intimates. But he
also wonders at how, in certain ways, he
has become his mother—an immigrant
whose life has spanned two cultures
and countries and who perhaps found,
after years had passed, that she never
felt at home in the United States but no
longer fit in her homeland either. “One
of the strangest things I’ve done with
my own life,” he reflects, “has been to
follow her path, in a sense willfully di-
vesting in order to pour myself into that
mold of divided.”
O n his last night in town, after shut-
ting down the hotel bar, he finds his
weekend’s denouement on a late-night
walk down darkened streets. Through
the glowing window of a brownstone in
Back Bay, the writer glimpses a paint-
ing that prompts him to conjure a scene
that’s drawn not from memory but from
his whiskey-warmed imagination. It
involves his young mother having her
portrait painted, in a townhouse like
this one, by a war-hero friend of her new
husband’s. The sequence’s dreamlike
leaps, in a narrative whose revelations
have up to now felt finely measured,
threaten to lose the reader. It’s almost as
if the creator of this narrator who’s con-
vinced us that the events he’s recounted
all occurred during one weekend rather
than over several visits, as perhaps
seems more likely, wants to remind
us that we’re reading a work of fiction
whose author’s name isn’t Goldberg but
Goldman. But this is the prerogative of
a novelist. And it may be the imperative
of this one, who is both the son of a soci-
ety “that somehow collectively realized
there was a certain kind of truthfulness
it was essential to do without” and a
writer who, as Goldman once told an
interviewer, has “never liked the mem-
oir form because I tend to think that
memory fictionalizes anyway.”
Either way, the memoir-as-novel
Goldman has written about the people
who made him breathes with expiation.
It’s an unloading of truths that no lon-
ger feel heavy, in a life that has landed,
as this book’s end suggests, in a good
place: his crush texts him back.
Today Goldman has a new partner
and a young daughter. He’s beloved by
a generation of younger writers who
have built careers based on his con-
ception of America as composed of the
essential bonds, often violent, that join
the United States to the lands and peo-
ples to our south. As a member of that
generation who’s also a half Jew from
New England, I share even more with
Goldman than his sense of “Ameri-
can” as a word that connotes not one
country but a hemisphere. And reading
this painful, refractive, beautiful book,
I couldn’t but be reminded of when I
met him for the first time, a few months
after his beloved Aura’s death, when he
was still raw with grief. He had come to
Berkeley to discuss The Art of Politi-
cal Murder. When he said then through
watery eyes that if the murderers he’d
fingered in that book wanted him dead,
he was ready to die, I believed him.
He’s not ready now. Q
The New York Review
 How Do Whispers Become Movements?
Susie Linfield

The Quiet Before:

On the Unexpected Origins
of Radical Ideas
by Gal Beckerman.
Crown, 331 pp., $28.99

The most thrilling part of Ten Days

That Shook the World (1919), John
Reed’s account of the Bolshevik Rev-
olution in 1917, is not the storming of
the Winter Palace or Leon Trotsky’s
impassioned speeches. It is the citi-
zens’ debates— described as “hot,”
“endless,” “violent,” and “stormy”—
over what course the revolution should
take, or even whether it should take any
course at all:

Lectures, debates, speeches—in

theatres, circuses, school-houses,
clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union
headquarters, barracks. . . . Meet-
ings in the trenches at the Front,
in village squares, factories. . . . For
months in Petrograd, and all over
Russia, every street-corner was a
public tribune. In railway trains,
street-cars, always the spurting up of
impromptu debate, everywhere. . . .

Conversation, at least in Reed’s excit-

ing and highly partisan telling, was at
the heart of the revolutionary process
in its very early days. This was democ-
racy in action, democracy in the streets
(which we, of course, know would soon
be brutally stifled).
Seven decades later, this culture of
disputation emerged as a central theme
in Timothy Garton Ash’s The Magic
Lantern, his eyewitness report on the
Eastern European revolutions of 1989.
In Prague’s Civic Forum, all the exi-
gent issues— socialism versus a mar-
ket economy, free elections and a free
press, the rule of law, parliamentary
democracy—were debated by an ex-
traordinary group of students, actors,
workers, economists, philosophers,
poets, historians, playwrights. “To
watch all this,” Garton Ash wrote, “was
to watch politics in a primary, sponta-
neous, I almost said ‘pure’ form.”
Gal Beckerman, too, is interested in
political talk. His new book, The Quiet
Before, is essentially a history of con-
versation, beginning in seventeenth-
century France and ending in
modern- day Cairo, Charlottesville,
Miami, and Minneapolis. Beckerman
concentrates not on the revolutionary
moment, though—the capture of the
Bastille, say, or Fidel Castro’s trium-
phant arrival in Havana—but on the
antecedents of transformative politi-
cal change. “The incubation of radical
new ideas,” he writes, “is a very distinct
process with certain conditions: a tight
space, lots of heat, passionate whisper-
ing, and a degree of freedom to work
toward a common, focused aim.”
The conversations that he documents
occur not just in person—indeed, rarely
in person— but through letters, peti-
tions, newspapers, manifestos, samizdat
journals, and feminist zines. And they
take place, these days, on social media.
Whether this constitutes a continuation
of the radical tradition or its negation is
a— perhaps the— crucial question that
Beckerman explores. We know of the
Twitter ranters, Facebook trolls, and In-
stagram influencers, but where are the
passionate whisperers of today?
Beckerman’s first chapter is a profile
of the natural philosopher and proto-
globalist Nicolas- Claude Fabri de
Peiresc. The place is Aix- en-Provence;
the year is 1635. Peiresc had a daunt-
ingly capacious intellect; among his
projects, Beckerman observes, were
an investigation of ancient weights
and measures, a study of the
Roman calendar of 354 . . . , a cat-
alog of gemstones that he and the
Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens
had been compiling together, the
publication of all the Samaritan
versions of the Pentateuch in He-
brew, Aramaic, and Arabic, and an
exhaustive history of Provence.
That’s a partial list.
Beckerman focuses on Peiresc’s “ob-
session with longitude,” by which he
sought to calculate the exact dimen-
sions of the Mediterranean Sea. This
challenging task—which would be of
invaluable help to sailors, traders, and
explorers—required the simultane-
ous observation, from multiple geo-
graphical locations, of a lunar eclipse.
Peiresc was working in the early days
of the scientific revolution, which de-
manded an epistemological and eth-
ical transformation— one that was
extraordinarily dangerous. (See, for
instance, Galileo, who was hauled be-
fore the Inquisition for daring to state
that the earth circles the sun.) To stage
Geoff McFetridge: Untitled Study, 2019
his experiment, Peiresc collected—via
letters— a wide-ranging group of col-
laborators, including a priest in Syria,
a former cardinal’s secretary (and for-
mer slave) in Tunis, a Jesuit in Quebec,
and various interlocutors in France,
Germany, and the Netherlands.
For the longitude experiment,
Peiresc needed to teach his would-be
colleagues a new way of thinking, in
which the acquisition of knowledge
would be based on skepticism, ob-
servation, and reason, rather than on
religious dogma or fealty to the past.
Beckerman explains:
Redrawing a map might sound like
a mundane cause upon which to
concentrate such intense attention,
but the letters tell a different story.
Peiresc had to gently pull these po-
tential observers toward a new re-
lationship with nature, one not at
all familiar or safe.
Letters were slow, which means that for
Peiresc’s purposes they were perfect.
“The ruminative aspect of letters, the
embedded patience of them,” Beck-
erman writes, “avoided what might
otherwise feel like the locked horn con-
frontation of one system of truth trying
to overtake another.” Indeed, Beck-
erman calls this chapter “Patience,”
though it reads like a thriller. How
could Peiresc find his collaborators,
and how convince them of his strange
project’s worth? Would they all show
up at the right time and understand
his instructions? Could they take this
seemingly small yet monumental step
into a new way of seeing, of knowing,
of experiencing the world?
In spite of the formidable logistics,
the experiment worked. On the night
of August 28, 1635, Peiresc’s far-flung
correspondents documented their mea-
surements of the lunar eclipse, then
(slowly) sent them to him. He and his
amateur scientists discovered the Med-
iterranean’s true shape, which differed
significantly from the depictions on
contemporary maps. Those who read
his findings were, Peiresc wrote, “rav-
ished and almost beside themselves.”
Beckerman’s subsequent subjects
are wildly eclectic. They include Fear-
gus O’Connor, a charismatic leader of
Britain’s nineteenth- century Chartist
movement for universal male suffrage;
Mina Loy, a British-born artist, writer,
and fellow-traveler of the Italian Fu-
turists; Natalya Gorbanevskaya, a poet
and Soviet dissident who documented
human rights abuses in an under-
ground publication called the Chroni-
cle and was imprisoned in a psychiatric
hospital in the early 1970s1 ; and the
punk-rock Riot Grrrls of the 1990s.
The movements they were involved in
weren’t necessarily, or at least immedi-
ately, successful. Some met with violent
opposition; others, like Italian Futur-
ism, veered ignominiously into fascism.
What interests Beckerman in each
case is how groups of people emerge into
1
Beckerman’s first book, When They
Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic
Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry (Hough-
ton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), was a
study of Jewish refuseniks in the USSR.

May 26, 2022 25

 political self-consciousness through dis-
— Available from all booksellers and nyrb.com or dorothyproject.com — cussion and debate, and the particular
modes of communication they develop
that enable them to do so. The process
is both individual and collective: each
person who participates is changed, but
develops only in concert with others.
And only through recognizing others,
too; each of these movements addressed
a kind of loneliness.
Of the Chartist petition campaign,
Beckerman asserts:
The petition had given this newly
self-aware working class an aim,
had bound them together, turning
the particles of anger that hung
in the air above factory floors and
in the small, dank living spaces of
coal miners into something more.
NEW AND SELECTED REVENGE OF THE The act of signing their names to
STORIES SCAPEGOAT: A NOVEL this document had unified them,
Cristina Rivera Garza Caren Beilin taking their inchoate frustration . . .
and sharpen[ing] it into a common
Trans. by Sarah Booker and others
“The author lands on an infectious purpose.
“The stories in this collection are as and perfect blend of cultural criti-
varied as Rivera Garza’s remarkable cism, wry writing advice (‘Don’t Gorbanevskaya’s typewritten publica-
career, and this book is an excellent bother writing a character since tion, Beckerman notes, would similarly
introduction to a unique writer who people change’), and magnificently help Russian dissidents “pick up the
weird storytelling. Beilin’s account of scattered pieces and put them together,
deserves to be recognized not just in
fixing their attention on the construc-
Mexico, but all over the world.” reemergence manages to be both hi-
tion of an ongoing argument. . . . Each
—Kirkus, starred review larious and deeply moving.”
saw their plight as unique. Now they
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
would literally be on the same page.”
“This hypnotic, riveting collection of Reading, circulating, and contribut-
new and previously published stories “Animated with the moxie and wit of ing to the Chronicle brought its par-
from MacArthur Fellow Rivera Garza Acker and Tillman, Caren Beilin is ticipants closer to one another and
. . . ought to earn [her] the wider at- one of the most bizarre and fearless fostered a kind of psychic cohesion,
tention she deserves.” writers of her generation.” “shattering the distinctly Soviet feeling
—Publishers Weekly, starred review —Catherine Lacey of having two selves.” It was the pre-
condition for what Václav Havel called
Dorothy, a publishing project living in truth.
Distributed through New York Review Books
Beckerman’s wide range is impressive
and makes The Quiet Before the most
original book I’ve read in a long time.
One particularly fascinating chapter
focuses on Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Ni-
gerian editor of The African Morning
Post, an anticolonialist newspaper in
1930s Accra, the capital of what was
B.B. then the Gold Coast (now Ghana).
Paperback • $12.99 • For ages 8–12 The Gold Coast, a British colony, had
On sale May 31st a small but burgeoning middle class. Its
members were immersed in local cul-
ture and traditions, but they also loved
Hollywood films and Shakespeare, and
they sought “a fast track to modernity.”
Part fantasy, part ecological parable, The Little Grey Men Go Down the Bright Stream was But how to get there— and more im-
first published in 1948 and remains as exciting, poignant, and far-seeing as ever. portant, what did this mean? The Af-
Sneezewort, Baldmoney, Dodder, and Cloudberry are the last gnomes in Britain. Life rican Morning Post became the forum
along the Folly Brook, where the gnomes live companionably with the birds and beasts, is through which they could debate the
wild and wet, just the way they like it. But one spring day, waking up from a long winter construction of an independent, mod-
sleep, the gnomes are confronted by an inescapable fact: Their brook is drying up and ern Africa: one that neither supinely
will soon be uninhabitable. mimicked nor resentfully rejected the
A sequel to B.B.’s award-winning The Little Grey Men, this novel is about the gnomes’
West. Azikiwe— affectionately known
perilous and daring search for a new home. Warwickshire and the rest of their beloved
as “Zik” to his colleagues, readers,
country has been despoiled by men, and the gnomes must find another place as wild and
and countrymen— became the man to
wet as their home once was.
guide this dialogue.
Azikiwe was born in 1904 in Nigeria.
“A couple of years ago I found myself gazing at the cover of a book I’d loved as a child . . . I To further his education, in 1925 he trav-
braced myself in case its magic had faded in the 40 years since it had been read to me at eled to the US, where he encountered
bedtime. . . I loved B.B.’s illustrations, the precise and detailed rendering of the natural black intellectuals like Alain Locke,
history in the book, and most of all the feeling it gave me of a secret world to which I was Ralph Bunche, Thurgood Marshall,
being granted privileged access. I needn’t have worried. As I turned the pages I found myself and Langston Hughes. He attended
enchanted all over again.” —Melinda Harrison on The Little Grey Men, The Guardian several universities and was eventu-
Also by B.B.
ally accepted into a Ph.D. program at
Columbia, but his place, he felt, was
The Little Grey Men
“My dad bought the beautifully illustrated book The Little Grey Men,
Africa. “I shall dedicate my life to the
by B.B. (ages 8 to 12), for me when I was 8 or 9. It’s about three gnomes emancipation of the continent of Africa
searching for their long-lost brother. Aside from being a rattling good from the shackles of imperialism, and to
adventure story, it’s a wonderful sort of nature study, following gnomes the redemption of my country from the
through the seasons.” —Julie Andrews, Parents Magazine manacles of foreign rule,” he wrote. In
1934 he moved to the Gold Coast and
Available from booksellers and www.nyrb.com became editor of the Accra paper.
By American standards, The African
Morning Post was unsophisticated. But
26
it was also the means by which Accra’s
teachers, civil servants, and others could
begin to define themselves through
questions and answers, controversy and
dispute; many of its pages consisted of
anonymous contributions from read-
ers. Like Peiresc, Zik sought to instill a
new sensibility: one that would lead his
readers to “see beyond their fractured
state as a collection of tribes.”
The paper’s subjects were cultural as
much as political— as if the two could
be disentangled. Which Dickens novel
was best? What were the benefits of life
insurance? Which was better: polyg-
amy or “the European form” of mar-
riage? In short, Beckerman writes:
How much of traditional culture
and practice would have to be
thrown off to seize upon a modern
national identity? These questions
snaked through every column and
reader response.
It may seem strange to us— exhausted as
we are by the rancorous chatter on cable
television and Twitter—that in Accra,
unfettered debate was seen as the en-
abler, not the enemy, of unity. “It was
the arguing that allowed them to peek
over the dividers of tribe or social status
and establish new allegiances,” Becker-
man observes. Conflict, disagreement,
altercation, intellectual friction— call it
what you will: these were the building
blocks of solidarity, political awareness,
and a shared sense of citizenship and
nation.
Like most courageous editors, Zik ran
into trouble. In 1936 he printed an arti-
cle titled “Has the African a God?” The
British authorities, already eager to shut
down the troublesome paper, indicted
Zik for sedition. But he was eventually
acquitted, and the affair was regarded
as a great victory by anticolonial intel-
lectuals. Kwame Nkrumah, the leader
of Ghana’s independence movement,
described the trial and acquittal as “the
first warning puff of smoke that a fire
had been lit, a fire that would prove im-
possible to extinguish.”
This is where Beckerman ends his
story, though he notes that, decades
later, Azikiwe became the first presi-
dent of independent Nigeria. The post-
script to the postscript is less happy: in
1966 he was ousted by a military coup
and barely escaped assassination, and
Nigeria has been racked by exactly the
kind of tribal and ethnic violence that
Azikiwe fought against so valiantly.
It’s a long way from there to here: from
the “healthy friction” fostered, at least
sometimes, by predigital forms of com-
munication to the decidedly unhealthy
friction of today’s social media world,
with its energetic invective, charac-
ter assassinations, fog of lies, and
attention- challenged TikTok junkies.
This is the subject of Beckerman’s final
chapters— and, as he notes in his intro-
duction, the troubled inspiration for his
book. He recalls how, while marching
with his wife and daughters to protest
Donald Trump’s election, he noticed,
“in a moment of cynicism or clarity, that
everyone around me was incessantly
posing for their camera phones. . . .
For all the power social media has lent
to movements . . . it has also stunted
them.” The last section of The Quiet
Before brings us close to the present.
Beckerman discusses the alt-right or-
ganizers of the 2017 Charlottesville
The New York Review
demonstration, the democracy activists
of Cairo’s Arab Spring, and the racial-
justice movements that gained momen-
tum after George Floyd’s murder.
In a chapter called “The Torches,”
Beckerman describes how, in the
months before the Unite the Right
rally in Charlottesville, leaders of var-
ious alt-right groups created a small,
invitation- only chat room— a safe
space!—to discuss organizational strat-
egies. (Andrew Anglin, a particularly
notorious neo-Nazi, cited the commu-
nity organizer Saul Alinsky as his in-
spiration.) They were preoccupied with
how to reach, rather than alarm, po-
tential supporters. Thus, swastikas and
hoods were to be strictly avoided; after
much debate, a uniform of white shirts
and khakis was approved. “This seems
trivial, but it also represented the first
of several small victories enabled by
the platform,” Beckerman comments.
“What everyone agreed upon is that
they should look like nice young men.”
Burning flags— even a “fag flag”—
was debated and rejected. (“A terrible
idea,” one participant wrote, arguing
instead for “intelligent and level rea-
soning, and civilized manner.”) Ditto
book-burning, which “will accomplish
nothing other than making us look like
we’re scared of literature.”
Of course, we know that the Char-
lottesville rally was anything but intel-
ligent, reasonable, or civilized, and this
was not just a case of bad optics. Anti-
Semitic and other racist slogans were
chanted by demonstrators carrying lit
torches, Nazi and Confederate flags
abounded, dozens of counterprotesters
were injured, and one of them, Heather
Heyer, was killed. The presumed calm-
ness of the movement’s cyber- debates
was overwhelmed by the fury of its ac-
tual politics. In my view, this chapter
is therefore a warning about the limits
and illusions of cyberspace rather than
an example of its success.
What interests Beckerman, though—
what, frankly, impresses him—is what
happens when “a self-selecting group
retreats to a quieter, slower, more pri-
vate, and less performative sphere” to
work out its politics. This is something,
he shows, that proved difficult for the
democratic movements in Cairo and
Minneapolis.
It is in Beckerman’s chapter on the 2011
protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that his
harshest, most direct criticisms of social
media emerge. He narrates the events:
how the gruesome photograph of Khaled
Said, a young computer programmer
tortured to death by the Egyptian po-
lice in 2010, inspired a Facebook page
called “We Are All Khaled Said,” which
rapidly gained hundreds of thousands
of followers; how a giant demonstration
that seemed to bridge Egypt’s religious,
cultural, and political divides was orga-
nized online; how the jubilant days in
the square led to the previously unimag-
inable: President Hosni Mubarak’s exit.
Quickly, though, problems emerged:
sharp differences among the initial
protesters became clear; elections were
hastily called, which the well-organized
Muslim Brotherhood won; the new
president, Mohamed Morsi, rapidly
though predictably established an au-
thoritarian Islamist regime. This led to
an enormous recall movement, the ar-
my’s intervention, and the 2013 Rabaa
massacre, in which, on a single day,
security forces killed at least nine hun-
May 26, 2022
dred Morsi supporters during a sit-in.2
Today, under the rule of General Abdel
Fattah el- Sisi, Egypt is a police state;
the repression is worse than ever; many
of the young activists are in exile or jail.
Beckerman views this as a cautionary
tale about the limits of organizing via so-
cial media, which thrives on conflict, im-
mediacy, sensationalism, superficiality,
drama, and anonymity. These are not
democracy’s building blocks. Thus, by
their very nature, Facebook and similar
platforms “proved extremely ineffective
at allowing people to focus, to organize
their thoughts, to become ideologically
coherent, to strategize, to pick leaders,”
Beckerman argues. “In short, the revo-
lutionaries were denied everything they
needed if they were going to win the
day—a tall order in any circumstance.”
The Tahrir movement’s experience
of a fast rise and precipitous fall was
preceded by Iran’s Green Movement of
2009, though Beckerman does not dis-
cuss this. There, too, young, educated
opponents of the repressive regime or-
ganized via social media and thronged,
peacefully but with elation, into the
capital’s streets; there they met violence
and defeat at the hands of the army, the
police, and the Revolutionary Guards.
At the time, the Green Movement was
lauded— glibly and obnoxiously— as
the “Twitter Revolution” by some in
the Western press. The revolutionaries
in Tehran knew better, and criticized
themselves for their reliance on social
media technologies.
The activist Afsaneh Moqadam ex-
pressed this self- critique in his pseud-
onymous book Death to the Dictator!
(2010):
Iranians discover that they have an
ambivalent attitude toward tech-
nology. Cell phone cameras, Face-
book, Twitter, the satellite stations:
the media are supposed to reflect
what is going on, but they seem, in
fact, to be making everything hap-
pen much faster. There’s no time to
argue what it all means—what the
protesters want, if they’re ready to
die. The movement rolls forward,
gathering speed, and no one really
knows where it’s going.
Cairenes were soon to learn this bitter
lesson. Beckerman quotes Alaa Abd
el-Fattah, one of Egypt’s most per-
sistent and most persecuted democracy
activists, who spoke to an interviewer in
2019 while briefly released from prison.
(As of this writing, he’s back in jail for a
new five-year term.) El-Fattah rued the
“regression” of Egyptian politics since
Tahrir: “It’s not the fault of Egyptians;
it’s the medium they are using. You’re
just swallowed up by Facebook. . . . This
is a trap.”3
Beckerman’s analysis of the Tahrir
events is right as far as it goes, but it is
also disappointingly limited. An enor-
mous amount has been written about
the so- called Arab Spring by Western
observers, Arab journalists, and par-
ticipants; Beckerman adds little that is
new. And though he briefly mentions
2
See Yasmine El Rashidi, “Egypt: The
Misunderstood Agony,” The New York
Review, September 26, 2013.
3
For more on Alaa Abd el-Fattah, see
Ursula Lindsey’s review in these pages
of his You Have Not Yet Been Defeated:
Selected Works, 2011–2021 (Seven Sto-
ries, 2022), April 21, 2022.
Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement,
formed in 2008 to support striking
workers, he ignores years of political
organizing by farmers, civil servants,
students, and neighborhood activists.
The Quiet Before is a study of radical
movements’ antecedents; here the au-
thor gives them short shrift.
There are more substantial problems
with the Tahrir Square chapter. Beck-
erman has been strongly influenced by
the media theorist Marshall McLuhan
and his oft- quoted motto that “the me-
dium is the message”; indeed, The Quiet
Before is essentially an exploration of
that idea. Beckerman concentrates on
Tahrir’s secular, educated, tech-savvy,
anti-authoritarian youth, whom he
greatly admires. (So do I.) But Tahrir
showed— as did Charlottesville—that,
ultimately, the message is the message,
and that it will subsume the medium.
Egypt is a culturally rich but extremely
poor, socially conservative, religiously
observant country with a far too low lit-
eracy rate. There is little indication that
most Egyptians yearn for the secular de-
mocracy of which the young organizers
dreamed. That is why the “Arab Spring”
moniker, with its echoes of 1848 and
Prague 1968, was itself a misnomer.4
Beckerman’s penultimate chapter
focuses on two racial-justice organi-
zations: Dream Defenders, which was
founded in Miami after the 2012 kill-
ing of Trayvon Martin, and Black Vi-
sions, founded in Minneapolis in 2017.
Some striking parallels with the Tahrir
movement emerge. There was the same
suspicion of leadership; Beckerman
rather gently calls this “horizontalism,”
though he allows that this can become
“a fetish.” There was the same use of
brutal visuals, especially the gruesome
phone video documenting George
Floyd’s agonized last minutes. And
there was the same growing recognition
that the movement’s reliance on memes,
hashtags, and tweets— all fostering an
addiction to the sugar high of imme-
diate, short-lived attention—was less
a reflection of real power than a dead
end. Beckerman quotes Rachel Gilmer,
a Dream Defenders organizer: “Social
media is constantly fueling and draining
our egos— making us feel hyper belit-
tled and narcissistic at the same time,”
she wrote to her followers in 2015. In re-
sponse, the Dream Defenders retreated
from social media and began organizing
the old-fashioned way: speaking one-on-
one to people in the black community.
In Minneapolis, an exhausted Black
Lives Matter organizer named Miski
Noor, a Somali immigrant, had come to
a similar conclusion about the political
limits of social media. In response, Noor
and six others founded a new group
called Black Visions, “a Black-led Queer
and Trans centering organization,”
which concentrated on what might be
called slow organizing. “If Black Lives
Matter found itself contorted by social
media’s impulses,” Beckerman writes,
“Black Visions set its own rhythm.”
But the problem, as with Tahrir, was
to be found not only in these groups’ use
or misuse of technologies. Something
was amiss with the vision. Black Visions
and Dream Defenders are dedicated to
defunding—indeed abolishing—police
and prisons, which they view as a kind
4
See Hussein Agha and Robert Malley,
“This Is Not a Revolution,” The New
York Review, November 8, 2012.
of ur- evil. (Black Visions defines crime
as “a colonial concept used to control
oppressed people” that is “usually em-
bedded in white-supremacist, capitalist,
ableist, patriarchal logics.”) As the orga-
nizers emerged from their social-media
cocoons, their fellow citizens told them
some unwelcome things.
“People were basically, like, we need
more police,” Gilmer told Beckerman.
“And it was really jarring for me. . . .
Social media definitely obfuscated how
we were thinking about those things.”
In Minneapolis, Noor, too, discovered
the “uncomfortable reality” that “most
people did not understand or like the
notion of abolishing the police.” Never-
theless, Black Visions raised $30 million
in donations and pushed hard for Ques-
tion 2— abolition of the Minneapolis
police, which Noor described as part of
“a people’s agenda”—to appear on the
ballot last November. Beckerman con-
cludes this chapter with the optimistic
observation that these organizers were
now “drawing on a different metabo-
lism and, even if slow, it was working.”
But in Minneapolis, the abolition refer-
endum was defeated by twelve points—
with the margin of rejection far higher in
the three districts that are majority- or
plurality-black. Once again, it was the
message, not the medium, that prevailed.
O urs is hardly the first era to be daz-
zled, excited, bewildered, and fright-
ened by rapid technological changes.
The 1950s may seem, in retrospect, to
be an age of technological innocence,
but things felt different at the time. In a
1957 essay ominously titled “The Ene-
mies of the Novel,” the critic Granville
Hicks lamented:
Technology has opened the whole
world to us, and has laid the prob-
lem of every part of it on our
doorstep. Inattention becomes
indispensable to survival. . . . The
danger is that we shall lose, or per-
haps never acquire, the ability to
pay attention to anything, to listen
fully, with all our being.
He probably would have appreciated
Johann Hari’s new book, Stolen Focus:
Why You Can’t Pay Attention— and
How to Think Deeply Again. 5
Yet our situation, and our anxieties,
are qualitatively different, not simply a
reiteration of the past; as Beckerman
writes, “In the same way that a car was
never really just a faster horse, talking
online was not just a virtual café.” Dig-
ital technologies have changed our love
lives and our politics, not to mention the
ways in which we talk, think, imagine,
study, read, write, cook, eat, shop, dress,
photograph, draw, invent, teach, work,
play, have sex, and raise our children.
(No doubt I’ve left out a lot.) Beck-
erman contends that the Internet “is
where we live our lives in the twenty-
first century. It has almost completely
annihilated”— a startling word—“all
those other modes of communication.”
Some of us fear that an untamable
monster has been unleashed. Perhaps
that is, as my students would say, a gen-
erational thing—social media, they tell
me, is essential to their personal and
intellectual lives. But the experiences
of the young activists in Tehran, Cairo,
Miami, and Minneapolis suggest that
they too share that fear. Q
5
Crown, 2022.
27
28 The New York Review
May 26, 2022 29

The Devil’s Half Acre:
The Untold Story of How One
Woman Liberated the South’s
Most Notorious Slave Jail
by Kristen Green.
Seal, 332 pp., $30.00
In The Allure of the Archives (1989),
a gem of a book, the French historian
Arlette Farge talks about unearthing,
insofar as it’s possible, a past that’s not
quite past— particularly in relation to
the lives of women, whose histories
have often been hidden, forgotten, or
written over, women spoken about
but whom we seldom hear speaking.
Combing through the judicial archives
at the Préfecture of Paris, Farge reads
the sullen or angry answers that or-
dinary eighteenth- century Parisian
women, some of the city’s poorest and
most vulnerable, give to the police who
have arrested them. And she knows
that to understand what they say, or
don’t say, we need to care and not to
care: to distance ourselves with empa-
thy while we set aside expectations and
assumptions. Deciphering what’s left
in the archives, Farge writes, “entails a
roaming voyage through the words of
others, and a search for a language that
can rescue their relevance.”
Piecing together stories about
women who managed the uncertain-
ties and privations of their situations is
even more difficult when the women in
question have been enslaved and thus
forbidden even the basic rights that an
eighteenth- century Parisian laundress
enjoyed. That is Kristen Green’s task in
her impassioned The Devil’s Half Acre,
which she calls “the untold story of how
one woman liberated the South’s most
notorious slave jail.”
Green is a journalist and also the
author of Something Must Be Done
About Prince Edward County (2015),
a personal account of how that Virginia
county defied Brown v. Board of Ed-
ucation and shut down its schools for
almost five years rather than integrate
them. In The Devil’s Half Acre, she
recovers the life of Mary Lumpkin, an
enslaved woman of mixed race born in
1832 who, likely by 1840, was held in
bondage at Lumpkin’s Jail, a chamber
of horrors located between Franklin
and Broad Streets in Shockoe Bottom,
the central slave-trading quarter in
Richmond, Virginia.
Owned by Robert Lumpkin, the
property consisted of four brick build-
ings on about a half acre of land: the
Lumpkin residence, a boardinghouse
for traders who’d come to town to buy
and sell human beings, a building with
a kitchen and tavern, and the fourth
building, two stories high, which was
the jail itself. Men were confined on the
lower floor, women on the upper, all of
them behind thick bars until they were
sold at auction or purchased privately.
Nearby were Lumpkin’s stables and the
kennel where he kept his bloodhounds.
A tall fence with iron spikes enclosed
the entire area, which Blacks dubbed
the Devil’s Half Acre.
Born around 1806, Robert Lumpkin
was, as a young man, already purchas-
ing enslaved men and reselling them at
a profit. By 1844, he had made enough
money to be able to buy the jail from
the slave trader Bacon Tait. There, cli-
30
A Fable of Agency
Brenda Wineapple
Lumpkin’s Jail; engraving from A History of the Richmond Theological Seminary, 1895
ents might ask Lumpkin to “see that the
negroes wash & fix up as well as they
can for the market.” And from the scant
ledgers that remain, it’s evident that he
kept meticulous records. One planter
boarded at Lumpkin’s for more than
a month while he bought six people.
Some of the buyers preferred to con-
duct their transactions at the jail rather
than attend auctions, out of discretion.
The hypocrisies were overwhelming;
the business, loathsome.
Fugitive slaves were delivered to
Lumpkin’s Jail, the most famous being
Anthony Burns, who long remembered
the Devil’s Half Acre. Having escaped
from slavery in Virginia only to be seized
in Boston in 1854, outraging much of
the city, Burns was shipped to Rich-
mond and locked away for four months
in a tiny cell in Lumpkin’s Jail, where,
chained and manacled, he was given dry
cornbread and rancid bacon to eat, a
bucket of water once a week to drink,
and a rude bench on which to sleep. The
Reverend Armstead Mason Newman
also grimly remembered Lumpkin’s
Jail, where he’d been viciously whipped
as a boy, his hands and feet shackled by
metal rings attached to the floor.
But despite Green’s admirable sleuth-
ing, we don’t know much about Mary
Lumpkin. There are few direct sources
of enslaved women speaking in their
own voice until Reconstruction, when
a number of depositions were taken,
and even these were mostly from men.
Green uncovers some of the available
reminiscences: Burns remembered her
as Lumpkin’s “yellow wife.” The Rev-
erend Newman recalled her as a “splen-
did looking” woman who regarded
him with pity when he was brought to
Lumpkin’s Jail. The Reverend Nathan-
iel Colver, who met her after the war,
described her as a “large, fair-faced
freed-woman, nearly white.” And in
the documents assembled by the Works
Progress Administration of Virginia,
there’s this wrenching recollection:
Early in the 1850s Lumpkin bought
an especially fine batch of slaves.
Special Collections, University of Virginia Library
self compulsory, is commandeered by
a despot who could sell the enslaved
woman and her children at the drop
of a hat. Acknowledging this, and rec-
ognizing that we don’t know much—
and definitely not how Mary herself
regarded this liaison— Green reports,
accurately, that she learned to read and
write. Where and how she learned is
not known.
In 1856 Mary’s two daughters, aged
about eleven and nine, were sent to the
Ipswich Female Seminary in Ipswich,
Massachusetts. Regrettably, this is one
of the instances where Green glides
from speculation into assertion: since
Mary “undoubtedly worried” about
her daughters as they approached pu-
berty, Green surmises that “Robert
Lumpkin may also have wanted to
protect them from the fate he imposed
on Mary— being sexually abused and
forced to have children.” This leads her
to conclude that Robert “knew that he
needed to get them to safety,” reiterat-
ing that he knew that “moving his girls
out of Richmond was the best way to
protect them.”
One, a young girl named Mary There are documented cases of such
Jane, was so well thought of by the hypocrisy; that this wealthy white
proprietor that he decided to keep slave trader might educate his racially
her on. Saved from the terrors of mixed, enslaved family was not anom-
the cotton country, the girl did all alous. As Green points out, Richmond
she could to show her gratefulness, slave traders like Bacon Tait, Silas
even when she discovered what her Omohundro, and John Hagan took as
chief duty was to be. their common-law wives women whom
they “owned” and then educated their
Mary bore five children while at the children or moved them north. Green
Devil’s Half Acre, and though Green might have reflected on the psycho-
rightly reminds us that Robert Lump- logical contortions that allowed a man
kin was an enslaver and a rapist, she also to buy and sell other human beings,
speculates that Mary and the children and to beat them, while paying for his
occupied what seems to have been a daughters’ education in the free state of
genteel Victorian household: “She and Massachusetts.
the children probably lived in the main
house on the jail property,” and they
“may have had the freedom to move A part from the accounts of his repul-
about the grounds.” Supposing too that sive profession and his ruthlessness, we
Lumpkin “may have set aside a space know almost as little about Robert as
in the main house to give her and the we do about Mary Lumpkin. In 1857,
children some privacy,” Green muses the same year as the Supreme Court’s
that “he may have furnished it with or- baleful Dred Scott decision, the Rich-
nate furniture and pretty linens,” and mond court registration records list
that “he likely bought instruments and Mary Lumpkin as a “free woman of
provided musical instruction, along color,” according to Hannah Cather-
with tutoring and French lessons.” Per- ine Craddock in her fine master’s thesis
haps, she adds, he bought Mary silk on Black female landowners in Vir-
stockings. ginia.* Interestingly, that same year,
Words like “may have” and “likely” with money from Robert, Mary pur-
and “perhaps” and “maybe,” which ap- chased a brick house in Philadelphia
pear as many as nine times in a single under the name Mary F. Scott, which
paragraph, seriously damage Green’s was, according to Green, “presumably
credibility, as do certain blanket gener- either her birth surname or the name
alizations. Referring to Thomas Jeffer- of a previous enslaver.” Her daughters
son’s relationship with Sally Hemings went to live there, not Richmond, after
and a 1995 movie, Jefferson in Paris, they left school. And in the 1860 cen-
in which it was romanticized, Green sus, the Lumpkins were listed as white,
warns us not to consider the relationship although, as Green emphasizes, that
between Mary and Robert Lumpkin a designation was made by the census
love affair. “The desire to take some- taker, not the person herself.
thing deeply despicable and make it pal- While in Ipswich, the Lumpkin
atable is an American pathology,” she daughters were said to pass as “white
continues in a sweeping broadside. “At ladies,” the Reverend Charles Corey
every step, white America wants to san- later recalled. (In the federal census
itize the trauma and abuse of slavery— of 1870, they were also designated as
trauma and abuse that Mary Lumpkin white.) “Perhaps they passed,” Green
surely suffered.” writes, “to receive an excellent educa-
Certainly, the relationship between tion.” Yet to her, “the emotional costs
master and slave is a particular circle of denying their Blackness, and some-
of hell for the slave, even if absurdly
staged as a love affair or a genteel *“Black Female Landowners in Rich-
Victorian household, with nice linens mond, Virginia 1850–1877,” master’s
and a piano. After all, the liaison, it- thesis, William and Mary, 2012, p. 23.
The New York Review
times their families, were high.” This
is a central motif in her book. “What
must it have been like to live in a neigh-
borhood surrounded by other multi-
racial people?” she asks rhetorically.
Hinting that the Lumpkin family may
have been ashamed of their “relation-
ships with white slave traders,” Green
writes that, “perhaps feeling that they
couldn’t tell anyone else about what
had happened to them, they erased
pieces of themselves in order to make
life work in the North.” But around
one another, she imagines, “they could
be their true selves, confiding . . . and
commiserating about their shared
experiences.”
Whether or not this is true, the
Lumpkins did live among a mixed-race
population in Philadelphia’s Seventh
Ward. As W. E. B. Du Bois observed
in The Philadelphia Negro (1899), his
study of the area, the city supported a
range of Black immigrants from var-
ious southern states— and from dif-
ferent classes. And in both Richmond
and Philadelphia, the church offered
camaraderie as well as educational op-
portunities. “Maybe the women joined
Black churches,” Green comments,
“which set expectations about how
they should behave and provided shape
to their lives as they sought to remake
the image of Black men and women
into one of upstanding citizens.” Draw-
ing on Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s A
Fragile Freedom: African American
Women and Emancipation in the Ante-
bellum City (2008), Green outlines the
mutual aid organizations, social net-
works, and churches available to Mary
Lumpkin that she may— or may not—
have joined.
In Philadelphia, Lumpkin mysteri-
ously listed herself as a widow in the
1861 city directory, “which may have
been the story she told people,” Green
suggests. Subsequently, though Green
does not mention this, Robert Lump-
kin reappears in the 1862 Philadelphia
directory as a “gentleman.” And while
he disappears in 1863, he reemerges in
the 1864 and 1865 directories, euphe-
mistically called a “merchant.” What-
ever the listings, during the war years
Lumpkin was obviously in Richmond,
still prepared to jail runaway men and
women or sell young boys for a profit.
When Richmond fell to the Union
Army in the spring of 1865, Lump-
kin chained together about fifty men,
women, and children and marched
them to the railway station, hoping he’d
be able to flee the city with them. But at
the depot he was stopped by sentinels,
who prevented them from boarding the
train, which happened to be carrying
Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. “Oh,
what a loss was there!” a reporter sar-
castically noted. “It would have been
fifty thousand dollars out of some-
body’s pocket in 1861.”
The slaves were taken back to Lump-
kin’s Jail, and the next day Black Union
soldiers flooded the city. “The doors of
the slave pens were thrown open, and
thousands came out shouting,” recalled
the formerly enslaved Garland H.
White, chaplain of the Twenty-Eighth
United States Colored Infantry, which
helped free them. “Slavery chain done
broke at last!” they sang.
T hat July, having affirmed that he’d
held no civil or military office in the
Confederacy and estimating his real
estate to be worth $20,000, Lumpkin
May 26, 2022
received a pardon from President An-
drew Johnson a mere three days after
requesting one. Infuriated by this,
Green claims that had Lincoln lived,
he might not have been so generous,
which is questionable, since Lumpkin
had not fought for the Confederacy or
overtly conspired against the Union.
In fact, Green herself had noted that
on Lincoln’s visit to liberated Rich-
mond, he “wanted to rally his broken
country around a promise to rebuild
and a plan to reincorporate the South
into the United States. He promoted
inclusion and suggested not placing
blame.”
According to testimony assembled
by the Federal Writers’ Project, Mary
and Robert Lumpkin were married
after the war. That’s doubtful, even
though there were other similar re-
Excavations at the site of Lumpkin’s Jail, Richmond, Virginia, 2008
ports. A white minister said that after
Richmond fell, Lumpkin “did the hon-
orable thing of marrying her, and so le-
gitimized her and her children.” But as
Green points out, interracial marriages
were prohibited in Virginia. Besides, in
his will, Lumpkin referred to Mary not
as his wife but as the woman “who re-
sides with me.” If she was known to be
his wife, as a Black woman she could be
accused of fornication since, as Green
notes, “marriages between white and
Black people had been prohibited since
1691 by Virginia law and would not be
allowed until 1967.” Or Lumpkin could
have been protecting his posthumous
reputation.
When he died in the fall of 1866,
his obituary politely identified him as
“the proprietor of Lumpkin’s Hotel.”
There’s no reference to the jail. “His
ownership and management of a slave
jail that housed and tortured thousands
of Black people were forgotten,” Green
protests. “His scandalous history was
wiped clean.” Not entirely. In 1888 the
demolition of the infamous jail was na-
tional news, and it continued to be de-
scribed as a place “more widely known
through the south in slave days than
any similar edifice here.”
As for Lumpkin, he left Mary his
entire estate, which included the prop-
erty in Shockoe Bottom, the house in
Philadelphia, and a house in Alabama,
as well as stock in the Richmond and
Danville Railroad and in a bank he’d
founded. Should Mary wed after his
death, his and Mary’s children, whom
he named in his will, would inherit the
estate. Moreover, Lumpkin stipulated
that his bequest to his two daughters
“be held in trust for their separate use,
so that the same shall not be liable for ology, the American Baptist Home
the contracts, debts or engagements Mission Society charged the estate for
of any husband they may then have or converting it to a school: “taking irons
thereafter take.” Strangely, he seems out of 28 Window frames,” “putting in
to be saying that no other man—no steps,” and “cutting out & putting in
husband of Mary’s or his daughters’— 2 Doors.”
should deprive them of their inheri- In 1869, after the Reverend Charles
tance. Here again, it would have been Corey took over the school from
useful for Green to reflect on the crude Colver, Lumpkin asked for an advance
racial hypocrisies embedded in white on the rent. As she explained, “I have
southern society and the warped think- to raise $200 by next month, and if
ing of those who profited from and per- you could it will help me very much.”
petuated slavery. She no doubt hoped that the Baptists
would buy her property outright when
the lease expired in 1870. Certainly
In the spring of 1867, hoping to open she needed the money. But the society
a Bible school for the freedmen, the didn’t renew. The number of pupils had
abolitionist Dr. Nathaniel Colver, for- increased, the nearby creek overflowed
merly a pastor at Boston’s Tremont onto the land, and Richmond news-
Temple, went to Richmond. In despair papers referred to the whole Shockoe
over not finding a building to house it, Bottom neighborhood as disease-
infested, crime-ridden, and “disreputa-
Lumpkin’s Slave Jail Site
ble.” The society, with the assistance
of the Freedmen’s Bureau, then pur-
chased Richmond’s once-fashionable
United States Hotel for $10,000. “It
was a proud day when the students and
teachers of Lumpkin’s Jail marched up
out of that slave-pen,” exclaimed Rev-
erend Corey. Green wryly comments
that the “symbolism of a slave jail as
a school had weighed on him, and on
the students too.” She’s undoubtedly
right.
By 1872 part of the Lumpkin prop-
erty had been sold, but selling the rest,
even subdivided and at public auction,
proved difficult: the buildings were
“neither fit for residence for white
persons nor for any business purpose
except possibly as the site for some
manufacturing establishment.” Ac-
cording to Hannah Craddock, Lump-
kin eventually sold the property for
about half its appraised value to a hotel
he described meeting a group of Black proprietor, Andrew Jackson Ford.
women gathered near the First African When the jail was finally torn down,
Baptist Church, whom he told of his the school had been long gone from the
predicament. Mary Lumpkin stepped premises.
forward and offered to lease the for- Mary Lumpkin had by then returned
mer jail to Colver for three years at to Philadelphia and in 1869 left for New
$1,000 per year. The Reverend James Orleans, where she evidently lived for
H. Holmes, assistant pastor at the three years. She then headed to Ohio
church, said he first introduced Colver and the vibrant Black community in
to Lumpkin, and Colver’s descendants New Richmond. Green says she may
recalled that she leased the property have been following a Union veteran—
“for five hundred dollars a year less “perhaps her one true love.” In 1892,
than she could have rented it to others.” Ford sold the rest of the old jail to the
Though Lumpkin could do what she Richmond Iron Works, which covered
wished with the real estate she now the site with dirt to fill it out. Eventu-
owned, what she essentially inherited ally it was paved over by the construc-
were insuperable expenses: taxes, doc- tion of the Richmond and Petersburg
tors’ bills, and upkeep of the buildings. Turnpike, now Interstate 95.
By 1872 she had not paid taxes for several
years, and the men to whom she owed
money had placed liens on the prop- In 2008 a team of archaeologists
erty. No wonder, then, that she was began to excavate the Devil’s Half
eager to lease the jail to the (white, Acre, and in 2014 the National Trust
male) American Baptist Home Mission for Historic Preservation declared it a
Society, a northern institution founded “site of conscience” that would recog-
in 1832 to preach the gospel, especially nize “this dark chapter of American
to the destitute and dispossessed. And history.” Indeed, Mary Lumpkin is an
she was herself a member of the First integral part of that chapter, and Green
African Baptist Church, which she does not want her forgotten, even by
again joined when she later moved to her descendants, whom she has touch-
New Orleans. ingly tracked down. Green understand-
Soon the jail was a school, the cells ably wants to help preserve this site of
refitted as classrooms. “No longer conscience, and each page of her story
would there go up from within those is written with a principled sense of ur-
walls from brokenhearted men, torn gency and mission.
from their families forever, an ago- But she at times exceeds the evi-
nized wail to Heaven,” Colver report- dence at hand. Noting more than once
edly exclaimed. But the record suggests that Mary Lumpkin “must have been
that the school’s early founders, except proud that she was able to take the old
possibly Colver, felt no real indebted- slave jail and turn it into something
ness to Lumpkin. According to court good,” Green is certainly proud; it’s
records recently discovered by the the raison d’être of her book. But it
James River Institute for Archae- wasn’t Mary Lumpkin who liberated
31
or transformed the jail. Black troops
unlocked its doors in 1865, and the
Baptists converted it into a school,
which ultimately became Virginia
Union University, one of America’s
historically Black universities—“born
in the bosom of Lumpkin’s Jail,” said
W. Franklyn Richardson, the pres-
ent chair of the university’s board of
trustees, whom Green quotes. Unques-
tionably Lumpkin facilitated that con-
version, and though she may very well
have been proud, Green’s alleging that
The Interrogation Rooms
of the Korean War:
The Untold History
by Monica Kim.
Princeton University Press,
435 pp., $35.00; $24.95 (paper)
On New Year’s Day, I went to a book-
store in Cheonan, South Korea, to buy
a wall map of the country. The label
said, simply, “Map of Korea,” so when
I got home and unfolded it, I was sur-
prised to see that it showed both North
and South—the entire peninsula and
its hundreds of surrounding islands.
The wars of the twentieth century had
turned one country into two, mutually
cordoned off and inaccessible; South
Koreans are not permitted to visit
North Korea, or even its websites, and
vice versa. My new map felt strangely
aspirational. The armored boundary
between the two Koreas, the Demili-
tarized Zone that meanders along the
38th parallel, was just a thin, red dotted
line, hard to make out.
That red line was first drawn at the
end of World War II, when Korea was
freed after decades of Japanese rule
and cracked into Soviet and Ameri-
can halves. In 1948 the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea was estab-
lished in the North and the Republic of
Korea in the South. The Great Powers
installed authoritarian leaders to their
liking, giving ordinary people little
say. Leftists in the south of the penin-
sula formed underground communes
and waged guerrilla struggles. Tens
of thousands were massacred by US-
backed South Korean forces.
In 1950 troops from Soviet-
controlled North Korea crossed into
the US- controlled South. The Chinese
army later entered the war to support
the North, and the US worked through
a nascent UN to recruit infantrymen
from fifteen other countries. (Officially,
President Truman did not ask Con-
gress for a war declaration, calling UN
intervention in support of the South a
“police action.”) Many Koreans found
themselves fighting for one side or the
other simply by chance. In the three
years that followed, some four million
people, most of them civilians, were
killed. Millions more were injured or
separated from their families, and the
landscape was razed. The Korean War
ended in a stalemate and an armistice
that was meant to be temporary.
This was nearly seventy years ago.
There is no longer active warfare on the
32
she “accomplished something incredi-
ble” creates a fable about someone who
“exercised her agency.” Such language
unfortunately shoehorns Mary Lump-
kin into a neat story about an episode
that may or may not have meant much
to her.
“We cannot bring back to life those
whom we find cast ashore,” writes Ar-
lette Farge. But in Mary Lumpkin, who
fleetingly appears and then disappears
from view, we can now glimpse an in-
tricate, jangly world in which the actual
A Permanent Battle
E. Tammy Kim
A young Communist woman being questioned by a soldier in a prisoner-of-war camp,
Gurijae, South Korea, 1951
peninsula (despite the occasional skir-
mish, rocket launch, and military drill),
but neither is there a peace treaty. This
fragile détente is held in place by an
extraordinary buildup of arms, some
of which are American. Nearly 30,000
US troops are still stationed in South
Korea, ostensibly to defend it in the
event of another invasion.
The Korean War was “the war that
was not a war,” writes Monica Kim in
The Interrogation Rooms of the Ko-
rean War: The Untold History. Kim, a
Korean American historian at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin at Madison, delves
into a large archive of prisoner- of-war
case files recently declassified by the
US. She also draws on memoirs in En-
glish and Korean, interviews, even pe-
titions written in blood. What results
is a composite tale of the hundreds of
thousands of POWs—rank-and-file sol-
diers and “civilian internees”—who
were captured and held in sprawling,
miserable camps on both sides of the
38th parallel.
For Kim, the newly revealed stories
of these POWs help us understand the
Korean War as an intimate civil con-
flict, not just a proxy battle between
superpowers. In POW camps and in-
terrogation rooms on the North–South
border, soldiers and civilians were sub-
jected to constant questioning. But the
lives of enslaved women run counter to The choices that Mary Lumpkin had
the tales we tell or to the roles assigned to make, the mysterious drama of her
them, then and today: that is, a world internal life, the consequences of being
where rifts open between what one is sold, exploited, and assaulted— or of
supposed to be and what one is, even dwelling in fear— are often unimag-
within the pernicious institution of slav- inable and steeped in horror, courage,
ery; a world in which the lives of Blacks acumen, and anguish. Her persistence
and whites were entangled socially, eco- is a testament to her bravery and her
nomically, physically, and psychologi- humanity, and to salute it, we need not
cally through a sadistic, depraved system pretend that she liberated a slave jail or
of exploitative labor, and in which, under founded a school. What she did, what-
the most unthinkable of circumstances, ever she did, just to survive is no small
people retained their dignity. thing. Q
Corporal Paul E. Stout/National Archives and Records Administration
Korean troops, he convinced them that
he was not a soldier or a guerrilla. They
took him as a prisoner of war.
Both sides of the conflict wanted
not only to get information but also to
promote their cold war ideology. They
used coercion to prove the superiority
of their cause. Americans and their al-
lies interrogated South Koreans as well
as North Korean and Chinese soldiers.
Across the border, the North Koreans
and Chinese questioned Americans, UN
forces, and South and North Koreans.
Where “no category—whether refugee,
POW, anti- Communist, Communist—
was stable,” Kim writes, every prisoner
became a target of persuasion.
Camp Number 1 on Geoje Island
(each camp had a number) was the
largest run by the US and UN Com-
mand. At its peak, it held 170,000 peo-
ple, segregated by nation, ideology, and
gender, including women and children
who were “suspected of being spies.”
Truman’s Psychological Strategy Board
saw interrogation as a form of counter-
insurgency. There were, in addition to
repeated interviews, film screenings
and group discussions.
prisoners’ allegiances were, more than North of the 38th parallel was Camp
anything, a matter of survival. Just as Number 5, the largest camp operated
on my wall map, the divide between by China and North Korea—though
the Korean people was, and is, imposed still much smaller than Camp Number
and often thin. 1—where prisoners were put in homes
that had been evacuated along the Yalu
River. In early 1951 the Chinese mili-
Two primary archives ground Kim’s tary began subjecting these POWs to
research: investigation reports from the intensive political education, including
largest POW camp run by the US and on “American plans for world domi-
UN, and files of more than one thou- nation; how capitalism got started and
sand US POWs who were interrogated why it should be stopped.” Every day,
by the US Counterintelligence Corps the prisoners attended mandatory lec-
after returning from Chinese and tures and study groups.
North Korean camps. Reading through In large camps like the one on
these documents, Kim finds time and Geoje, officials interviewed, exam-
again that loyalties were blurry. There ined, and photographed every POW
was no intrinsic difference between a upon entry. US and South Korean
North Korean and a South Korean or soldiers divided them into numbered
a Korean leftist and a Korean right- compounds and summoned them for
ist— or, for that matter, a Korean sol- questioning— sometimes inside, some-
dier and a Korean civilian. times outside; sometimes peacefully,
Kim begins the book with the story sometimes under duress. In one (pos-
of Oh Se-hui, who, in October 1950, sibly staged) photo taken at a camp
was twenty years old and “making his in Gurijae, which Kim found in the
way back to his home” in southern National Archives, a young Korean
Korea, after serving in the North Ko- woman sits next to a helmeted South
rean army. Knowing that he would en- Korean soldier at an outdoor table,
counter North Korean, South Korean, an expanse of dirt and fencing be-
and UN forces on his long journey, hind them. He looks at her and takes
“he had stashed away four different notes with a fountain pen; she holds
pieces of paper in strategic places on up a document. “A communist woman
his body”— each proof of a different leader, aged 20, formerly a student in
affiliation. Stopped on a road by South Pusan,” the caption reads.
The New York Review
 The US (representing South Korea
and UN allies), China, and North Korea
began to discuss a cease-fire early on,
in the summer of 1951, but the parties
could not agree on what to do with the
people held across enemy lines. Prison-
ers of war had always been a feature of
fighting, but now an expanded regime
of international law dictated how they
should be treated— and the cold war
made the US less willing to follow the
rules. Under the 1949 Geneva Con-
vention relative to the Treatment of
Prisoners of War, every prisoner was
supposed to be returned to his coun-
try of origin. But where was home for
a North Korean who had fought for the
South, or a young man from southern
Korea whose family ended up north of
the 38th parallel?
Yi Chong-gyu was a Christian teen-
ager forced to join the North Korean
army a few months into the war. After
Yi’s unit was repelled by General
MacArthur’s Incheon Landing in Sep-
tember 1950, he was captured by South
Korean soldiers. They “took him aside
for interrogation and asked him to re-
cite the Lord’s Prayer,” Kim writes, to
prove his (implicitly anti- Communist)
religiosity and thus gain a kind of ref-
ugee status. When he did, they spared
his life and took him to Geoje Island.
The interrogators were themselves
often unsettled in their views and un-
comfortable with their orders. Many
of the US soldiers tasked with exam-
ining Korean prisoners were Japanese
American. Officials assumed that they
could communicate with Korean cap-
tives who had been required to use
Japanese during the colonial period.
Many of these Japanese Americans
had just emerged from World War II
internment camps, yet were expected
to smoothly transition from captive
to patriotic captor. The interrogators,
not unlike the prisoners they interro-
gated, were forced to play a part, Kim
observes. North Korean POWs were
pressured to switch sides, and South
Koreans were pressured to prove their
fidelity. Everyone was cast in a role of
self-justification.
One such interrogator was Sam Mi-
yamoto, a California-born Japanese
American whose family had been im-
prisoned in an internment camp in Pos-
ton, Arizona, in 1942. The following
year, the Miyamotos were directed to
board “the SS Gripsholm as parties to
a POW/hostage exchange, where Japa-
nese nationals and Japanese Americans
were exchanged for white American
businessmen, journalists, and mission-
aries,” Kim writes. Miyamoto, then a
teenager, witnessed the devastation of
Allied bombing in Tokyo and Hiro-
shima. He was effectively stateless in
Japan, pawned off by the US but not
legally Japanese, and thus unable to
register for school.
In 1949 Miyamoto managed to se-
cure a return to the US to attend
UCLA. From there, he applied for a
transfer to UC Berkeley to study law
and attempted to put the indignities
of internment behind him. But in that
unlucky interval of disenrollment, he
was drafted, trained as a military lin-
guist, and sent to serve in the Korean
War. Miyamoto was assigned to Geoje
Island—his second prisoner camp, his
second war. In an interview with Kim,
he recalls telling his Korean prison-
ers, “I’m here because I was ordered
May 26, 2022
to come here. I didn’t come here by
choice.”
Many Korean POWs in UN camps
like Geoje felt similarly misplaced. They
told their captors that they were anti-
Communist— maybe sincerely, maybe
as a gambit—then took extreme steps
to prove their fealty to Washington and
Seoul. They tattooed South Korean flags
on their torsos and sent officials petitions
for release that were written in their own
blood. Kim locates one of these peti-
tions in the National Archives (kept
in the same climate- controlled storage
room as Jackie Kennedy’s bloodstained
Chanel suit): “We are anti- communist
young men. Let’s have discharge, so that
we may be able to go front line.” Chinese
anti-Communist soldiers acted out simi-
lar blood rituals, to convince the US to
send them to Taiwan.
Before the Korean War, the US had
vowed to abide by the Geneva Conven-
tions. Yet when cease-fire negotiations
began at the border between the two
Koreas, the Truman administration re-
fused to repatriate North Korean and
Chinese prisoners as a matter of course.
The US Psychological Strategy Board
recommended a policy of “voluntary
repatriation,” or letting POWs choose
where to return. If, in the process of
interrogation, some Korean Commu-
nists could be convinced to choose
South over North Korea, Kim writes,
it would “validate the US project of
liberation through military occupa-
tion in the south.” Behind this strategy
was National Security Council Paper
68 (1950), the founding document of
the cold war, which called for “a more
rapid build-up of political, economic,
and military strength . . . to resist Soviet
expansion” around the world. Korea
was the testing ground for an emerg-
ing US strategy: a permanent battle for
hearts and minds— and a permanent
network of global bases—in the name
of liberal democracy.
President Syngman Rhee, Washing-
ton’s man in Seoul, was sympathetic to-
ward anti- Communist POWs and eager
to incorporate them into his new police
state. He even approved the release
of 25,000 such soldiers from multiple
UN camps without first consulting the
Americans. “These Korean POWs did
not simply vanish into thin air,” Kim
writes. Many belonged to the rightist
youth groups that had collaborated
with the US military’s Counterintel-
ligence Corps and the South Korean
army before the Korean War— and
continued to do their work.1 This form
of “anti- Communist fascist mass orga-
nization,” Kim explains, held a “mo-
nopoly of violence in post-1945 Korea.”
In the Geoje camp, pro- Communist
Koreans and Chinese also agitated for
political recognition. Their “single,
most important demand” was that the
US military stop “repatriation screen-
ing,” Kim writes. In 1952 a group of
these prisoners famously took hostage
an American camp commander, Briga-
dier General Francis Dodd, to publicize
the violation of their right to manda-
tory repatriation under the Geneva
Conventions. The commander would
“not be harmed if P[O]W problems are
resolved,” the prisoners’ banner read.
1
Kim notes that Kim Du-han, a member
of one such group and a notorious mur-
derer, became Rhee’s bodyguard, then a
member of the National Assembly.
Western news readers reacted with fear and engaged him in a Communist
and fascination to these brazen “reds,” study group; his white countrymen,
but Dodd later reported that the worst meanwhile, called him “nigger.”2
he suffered was a broken fountain pen. After Adams settled in China, he at-
The hostage-takers soon released him, tended college, married a professor of
on the condition that the US and UN Russian, and recorded broadcasts that
agree to recognize them as representa- encouraged Black soldiers in the Viet-
tives of the North Korean and Chinese nam War to resist American empire.
POWs. But in 1966 he and his wife and two
“In the days following Dodd’s re- children returned to the US, to escape
lease,” Kim writes, “the US Army the Cultural Revolution. Adams was
launched the longest investigation of interrogated at length, but without
a POW-related incident conducted incident, by the House Un-American
during the Korean War,” resulting in Activities Committee and later
a five-hundred-page case file of inter- opened several Chinese restaurants in
rogation transcripts and witness state- his hometown.
ments. Several weeks later, American Through the accounts of men like
Miyamoto and Adams, Kim presents a
National Archives and Records Administration
“bottom-up,” people- centered history
of the first hot war of the cold war. Her
book catalogs the torn, often arbitrary
allegiances of the Korean people—like
so many people split apart by mass
violence. In the case of the Koreas,
though, that divide has only hardened
since the 1950s. Today, stockpiles of
missiles and large standing armies sit in
wait on either side of the Demilitarized
Zone. 3 Families are estranged across
the border. Yet the postcolonial vision
of coexistence and exchange, if not uni-
fication, persists.
In the US, this vision was, however
ironically, sharpened by President
Trump’s volatile engagement with
A Korean prisoner of war with tattoos
of the national flag of South Korea and North Korea. Two years into his term,
the words ‘Patriotism’ and ‘Eradicate progressive members of Congress,
Communists,’ Camp Number 1, including California representatives
Geoje Island, South Korea, 1952 Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee and
New York representative Alexandria
paratroopers used “tanks, tear gas, gre- Ocasio- Cortez, introduced House Res-
nades, and flamethrowers” to storm the olution 152, “calling for a formal end
camp. Thirty-five people were killed. of the Korean war”— a peace treaty
In July 1953 the UN Command signed to replace the armistice. The bill ac-
an armistice with North Korea and knowledges that, as Kim’s history of
China, and both sides began to clear out interrogation suggests, the war was
their camps. Despite all parties’ invest- muddier and less rigid in its dividing
ments in propaganda and loyalty tests, lines than Americans have always as-
prisoners largely chose to return home: sumed. Among the lead sponsors of the
99 percent of Americans, 96 percent of bill was a first-term congressman from
South Koreans, and 91 percent of North New Jersey, a “proud son of Korean
Koreans. The exception were the Chi- immigrants” who spoke of bringing
nese, only 33 percent of whom opted for “peace to the Korean peninsula.” His
mainland China; the rest went to Tai- name was Andy Kim, and his sister,
wan. The Chinese were dealing with the Monica, had just published an espe-
aftermath of their own civil war. cially relevant book. Q
Prisoners made their choices in a final 2
See Clarence Adams, An American
set of interrogation rooms that were Dream: The Life of an African Amer-
erected along the 38th parallel at the ican Soldier and POW Who Spent
end of the Korean War. Groups of Twelve Years in Communist China,
POWs were led into a holding area, then edited by Della Adams and Lewis H.
brought, one by one, into a UN “ex- Carlson (University of Massachusetts
planation booth,” a large tent. There, Press, 2007).
each POW was interviewed by a panel 3
Kim’s book contributes to a grow-
of officials from “neutral nations” and ing literature on the international re-
allowed to voice his desire: repatri- verberations of the Korean War. The
ation or non-repatriation. Earlier in Oberlin historian Sheila Miyoshi Jager
the war, when the US had demanded a examines the effect of the war on Mao
system of voluntary repatriation, India Zedong and the emerging Chinese
had devised a third- country compro- state in Brothers at War: The Unending
Conflict in Korea (Norton, 2013). Tessa
mise: POWs could choose to be sent
Morris- Suzuki, of the Australian Na-
home, into enemy territory, or some- tional University, collects the wartime
where else altogether. Seventy-six Ko- views of people in Mongolia, Manchu-
rean POWs opted for a third country ria, Okinawa, and Japan (including the
and were eventually settled in India, improbable journey of the only Japanese
Brazil, Argentina, or Mexico. POW) in her edited volume The Korean
Twenty- one American POWs, mean- War in Asia: A Hidden History (Row-
while, made the startling choice to stay man and Littlefield, 2018). And David
behind Communist lines. This group Cheng Chang’s The Hijacked War: The
included Clarence Adams, an Afri- Story of Chinese POWs in the Korean
War (Stanford University Press, 2019),
can American who grew up in Mem-
a complement to Kim’s book, draws
phis, under what he called “these cruel on interrogation records and extensive,
slave laws of the southern states.” In multilingual oral histories to follow the
Communist Camp Number 5 on the winding experiences, and allegiances,
Yalu River, Adams’s Chinese captors of prisoners connected to both the Chi-
had let him manage the prison library nese mainland and Taiwan.
33

Memory Speaks:
On Losing and Reclaiming
Language and Self
by Julie Sedivy.
Belknap Press/Harvard
University Press, 346 pp., $29.95
Alfabet/Alphabet:
A Memoir of a First Language
by Sadiqa de Meijer.
Windsor, Ontario: Palimpsest/
Anstruther, 153 pp.,
$14.95 (paper)
A few weeks ago I was invited to
the book festival in Trieste, in
northeast Italy, a city of divided
loyalties and complicated history.
At its center is an old Austro-
Hungarian port; some of its street
signs are bilingual, in Italian and
Slovenian. The city was “Tergeste”
to the Romans, founded on the site
of a former settlement as a fortress
against Illyria, and it has been
variously dominated by Frankish,
Venetian, Balkan, Italian, and
Austrian influences in the centu-
ries since. After World War II it
was a free zone administered by the US
and UK, and rejoined Italy only in 1954.
I learned Italian from my wife, who
grew up in Lombardy, and my pre-
sentation at the festival began with an
apology for my accent— a bizarre amal-
gam of the flattened vowels of Lombard
dialect with the rolled r’s of my native
Scots. There was a ripple of indul-
gent laughter from the audience, who
also seemed relieved after two years
of Covid to have foreigners return to
speak in their town— even a town re-
nowned for its international research
institutes and its proximity to borders.
I’d rehearsed what I would say, but as
my presentation progressed I began to
lose words, phrases, grammatical con-
structions. Conditional tenses slipped
away from me, and circumlocutions
crept in. I heard myself utter the phrase
“that plastic that goes around electric
wires” instead of the Italian word for
“insulation,” then “that mythical is-
land that sunk” instead of the word for
Atlantis.
It had been more than two years
since I’d last been in the country, and
the Italian I use at home was too do-
mestic to explore the concepts of the
book I was there to discuss. At the same
time, I had the strong sense that, were I
permitted to stay on in Italy a few years,
speaking only Italian, it would be En-
glish words that would begin to recede
through lack of use—not that they’d be
entirely forgotten, but they’d be overlain
with Italian constructions and vocabu-
lary used more often in day-to-day life.
For my trip to Trieste I had packed
perhaps the most appropriate reading
material possible for someone living
and moving between two languages—
Memory Speaks by the academic psy-
cholinguist Julie Sedivy and Alfabet/
Alphabet by the poet Sadiqa de Meijer.
Both writers moved to Canada as chil-
dren, and though their books are very
different, both examine their compli-
cated relationship with their adopted
language: the gifts of bilingualism, but
also the visceral sense of unmooring
they experienced as each lost touch
with what Ghita El Khayat called the
34
The Babel Within
Gavin Francis
Joyce Wieland: O Canada, 1970
“milk language”—the language of lul-
labies and nursery rhymes.
Sedivy, who now teaches in Calgary,
arrived in Canada before the age of six
from Czechoslovakia via Austria and
Italy. She writes of the “clutter” of lan-
guages that had introduced themselves
before she began to learn English at
school: German in preschool, Italian
with friends, French in the streets of
Montreal. De Meijer moved from the
Netherlands at the age of twelve. For
these writers the forgetting, remem-
bering, and relearning of language is
one of the most binding and alienating
elements of their immigration experi-
ence: binding because of the pressing
requirement both writers felt to achieve
fluency in English, and alienating be-
cause of all the ways their native lan-
guages continued to hold claims over
them, marking them out from peers
and neighbors.
A childhood between two places has
led Sedivy to feel most comfortable
among junctures and transitional spaces;
her book describes how she found her-
self discontented with the study of pure
linguistics and with the study of psychol-
ogy, but at home in a field that borders
the two disciplines, able to harvest the
insights of both. “I’m drawn, like a
moth flinging its body against a light
bulb, to in-between spaces and inter-
sections, to hyphenations, to situations
in which there will always be two sides,”
she writes. “This is, for me, where
all the heat and light can be found.”
(As if to underscore her rejection of
black-and-white distinctions, the word
šedivý, in Czech, means “gray.”) When
it comes to our identities and our sense
of belonging, language is the natural
place to start.
As a child trying to fit in with her new
surroundings, Sedivy quickly forgot
much of her Czech. “The inescapable
truth is that a language both binds and
excludes,” she writes, and she wanted
to bind herself to the new. Czech was
and is her mother tongue, her milk
language, but English quickly became
her dominant language—the language
in which she most easily functions. It
took her many years to realize the sig-
nificance of what she had lost with that
fracture. Her father eventually moved
from Canada back to his hometown
in Moravia, and on her infrequent vis-
its there in adulthood (beginning with
her first visit since early childhood, to
an academic linguistics conference in
1994) she was startled by the degree
to which she had lost her command of
Czech. Decades later the death of her
father occasioned mourning not just for
a parent but for one of her few remain-
ing connections to the language:
It was as if the viola section in the
orchestra had fallen silent—not
carrying the melody, it had gone un-
noticed, but its absence announced
how much depth and texture it had
supplied, how its rhythms had lent
coherence to the music.
Relearning Czech as an adult offered
redemption, and Sedivy’s book is in part
an account of how through that act of
learning she has found ways to bind dis-
parate aspects of her identity. Becoming
fluent again in her milk language
has deepened and calmed my sense
of who I am, forging a peace treaty
between the various, fragmented
parts of myself. And it has cast a
new light on the old question of
how to make a home in a place that
is foreign to your ancestors.
This is a question that for Sedivy, as
a Canadian, is particularly delicate,
given the extent to which the First
Nations peoples of that country have
been culturally dislocated, and how in-
digenous Canadian languages are now
among the world’s most vulnerable.
“Here are the things that no one tells
a six-year- old immigrant child speak-
ing to her baby sister in English: Be
careful,” Sedivy writes.
If you continue down this path,
your ancestral tongue will one day
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
become more effortful for you
to speak than this new language
is now. . . . You will become a lin-
guistic orphan, a person without
a mother tongue.
To an individual the loss of a
language is a calamity, but it is
dwarfed by the catastrophe of an
entire group’s loss of language.
She quotes Marie Smith Jones,
the last native speaker of the
Alaskan language Eyak who, on
being asked how she felt to be
the last speaker of a language, re-
plied, “How would you feel if your
baby died? If someone asked you,
‘What was it like to see it lying in
the cradle?’”*
or de Meijer, to speak English F
every day is to live in a state of
chronic abstraction—though she
is fluent in the language, Dutch
has remained much more domi-
nant in her thought and speech.
She agrees with the Polish Ca-
nadian writer Jowita Bydlowska
that her second language is an “exo-
skeleton”— a tough hide of words that
shield her from feeling. The poet in her
is shocked by the incongruity between
the associations her two languages
evoke. One of her poems, written origi-
nally in English, contains the word har-
bour, which “conjures a generic image;
there are ships, docks, and gulls, but it
is nowhere that I can name.” Translat-
ing the poem herself, she substitutes
the Dutch haven, and effects a magical
transformation:
I saw our former river harbour, a
charmless place of silos and con-
crete piers . . . a bicycle ride on an
overcast afternoon, during which
my youngest brother sat in a seat
on my father’s handlebars. I was
being somewhat reckless, biking
in a slalom between the moorings,
near the sheer drop to the water.
De Meijer realizes with a jolt that
English offers her little in the way of
access to memories of her childhood
self. Passing on news of her grand-
mother’s death in English, de Meijer’s
voice is “monotonous, composed”; she
feels herself to be coping well with
the bereavement. It is only when she
tells an acquaintance in Dutch that
the full force of grief breaks through:
“The pain was immediate and furious.
A flood of tears, unstoppable. Early
words, along primal neural pathways,
imprinted when I still meant every-
thing I said.”
A language learned in early child-
hood is privileged with an emotional
intensity that a language learned later
in life— even in adolescence, as En-
glish was for de Meijer— cannot match.
“When we learn a language in child-
hood,” Sedivy writes,
it is by throwing our full selves—
bodies, emotions, familial entangle-
ments, social duties, and all—into
the task. . . . A language learned
*Elizabeth Kolbert, “Last Words,” The
New Yorker, June 6, 2005.
The New York Review
 S P RI N G 2 02 2

NEW BOOKS
FRO M U N IV ERSIT Y PRE S S E S

AFRICAN AMERICAN AND BLACK STUDIES ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES

Afrodiasporic Forms Water Thicker Than Blood

Slavery in Literature and Culture of the African Diaspora
Raquel Kennon
Afrodiasporic Forms explores the epistemological possibilities of
the “Black world” paradigm and traces a literary and cultural
cartography of the monde noir and its constitutive African
diasporas across multiple poetic, visual, and cultural permu-
tations. Examining the transatlantic slave trade and modern
racial slavery, Raquel Kennon challenges the US-centric fo-
cus of slavery studies and draws on a transnational, eclectic
archive of materials from Lusophone, Hispanophone, and
Anglophone sources in the Americas to inspect evolving,
multitudinous, and disparate forms of Afrodiasporic cultural
expression.
Pub June 29, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 336 pp.
Louisiana State University Press
978-0-807-17681-8 Paper, $35.00
A Memoir of a Post-Internment Childhood
George Uba
“This is a lovely addition to the rich literature somehow cre-
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en from them, all at once.” —Cynthia Kadohata, Newbery
Medal– and National Book Award–winning author of Kira-
Kira and The Thing about Luck
Pub June 2022. 6 × 9 in. 230 pp.
Temple University Press
978-1-4399-2258-3 Paper, $29.95; 978-1-4399-2257-6 Cloth, $110.50

BIOGRAPHY
Buy Black
How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture
James Dickey
Aria S. Halliday
A Literary Life
“A compelling analysis of the role American Black women Gordon Van Ness
have played in consumerism and popular culture, focusing on
This literary biography centers on James Dickey as poet, nov-
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Ness shows Dickey’s artistic beginnings and the rise and fall
A volume in the series Feminist Media Studies
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Pub April 26, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 208 pp.
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978-0-252-08635-9 Paper, $24.95; 978-0-252-05326-9, e-book $14.95
Pub May 2022. 6 × 9 in. 500 pp.
Mercer University Press
978-0-881-46826-7 Cloth, $45.00

ART
I Got Mine
Confessions of a Midlist Writer
Image-Thinking John Nichols
Artmaking as Cultural Analysis
Mieke Bal “This is an intimate portrait of a man as writer. No other
work, or person, can look back at the whole of John Nichols’
In this richly illustrated book video artist and cultural theo- life as John himself can.” —Paul Skenazy, author of Temper CA
rist Mieke Bal takes us on a journey through the range of Pub May 15, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 280 pp.
her work, using the concept of image-thinking as a point of High Road Books | An Imprint of the University of New Mexico Press
connection between cultural analysis and artistic practice. 978-0-8263-6379-4 Cloth, $27.95
Sharing a lifetime of experience of writing about art, making
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explore trauma, agency, identity, affect, and cultural memory.
This is Bal at her most personal and her best.
Pub March 31, 2022. 9.6 × 6.7 in. 512 pp.
Edinburgh University Press
978-1-474-49423-6 Paper, $39.95

May 26, 2022 35

 EDUCATION
Higher Education for Democracy
The Role of the University in Civil Society
William G. Tierney
Democracy and higher education are inextricably linked: uni-
versities not only have the ability to be key arbiters of how de-
mocracy is advanced, but they also need to ref lect democratic
values in their practices, objectives, and goals. Framed by the
COVID-19 pandemic, and the ongoing crisis of structural
racism, Higher Education for Democracy explores academe’s role
in advancing democracy by using a cross-national comparison
of Los Angeles, New Delhi, and Hong Kong to develop strat-
egies that universities can employ to strengthen democracy
and resist fascism.
Pub July 1, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 310 pp.
SUNY Press
978-1-438-48450-1 Paper, $29.95
use code NYRB22 and save 30% at www.sunypress.edu
ENVIRONMENT/CONSERVATION
Reckoning with the U.S. Role in Global Ocean
Plastic Waste
By Committee on the United States Contributions to Global
Ocean Plastic Waste; The National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine
An estimated 8 million metric tons (MMT) of plastic waste
enters the world’s ocean each year—the equivalent of dumping
a garbage truck of plastic waste into the ocean every minute.
This book calls for a national strategy by the end of 2022 to
reduce the nation’s contribution to global ocean plastic waste at
every step—from production to its entry into the environment.
Pub April 2022. 7 × 10 in. 250 pp.
National Academies Press
978-0-309-45885-6 Paper. $60.00
Requiem for America’s Best Idea
National Parks in the Era of Climate Change
Michael J. Yochim; Foreword by William R. Lowry
“This book highlights the beauty of the natural world and
its status as an invaluable commodity that all humans share.
Recommended for all nature enthusiasts.” —Library Journal,
starred review
Pub March 15, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 304 pp.
High Road Books | An Imprint of the University of New Mexico Press
978-0-8263-6343-5 Cloth, $34.95
Surveying the Anthropocene
Art and Photography Now
Patricia Macdonald
Surveying the Anthropocene presents a range of approaches to
image-making concerning the environment by some of the
best artist-photographers working worldwide. More than 250
images are presented alongside texts by some of the most illu-
minating writers on environmental questions. It concentrates
particularly on work which relates to the types of impact, on
climate and the web of life, that are sufficiently significant and
globally widespread to appear in the future record of the rocks
as a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene.
Pub March 31, 2022. 9.4 × 12.5 in. 248 pp.
Edinburgh University Press
978-1-838-38223-0 Cloth, $65.00
36
FICTION
Close-Up
A Novel
Michelle Herman
In this artful, expansive novel, we follow five protagonists—
Jacob, Martin, Caroline, Jeanie, and Jill—through love, mar-
riage, parenthood, and the romance of friendship as they
struggle to make sense of themselves and each other and of
what makes for good art, good magic, and a good life. What
follows is a story of missed connections and old grievances,
of loneliness and longing, of rifts and reconciliations and re-
demption. Close-Up depicts the fraught entanglements of the
relationships we’re born into and those we choose.
Pub March 15, 2022. 5.5 × 8.5 in. 376 pp.
Columbus State University Press
distributed by the University of Georgia Press
978-0-5789-0528-0 Paper, $24.95
GENERAL INTEREST
MLA Guide to Digital Literacy
Second Edition
Ellen C. Carillo
The second edition of this best-selling classroom guide helps
students understand why digital literacy is a crucial skill for
their education, future careers, and participation in democ-
racy. It offers strategies for reading and analyzing data visu-
alizations; finding and evaluating credible sources; learning
how to spot fake news; fact-checking; crafting a research
question; effectively conducting searches on Google and on
library catalogs and databases; finding peer-reviewed publi-
cations; evaluating primary sources; and understanding dis-
information and misinformation, filter bubbles, propaganda,
and satire in a variety of sources.
Pub August 2022. 6 × 9 in. 168 pp.
Modern Language Association
978-1-603-29605-2 Paper, $22.00
Next Time There’s a Pandemic
Vivek Shraya
In Next Time There’s a Pandemic, artist Vivek Shraya ref lects
on how she might have approached the COVID-19 pandemic
differently, and how challenging and changing pervasive ex-
pressions, attitudes, and behaviours might transform our lives.
For instance, what might happen if, rather than urging one
another to “stay safe,” we focused instead on being caring?
With generosity, Shraya captures the dissonances of this mo-
ment, urging us to keep showing up for each other so we are
better prepared for the next time . . . and for all times.
Pub March 1, 2022. 5.25 × 9 in. 64 pp.
University of Alberta Press
978-1-77212-605-1 Paper, $12.99
The Mexican Chile Pepper Cookbook
The Soul of Mexican Home Cooking
Dave DeWitt and José C. Marmolejo
“A tasty collection of colorful chile recipes from Mexico—
some hot, some not—seasoned with a pinch of food his-
tory and spiced with a generous handful of personal tales.”
—Sharon Hudgins, author of T-Bone Whacks and Caviar Snacks
Pub April 15, 2022. 6.5 × 10 in. 296 pp.
University of New Mexico Press
978-0-8263-6351-0 Paper, $24.95
The New York Review
 HISTORY/AMERICAN
A Century of Repression
The Espionage Act and Freedom of the Press
Ralph Engelman and Carey Shenkman
How the weaponized Espionage Act chills free speech.
“This study of the history and abuses of the Espionage Act—
past and present—is urgently needed if we are to remain a
truly democratic society. I even learned a lot about my own
case. A riveting eye opener and must read.” —Daniel Ellsberg
A volume in The History of Communication series
Pub August 23, 2022. 6.125 × 9.25 in. 344 pp.
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-08663-2 Paper, $24.95; 978-0-252-05356-6 e-book, $14.95
The Creole Rebellion
The Most Successful Slave Revolt in American History
Bruce Chadwick
“This informative and well-written book provides a rendering
of this turning point that must not only be read, but studied.”
—Gerald Horne, author of Negro Comrades of the Crown
Pub March 1, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 268 pp.
University of New Mexico Press
978-0-8263-6347-3 Cloth, $27.95
HOLOCAUST STUDIES
The Cigar Factory of Isay Rottenberg
The Hidden History of a Jewish Entrepreneur in Nazi Germany
Hella Rottenberg, Sandra Rottenberg. Afterword by Robert
Rotenberg. Translated by Jonathan Reeder
“Two granddaughters search for the hidden history of their
Jewish grandfather and uncover an amazing story: how he
bought a cigar factory near Dresden as the Nazis came to
power in Germany and fought defiantly to keep it operating,
at the risk of his life. An astonishing portrait of what life was
like for a Jewish businessman in Nazi Germany, and an exem-
plary example of how two determined women stripped aside
family mythologies and arrived at the surprising truth about
the family patriarch.” —Michael Ignatieff
Pub Jan 11, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 228 pp.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
978-1-77112-550-5 Paper, $24.99
IMMIGRATION STUDIES
Jamón and Halal
Lessons in Tolerance from Rural Andalucía
Christina Civantos
“This is a book that is both a personal account and a rigorous
academic study. It is a model for the kind of engaged human-
istic work we are now beginning to see as a hallmark of the
post-theory moment, and one that remembers the hard lessons
of ethnographic fieldwork as well as the challenging founda-
tional work from philosophically-tinged theory.” —Debra A.
Castillo, and Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies,
Cornell University
Pub April 11, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 258 pp.
Amherst College Press
978-1-943208-36-4 Paper, $21.99; 978-1-943208-37-1 open access ePub
May 26, 2022
LABOR/WORKFORCE ISSUES
Transforming Trajectories for
Women of Color in Tech
By the Committee on Addressing the Underrepresentation of
Women of Color in Tech; Evelynn Hammonds, Valerie Taylor,
and Rebekah Hutton, Editors; National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine
Transforming Trajectories for Women of Color in Tech identifies
systemic issues that negatively affect outcomes for women of
color in tech and provides guidance for transforming existing
systems and implementing evidence-based policies and prac-
tices to increase the success of women of color in tech.
Pub March 2022. 6 × 9 in. 280 pp.
National Academies Press
978-0-309-26897-4 Paper, $35.00
LANGUAGE/LINGUISTICS
Linguist on the Loose
Adventures and Misadventures in Fieldwork
Lyle Campbell, Foreword by Wade Davis
Lyle Campbell’s linguistic fieldwork has taken him to numer-
ous countries, sometimes in challenging circumstances. Writ-
ten with humour, heart, and a clear dedication to endangered
languages and their speakers, Lyle’s vivid memoir is a lesson
not only on life in the field but on the importance of language
documentation.
“Linguist on the Loose does for linguistics what Indiana Jones
does for archaeology with the advantage that Linguist is all
true: an impassioned plea for language documentation and a
call to adventure.” —Prof. Judith Maxwell, Tulane University
Pub March 2022. 8.5 × 5.5 in. 304 pp.
Edinburgh University Press
9781474494151 Paper, $19.95; 9781474494175 e-Book (ePub)
LITERARY COLLECTIONS/LATIN STUDIES
Home in Florida
Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness
Edited by Anjanette Delgado
This anthology features contemporary Latinx writers who
capture the diversity of immigrant experiences in Florida,
including Patricia Engel, Richard Blanco, Jaquira Díaz, and
many others.
Pub Nov 16, 2021. 6 × 9 in. 286 pp.
University of Florida Press
978-1-68340-250-3 Cloth, $26.95
LITERARY CRITICISM/
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature
Edited by Carol Mejia LaPerle
Race and Affect in Early Modern English Literature puts critical
race studies and affect theory into dialogue. By investigat-
ing how race feels, this book offers new ways of reading and
interpreting literary traditions, religious differences, gendered
experiences, class hierarchies, sexuality, and social identities.
So far scholars have shaped the discussion of race in the early
modern period by focusing on topics such as genealogy, lan-
guage, economics, religion, skin color, and ethnicity. This
book, however, offers something new: it considers racializing
processes as visceral, affective experiences.
Pub March 30, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 180 pp.
ACMRS Press
978-0-866-98658-8 Paper,$19.95
37
 Race and Romance
Coloring the Past
Margo Hendricks
Race and Romance: Coloring the Past explores the literary and
cultural genealogy of colorism, white passing, and white pre-
senting in the romance genre. The study ranges from Helio-
dorus’ Aithiopika to the short novels of Aphra Behn, to the
modern romance novel Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins. Hen-
dricks engages with the troublesome racecraft of “passing”
and the instability of racial identity and its formation from
the premodern to the present. Race and Romance is a bridge
between early modern studies and scholarship on twenty first
century romance novels.
Pub April 5, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 160 p.
ACMRS Press
978-0-866-98659-5 Paper, $19.95
LITERATURE/DRAMA
Romeo and Juliet
Play On Shakespeare
William Shakespeare. Translated by Hansol Jung.
“For never was a story of more woe / Than this of Juliet and
her Romeo.” In this version of Romeo and Juliet, Hansol Jung
breathes new life into Shakespeare’s famous tragedy. Jung il-
luminates a more nuanced world than we have come to ex-
pect from the well-known tale of star-crossed lovers. Play On
Shakespeare, from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, commis-
sioned new translations of Shakespeare’s plays. Enlisting the
talents of a diverse group of contemporary artists and drama-
turges, this series reenvisions Shakespeare for the twenty-first
century.
Pub June 14, 2022. 5 × 7.75 in. 136 pp.
ACMRS Press
978-0-866-98771-4 Paper, $9.95
LITERATURE/ESSAYS
On Our Way Home from the Revolution
Reflections on Ukraine
Sonya Bilocerkowycz
Featured in USA Today’s “Ten Books to Help Better Under-
stand What’s Happening in Russia and Ukraine”
“A remarkable work of lyric inquiry and brutal empathy. A
carefully crafted collection that paints a loving but honest
portrait of family, country, and self through the eyes of a bril-
liant young writer unafraid to look directly into the blistering
stare of a Chernobyl sunset or the red sunrise of a fire-fueled
revolution.” —Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas, author
of Don’t Come Back
Pub September 23, 2019. 5.5 × 8.5 in. 232 pp.
Ohio State University Press
978-0-8142-5543-8 Paper, $19.95
Ripe
Essays
Negesti Kaudo
A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2022.
“Ripe is a testament to the expansiveness of Black life—a very
specific expansiveness that offers generous glimpses into Black
womanhood, Black Midwesternness, Black place, and place-
lessness.” —Hanif Abdurraqib
“With unf linching honesty and vulnerability, Kaudo docu-
ments her journey to becoming her bolder self. . . . A deeply
intimate meditation on millennial Black womanhood and a
righteous indictment of how this country treats Black girls
and women. Timely, unapologetic, and intense, in all the best
ways.” —Kirkus (starred review)
Pub April 18, 2022. 5.5 × 8.5 in. 224 pp.
Ohio State University Press
978-0-8142-5818-7 Paper, $19.95
38
MEMOIR
Dead Woman Pickney
A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica, Second Edition
Yvonne Shorter Brown
Dead Woman Pickney chronicles Yvonne Shorter Brown’s life
growing up in Jamaica between 1943 and 1965. Told with
stridency and humor, the stories include both personal experi-
ence and history. The author’s quest to understand the absence
of her mother and her mother’s people from her life are at the
heart of the narrative. In this updated edition she adds a coda,
“finding mother,” constructed from archives, genealogy, let-
ters, and journals. Foreword by Sonja Boon, author of What
the Oceans Remember.
Pub April 1, 2022. 5.25 × 8 in. 340 pp.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
978-1-77112-547-5 Paper, 24.99
Scratching River
Michelle Porter
Scratching River braids the voices of mother, brother, sister, an-
cestor, and river to create a story about environmental, per-
sonal, and collective healing. This memoir revolves around
a search for home for the author’s autistic and schizophrenic
brother, and an unexpected emotional journey that led to ac-
ceptance, understanding and, ultimately, reconciliation. Mi-
chelle Porter brings together the oral history of a Métis ances-
tor, river morphology studies, and news clippings about abuse
her brother endured in a group home to tell a tale about love,
survival, and hope.
Pub April 15, 2022. 5.25 × 8 in. 184 pp.
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
978-1-77112-544-4 Paper, $19.99
MUSIC
Sharkey
When Sea Lions Were Stars of Show Business (1907-1958)
Gary Bohan Jr.
The incredible, true story of the twentieth century’s greatest
performing sea lion and the man who trained him. Sharkey
tells the compelling story of an unusually gifted, trained sea
lion who shared the stage with practically every important
performer of the first half of the twentieth century—from
Bob Hope to Ella Fitzgerald, from Broadway to Hollywood.
Readers follow Sharkey and his f lippered colleagues as they
travel the world. Meticulously researched Sharkey is a quirky
slice of New York and entertainment history sure to delight.
Pub April 1, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 326 pp.
SUNY Press
978-1-438-48712-0 Paper, $24.95
use code NYRB22 and save 30% at www.sunypress.edu
NON-FICTION
One by One, the Stars
Essays
Ned Stuckey-French
One by One, the Stars, presents new, highly personal essays
tracing Stuckey-French’s childhood in Indiana and a bur-
geoning interest, during adolescence, in politics and social
justice to his life as a father, teacher, and writer. Thematic
threads connect these elements, and foremost is his grow-
ing commitment to activism on behalf of the disadvantaged,
overlooked, or threatened. The volume also features some of
Stuckey-French’s “greatest hits” as a public scholar and writer,
including his popular essay on his Facebook addiction.
Pub May 1, 2022. 5.5 × 8.5 in. 240 pp.
University of Georgia Press
978-0-8203-6180-2 Paper, $24.95
The New York Review
 The Sum of Her Parts
Essays
Siân Griffiths
The Sum of Her Parts explores how women’s body parts and
the roles/parts that women play have been deployed toward
political ends. Griffiths uses humor and sincerity to approach
the topic of the female body through a wide variety of essay
forms, blending lyric and narrative modes. Using fragmenta-
tion and argumentation, the collection invites the reader to
think ambiguously and explosively, allowing complication
rather than easily connected dots. The result is a discussion
of the female body that is varied, complex, nuanced, and
thoughtful.
Pub May 1, 2022. 5.5 × 8.5 in. 144 pp.
University of Georgia Press
978-0-8203-6233-5 Paper, $19.95
Quit Smoking Weapons of Mass Distraction
Simon Chapman
An estimated 75% of smokers quit without drugs or profes-
sional help. Yet smoking cessation is a global phenomenon
serviced by multibillion-dollar industries that promote their
own products and try to undermine smokers’ agency to quit
unassisted. In Quit Smoking Weapons of Mass Distraction Simon
Chapman AO, one of Australia’s foremost experts on strate-
gies to minimise harm from tobacco, reviews the early history
of quitting smoking and the rise of assisted quitting. He also
provides actionable policy solutions to help people actually
quit smoking.
Pub July 01, 2022. 8.5 × 6 in. (210 x 148 mm). 396 pp.
Sydney University Press
978-1-743-32853-8 Paper/e-Book, $40.00 (AUD)
PHILOSOPHY/RELIGION
Contribution to the Correction of the Public’s
Judgments on the French Revolution
J. G. Fichte; Edited, Translated, and with an Introduction by Jef-
frey Church and Anna Marisa Schön
The reception history of the French Revolution in France and
England is well documented among Anglophone scholars;
however, the debate over the Revolution in Germany is much
less well known. Fichte’s Contribution played an important role
in this debate. Presented here for the first time in English,
Fichte’s work provides a distinctive synthesis of Locke’s “pos-
sessive individualism,” Rousseau’s general will, and Kant’s
moral philosophy. This eclectic blend results in an unusual
rights theory that at times veers close to a form of anarchism.
Pub July 1, 2021. 6 × 9 in. 280 pp.
SUNY Press
9781438482163 Paper, $32.95
use code NYRB22 and save 30% at www.sunypress.edu
Plasticity
The Promise of Explosion
Catherine Malabou
This career-spanning collection of essays, many previously
unpublished, showcases the work of leading French philoso-
pher Catherine Malabou. She articulates a coherent concep-
tualization of “plasticity” by merging neurobiology and me-
dicinal sciences with the history of philosophy and political
theory. She carves a philosophical space between structural-
ism, deconstruction, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and
speculative realism, demonstrating the plastic transformability
at the heart of these disciplines. Includes an introduction situ-
ating her work within contemporary philosophy by Ian James.
Pub May 31, 2022. 9.2 × 6.1 in. 344 pp.
Edinburgh University Press
978-1-474-46212-9 Paper, $29.95
May 26, 2022
POETRY
Natural History
Poems
José Watanabe
Beloved by lovers of poetry across the globe, José Watanabe
(1946–2007) is one of Peru’s most celebrated twentieth-
century poets. Of his variegated repertoire, which includes
articles, screenplays, and children’s books, Watanabe is best
known for his seven original books of poetry, of which Natu-
ral History is the first to be rendered into English. Here, the
starkly lyrical poems are presented in dual-language format
and alongside pen-and-ink drawings by the Lima-based art-
ist Eduardo Tokeshi, which appeared in the original volume.
Pub May 1, 2022. 5.5 × 8.5 in. 128 pp.
University of Georgia Press
978-0-8203-6216-8 Paper, $19.95
POLITICAL SCIENCE/PUBLIC AFFAIRS
A Call to Dissent
Defending Democracy Against Extremism and Populism
Stuart Sim
A Call to Dissent defends dissent as an essential part of democ-
racy. Stuart Sim argues that the political left is falling into
despair in the face of growing right-wing populism and ex-
tremism, rather than challenging and standing up to it. He
identifies how dissent works in philosophy, religion, science,
and the arts, as well as in politics. Ultimately, he calls on all
of us to become dissenters ourselves in order to challenge au-
thority and counter the growth of prejudice and bigotry in
public life.
Pub May 1, 2022. 8.5 × 5.3 in. 216 pp.
Edinburgh University Press
978-1-474-49495-3 Paper, $19.95
Battling the Prince
A Woman Fights for Democracy
Claire Snyder-Hall
In this political memoir, Claire Snyder-Hall shares lessons
learned from eight years in party politics. She tells the story
of organizing a grassroots campaign for state senate in a Dela-
ware district dominated by good ole boys, of a political milieu
in which a letter to the editor results in a smear campaign and
broken friendships, and of battling a party establishment more
concerned about shoring up its own power than engaging ev-
eryday people or fighting for their needs.
Pub January 1, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 248 pp.
SUNY Press
978-1-438-48464-8 Paper, $32.95
use code NYRB22 and save 30% at www.sunypress.edu
Democracy’s Rebirth
The View from Chicago
Dick Simpson. Foreword by Lori Lightfoot
“His proposals represent nothing short of the rebirth of our
democracy on both a local level and the national level—
values that I have personally fought for in my mayoral cam-
paign and administration. Democracy’s Rebirth: The View from
Chicago helps illuminate both our past and our way forward
toward a government and society that are more fair, equitable,
and effective for all its residents, and a successful future that
we can all equally engage and benefit from.” —Mayor Lori E.
Lightfoot, from the Foreword
Pub April 26, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 272 pp.
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-08638-0, Paper $19.95; 978-0-252-05329-0 e-book, $14.95
39
 The House That Madigan Built REGIONAL STUDIES
The Record Run of Illinois’ Velvet Hammer
Ray Long. Foreword by Charles N. Wheeler III
The Spirit of New York, Second Edition
“An amazingly timely book that puts into perspective the his- Defining Events in the Empire State’s History
toric events of last week — the federal indictment of the most Bruce W. Dearstyne
powerful figure in Illinois politics.” —Shia Kapos, Politico
Bruce W. Dearstyne presents New York State history through
“Long’s account of Madigan’s legacy is a study of the practi-
an exploration of nineteen dramatic events. From the launch
cal application of power.” —Garin Cycholl, Chicago Review
of the state government through the musical play Hamilton,
of Books
Dearstyne puts the fascinating people who made history at the
Pub March 22, 2022. 6.125 × 9.25 in. 312 pp.
center of the story: John Jay, the lead writer of the first state
University of Illinois Press
constitution; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the irrepressible cru-
978-0-252-04447-2 Cloth, $29.95; 978-0-252-05348-1 e-book, $14.95
sader for women’s rights; Glenn Curtiss, New York’s aviation
pioneer; Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play baseball
for the Brooklyn Dodgers; and Lois Gibbs, an environmental
activist.
Pub February 1, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 482 pp.
SUNY Press
978-1-438-48714-4 Paper, $29.95
POPULAR CULTURE use code NYRB22 and save 30% at www.sunypress.edu

The Tacky South

Edited by Katharine A. Burnett and Monica Carol Miller
The Tacky South presents eighteen fun, insightful essays that
examine connections between tackiness and the American
South, ranging from nineteenth-century local color fiction
and the television series Murder, She Wrote to red velvet cake
and the ubiquitous inf luence of Dolly Parton. Charting the
gender, race, and class constructions at work in regional aes-
thetics, The Tacky South explores what shifting notions of
tackiness reveal about US culture as a whole and the role that
region plays in addressing national and global issues of culture
and identity.
Pub June 15, 2022. 6 × 9 in. 280 pp.
Louisiana State University Press
978-0-807-17789-1 Paper, $35.00
WOMEN’S STUDIES
This Bridge Called My Back,
Fortieth Anniversary Edition
Writings by Radical Women of Color
Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa, editors
Reissued here, forty years after its inception, this anniver-
sary edition contains a new preface by Moraga ref lecting on
Bridge’s “living legacy” and the broader community of women
of color activists, writers, and artists whose enduring contribu-
tions dovetail with its radical vision. Further features help set
the volume’s historical context, a statement written by Gloria
Anzaldúa in 1983, and visual art produced during the same pe-
riod by Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Yolanda López, and others,
curated by their contemporary, artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez.
Pub November 1. 2021. 6 × 9 in. 342 pp.
SUNY Press
978-1-438-48828-8 Paper, $34.95
use code NYRB22 and save 30% at www.sunypress.edu.

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40 The New York Review

 much later is sheltered from the
emotional weather of childhood.
This is perhaps why the loss of intensity
of feeling in English affects de Meijer
far more than it seems to affect Sedivy.
Sedivy uses the example of Nabokov’s
memoir of childhood, called Conclusive
Evidence when first drafted in English,
then Drugie berega (Other Shores) when
he revised it after having translated it into
his native Russian. Nabokov described
his memories as tuned to the “musical
key” of Russian, and the memoir deep-
ened in texture, detail, and emotional
resonance as a result of the translation.
“A simple anecdote about a stingy old
housekeeper becomes perfumed with
the scents of coffee and decay,” Sedivy
writes, “the description of a laundry
hamper acquires a creaking sound, the
visual details of a celluloid swan and
toy boat sprout as he writes about the
tub in which he bathed as a child.”
Beyond the striking anecdotes from
her own biography, Sedivy’s book is at
its best when she brings insights from
psycholinguistics to the page: patients
whose progress in psychoanalysis was
stalled until they spoke in their na-
tive language; role-playing games that
Dutch subjects undertook coopera-
tively in Dutch, but with a cold and
calculating streak in English; the story
of a Korean child of six who, after two
months in the United States, was found
to have lost half of her vocabulary. Na-
tive English speakers enrolled in a Ko-
rean language class began to noticeably
modify their accents within weeks of
beginning the course, inflecting their
mother tongue with hints of Korean.
“A bilingual mind is like a household
that contains more than one person,”
Sedivy observes.
Intimate living arrangements be-
tween two people have a way of
changing their interpersonal dy-
namics and perhaps even their
personalities, and in the same way,
cohabiting languages are bound to
change each other.
De Meijer’s mother lived in the Neth-
erlands long into adulthood before em-
igrating, but after decades in Canada
she too began to notice her command
of Dutch shifting, deteriorating. “En-
glish words, more readily at hand, are
swapped in here and there in her speech
and in mine,” de Meijer writes. “At other
moments, we both falter and have to re-
mind each other of the Dutch word we’re
looking for; it is a sensation familiar to
dreams, to be certain that something
exists without being able to locate it.”
In the 1950s the psycholinguist
Susan Ervin-Tripp showed that bilin-
gual subjects put through the Thematic
Apperception Test, a kind of verbal
Rorschach blot, will conjure stories
of a very different emotional register
when they conduct the test in their two
different languages. Tests of personal-
ity also prove untranslatable, issuing
widely variable results with the same
subject according to which language
they are questioned in.
Sedivy explains that when personality
tests are conducted on bilingual Mexi-
can Americans living in Texas, they tend
to score low on “agreeableness” when
questioned in Spanish, because of the
way Mexican culture valorizes modesty,
but will score much more highly if asked
the same question in English. She de-
scribes a woman who is polite, calm, and
May 26, 2022
respectful in Portuguese, but vulgar, dy-
namic, and funny in French. Language
may also influence our experience by
determining which concepts are avail-
able to be named. “There is no word in
Italian for accountability,” Sedivy goes
on. “The closest is ‘responsibilità’—
responsibility—which lacks the concept
that actions can carry consequences.”
A selective forgetting of Czech might
have encouraged Sedivy’s childhood
assimilation and integration in Can-
ada, but as de Meijer points out, citing
the work of Manuela Julien, a teacher
of Dutch to immigrant families in the
Netherlands, a thorough grounding in
a mother tongue can actually help im-
migrants attain proficiency in their new
language: “Julien also objects to the
stigma inherent in the term taalachter-
stand, or language-behindness, which
is used in her field to refer to these chil-
dren’s partially bilingual states.” Se-
divy discusses Lily Wong Fillmore, an
American linguist of Chinese heritage,
whose work suggests that early immer-
sion in English at the expense of a home
language can be devastating: “The loss
of a fully bilingual generation in immi-
grant families, a generation that could
serve as a bridge between its older and
younger members, could have dire con-
sequences for family dynamics.”
Sedivy’s experience of relearning
Czech in adulthood was revelatory:
lying in the bed where her father was
born, she found herself
waking often in the nights, aware
of having dreams, not of images
or movement or people or events,
but of Czech words and phrases
that frothed and bubbled into con-
sciousness. Within weeks, a mea-
sure of fluency began to unspool
during my waking hours. Words
that I’m sure I hadn’t used in de-
cades leapt out of my mouth, as-
tounding me.
Her knowledge of Czech was not for-
gotten, only “long-buried under the
dust and debris of other languages.”
Czech has a particular Ĝ sound that
even a closely related language like
Slovakian does not. “At some point in
my childhood, I did master this sound,”
writes Sedivy, “and can pronounce it
to this day. But my brother, born three
years after me in Vienna, cannot.” On
their visits to Czechia, Sedivy encoun-
ters strangers who scold her for her slips
in accent and stumbles in grammar— so
different from the indulgence and en-
couragement with which I was received
in Trieste. “I found myself bristling at
such interactions,” Sedivy writes.
They were a visceral reminder of
the many obstacles faced by some-
one who is trying to reclaim their
native language— obstacles that
arise out of a lack of understand-
ing of the convoluted linguistic
journey of a person who is born
into a language but then kept at a
distance from it.
She wonders whether this intolerance
of the Czechs is a national characteris-
tic or, given how few foreigners attempt
to learn Czech, simply the result of
being exposed only to a narrow range
of pronunciations: “‘I’m sorry,’ said my
brother, ‘My Czech is not very good.’
‘Yes, I can hear that,’ said the clerk,
without the slightest hint of a smile or
note of encouragement.”
For very young children, mastering
an accent provides one of the most re-
liable indicators of belonging. Babies
of just ten months old accept toys more
readily from someone who speaks the
language of their caregivers— and even
more readily if the person offering
the toy shares the same accent. White
American children of age five or six ap-
parently find it easier to believe some-
one will grow up to be a different racial
group than that they will grow up to
speak a different language. One study
found that five-year- olds believed that
adopted children would necessarily
speak the language of their birth par-
ents, not their adopted parents.
Language is “a reliable badge of the
gradations of belonging,” Sedivy writes,
a timeless tool used by our hypersocial
species to decide who is and isn’t to
be trusted— something she underlines
with a quote from the book of Judges:
“Are you an Ephraimite?” If he
said, “No,” then they would say to
him, “Say now, ‘Shibboleth.’” But
he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could
not pronounce it correctly. Then
they seized him and slew him at
the fords of the Jordan.
There are recent reports that
Ukrainian defense forces are making
their prisoners pronounce the word
palianytsia (a type of bread) as a reli-
able indicator of Russian or Ukrainian
upbringing. Sedivy cites disconcerting
evidence that the more diverse a soci-
ety, the more distrustful it is. The “link
between diversity and distrust does not
readily evaporate even when [poverty
and income inequality] are taken into
account,” she notes. “Unlike the illu-
sory connection between bilingualism
and poor school outcomes, the worri-
some relationship between fragmen-
tation and social distrust has thus far
withstood closer scrutiny.”
Sedivy balances evidence for and
against language diversity as an obsta-
cle to nation-building. “Language has
partitioned humans into groups since
very far back in our evolutionary his-
tory,” she writes. “Given how language
broadcasts identity, it’s not unreasonable
to ask whether promoting a polyphony
of languages is at odds with nurturing a
sense of national unity.” But as anxious
as she is about the disharmony evident
within polyglot communities, she dis-
agrees with the British journalist David
Goodhart, whose book The Road to
Somewhere (2017) proposed a division
of society into “Somewheres” and “Any-
wheres” (with the suggestion that “Any-
wheres” are less committed to local and
national goals): “‘Anywhere’ conveys an
indifference that I do not feel toward any
of the places that have shaped me.”
De Meijer describes returning to the
Netherlands from Canada and stand-
ing on the beach at Ijmuiden, swayed
by the blast of wind from the North
Sea. She recalls the poetry of M. Vasa-
lis, a Dutch poet and child psychiatrist
who titled her final collection, pub-
lished posthumously, De oude kustlijn
(The Old Coastline). Much farmland
in the Netherlands is reclaimed from
the sea, and Vasalis chose the name
because many migrating birds still fol-
low the line where sea once met land,
just as the thoughts of an immigrant
will run more easily along the lines of
a language learned in childhood. The
dikes and polders of the Netherlands
shape the lives and habits of all those
birds living today, no matter the migra-
tion routes embedded in their neural
circuits. In the same way, the learning
of new languages shapes our human ex-
perience even as the traces of our child-
hood language persist.
My wife and children hold Italian cit-
izenship, and one of the consequences
of the recent implementation of Brexit
is that my freedom to live in Italy,
speaking Italian with Italians, is now
far more restricted than it once was.
(On my recent trip to Trieste, for the
first time in a quarter- century of trav-
eling back and forth to the country, my
passport was stamped in and stamped
out.) So, for the last couple of years, as
the world closed down with Covid, I’ve
been attempting to widen my own hori-
zons and apply for Italian citizenship.
I’ve passed a language exam and sent
the certificate for it, along with a certif-
icate of my marriage, the passports of
my wife and children, a police report,
some signed photographs, and the evi-
dence of every address I’ve stayed at for
more than twenty years, all to an office
somewhere in Rome. I’ve been told to
expect a wait of twenty-four to thirty-
six months before hearing whether my
application will be successful. It feels
as if I’m waiting to hear whether my
family’s own fusion of English and Ital-
ian, with its public and domestic vocab-
ulary, will be allowed to flourish.
Sedivy may feel divided between
different homelands, but she describes
beautifully her ease in a “home-
language,” closing her book with a
fantasy of a fusion tongue that would
combine all the elements of her identity
in one:
It would preserve the dastardly
Ĝ sound of Czech and the lisp-
inducing th of English. I would
want it to keep both the vertigi-
nous case endings of Czech nouns
and the mongrel vocabulary of
English— and the swearing would
all be in joyous Québécois French.
De Meijer thinks of Dutch now as a
kind of “carbon shadow” that perme-
ates her English. “Never erase,” her
favorite art teacher said to her once,
“it doesn’t really work,” and she writes
of the ways Dutch surfaces in the hur-
ried moments of her life. Dutch is the
foundation of language for her, the first
draft of a drawing that she has added to
but never erased. Like Sedivy, de Mei-
jer ends her book with a vision of the
richness and possibility that twinned
senses of belonging have offered her.
But with her gift as a poet, she takes
that experience of language and tran-
substantiates it into the image of a fruit
tree she knew of in the Netherlands, in
the garden of a family friend unusually
skilled at the grafting of branches:
In his vegetable garden stood the
odd, Edenic sight of an apple tree
that also bore apricots and plums.
Perhaps the minds of linguistic mi-
grants are like that tree; the mother
tongue is the apple trunk, with
roots that penetrate the earth. And
our later languages are branches,
feeding through the same roots but
setting their own fruit.
Q
41

“Get out! You don’t have permission
to be here! Didn’t you see the sign on
the gate?” shouted the official. But it
was open briefly when I walked by on
the evening of March 28, and sixty sec-
onds were enough to sear the image
on anyone’s mind for a lifetime: some
one hundred dead bodies lined up and,
in one section, piled up to three deep
in the courtyard of Kharkiv’s central
morgue. Frozen by the cold, some were
in body bags; many were not. Some had
shoes; some were in socks. Bare legs
protruded from under sheets. Some
were old. Most appeared to be civilians.
The Russian-speaking city of Kharkiv,
in Ukraine’s northeast, is about twenty
minutes from the Russian border, and
the distant sound and vibration of ar-
tillery and rockets, incoming and out-
going, rolled in spasms throughout the
day and night from the battered district
of North Saltivka, about twenty min-
utes from the city center. But no part
of Kharkiv has been spared by the war.
Entire sides of apartment buildings hit
by rockets have been sheared away.
Schools, universities, hospitals, and gov-
ernment buildings have all been struck.
Five weeks after the beginning of the
war, the Russians retreated from Kyiv,
Chernihiv, and the north of Ukraine.
Now, with every passing day, we learn
more about the Russian terror—the
murders, summary executions, and
looting in the territories they occupied.
But this is just the end of the begin-
ning. Having failed to capture Kyiv or
any other big city apart from the Black
Sea ports of Kherson and, as of the end
of April, all but a last redoubt in Mari-
upol, much of which they had to nearly
raze to seize, Russian president Vlad-
imir Putin and his generals have now
regrouped their forces and launched a
new offensive that aims to take control
of as much territory as possible in the
Donbas, in the east of Ukraine, and to
consolidate their hold on the land they
have conquered connecting Russia to
Crimea along the Black Sea. Even if
the Russians fail to take Kharkiv, by
shelling and threatening it, they tie
down Ukrainian forces who would oth-
erwise be fighting them in the Donbas.
In the meantime the horror continues
to mount. The day after I was thrown
out of that courtyard in Kharkiv, Yuri
Kravchenko, the official in charge of
the region’s morgues, agreed to talk
to me. With the exception of very
rare events like plane crashes, he told
me, the courtyard had only been used
twice before to store bodies: during
World War II and in 1933 during the
Holodomor, Stalin’s man-made fam-
ine that killed millions in Ukraine. We
stood on the pavement outside while
families and a line of undertakers’ vans
waited in the street to collect the dead.
Finally he let me back into the court-
yard, where three local officials with
clipboards stood over the unbagged
bodies to determine causes of death.
Kravchenko said that the reason the
bodies were in the courtyard was that,
with Kharkiv under attack, municipal
officials could not produce death cer-
tificates fast enough. Even if they had
enough space for all the corpses, which
42
The Russian Terror
Tim Judah
A room in an apartment building struck by a missile in the Pavlovo Pole district,
Kharkiv, Ukraine, March 27, 2022
they did not, storing them in the reg-
ular way would slow down the process
of issuing the certificates even more.
You could only take them up from the
freezer room one at a time in a special
elevator, he said: “Once a determination
of death has been made, then they put
the body in a bag and, unless they are
claimed, we bury them in ten days.” The
number of unclaimed bodies has soared
because so many families have left.
On February 27 Russian reconnais-
sance troops had penetrated Kharkiv’s
center, but they were forced back
within hours. Fierce fighting over the
next few days pushed the Russians out
beyond the suburbs, but ever since they
have not ceased to bomb Kharkiv and
attack it with missiles. A few hours
after I arrived in the city on March 26,
a missile strike less than a ten-minute
drive from the city center gouged a cra-
ter several yards deep. The blast gutted
a historic 1886 fire watchtower and the
school opposite.
After three in the afternoon the
streets of Kharkiv were deserted, but
even before that there were few peo-
ple out. Except for a small number of
supermarkets and drugstores, nothing
was open. The economy of the city,
which, like that of much of the rest of
Ukraine, had recently been growing
after decades of post- Soviet collapse,
has shut down. Kharkiv’s factories,
offices, and universities, as well as
its institutes of higher education and
research institutions— all have been
closed and many have been shelled or
hit by missiles.
In a residential area in the Pavlovo Pole
district, the front of a five-story building
had peeled off and fallen into the street.
Tim Judah
From one apartment a bed teetered out
of a bedroom, and in all of them were
the remains of comfortable lives that
ended with the explosion. Clothes were
still folded neatly in cupboards, coats
hung on pegs by front doors, and in one
room, the books, pencil case, fluffy toy,
unopened lollipop, and dancing compe-
tition trophy of a schoolgirl remained on
her desk. In another apartment a sauce-
pan of soup, a bowl, an unfinished cup
of tea, and some chocolates were still
on the table. In all of the surrounding
buildings, windows were shattered and
no one appeared to remain.
In the Shevchenkivs’kyi district a
cat popped into a hole in the side of a
nine-story building hit on March 14 by
a rocket. Someone had folded a blanket
for it to sit on. Igor and Nina, friends
both aged sixty, sat on a bench sharing
a Carlsberg lager and said that some
people remained in the basements of
the surrounding buildings, but the rest
had left because their windows had
been shattered and the electricity and
heat had gone off. “The only people
who have stayed have no money and
nowhere to go,” said Nina. Igor said he
remained because despite the freez-
ing weather, his apartment was warm
enough if he left his gas stove on.
Although buildings throughout Khar-
kiv have been burned out, reduced to
rubble, or pierced by missiles, fighting
was now concentrated in the north-
east of the city. On the way there I saw
hundreds of people lining up for hu-
manitarian aid in front of a blown- out
bank in the Saltivka district. But a few
minutes’ drive beyond them, the streets
were deserted. Black smoke billowed in
the distance.
Emerging from behind an apartment
building, two soldiers carrying empty
water containers told me that Rus-
sian troops were less than a mile away.
“They are digging defensive positions
now,” said one of them. While territory
had been retaken to the southeast of the
city, in North Saltivka the lines had not
moved since the Russians were pushed
back at the beginning of the war.
Sitting at a shattered bus stop, friends
and neighbors Ludmila, sixty-five, and
Sasha, sixty-six, gladly accepted the
offer of a lift and told me that this
was the first time they had come back
to the area since the war began. They
had tried to get to their apartments in
North Saltivka to retrieve some posses-
sions. When they had fled at the begin-
ning of the war to neighboring Saltivka,
said Ludmila, “we took nothing but the
clothes we were wearing.” Soldiers told
them it was too dangerous to get back to
their building. Ludmila suddenly burst
into tears. “Please let us off here,” she
said, by the people lining up for loaves
of bread and frozen chicken legs. “We
need to get some aid.”
F or everyone who remained in
Kharkiv, life was getting harder by the
day. Those who stayed were running
out of money. Either they were being
laid off or their companies could no
longer pay them. Even those with some
savings were lining up because, as one
man said, “if they are giving help, it is
better to take it because who knows
what will happen tomorrow.”
Many people in line were collect-
ing food for elderly and infirm family
members or neighbors who found it
hard to go out. Because the electricity
often went off when there was a rocket
strike, elevators had been turned off so
that people did not get trapped in them.
But that meant many then got trapped
in their apartments, unable to manage
ten or fifteen flights of stairs. When I
left Kharkiv I was asked to take an el-
derly lady with me to her daughter in
Kyiv. At first she had not wanted to
leave, even though she could not man-
age the stairs by herself, but gradually
all of her neighbors, who had helped
her survive, had left, and so she had to
do as her daughter insisted.
There are only very partial figures
for the number of dead and injured in
Kharkiv, but Nataliya Zubar, a veteran
local political and human rights activist
now collecting evidence of possible war
crimes committed by the Russians in her
city, believes that “close to a thousand
civilians” have died.1 It is also unknown
how many people remain in Kharkiv,
which was home to 1.5 million before
the war. Ihor Terekhov, the mayor,
said that 70 percent remain and that he
“bowed with respect toward those who
have stayed.” Zubar believes the number
to be no more than 700,000, while Maria
Avdeeva, a think-tanker turned wartime
videographer filming the fate of her city,
estimates that as few as 300,000 remain.
It was not all death and destruction,
though. Underground, life was thriv-
1
For more on prosecuting war crimes
in Ukraine, see Fintan O’Toole’s “Our
Hypocrisy on War Crimes” in this issue.
The New York Review
ing. In a metro station that I visited,
Superman, Batman, and a giant pink
rabbit in a blue dress were entertain-
ing children, many of whom have been
living there since the beginning of the
war. People were sleeping in the metro
because either they were frightened
their home would be hit, it had already
been hit, or they had fled fighting in
outlying districts. Between 600 and
1,150 slept in the station each night.
The war had given new meaning
to the lives of some of them. Olha, a
twenty-nine-year- old English teacher
before the war, was now a volunteer at
the station. “I am only sleeping two or
three hours a night,” she said as she gave
a guided tour of its back offices. They
had been converted into rooms to store
food and medicine and a makeshift
kitchen where other volunteers made
sandwiches and soup for hundreds.
The lack of privacy was a big problem,
said Olha. If you slept inside a train car,
it was warmer than the platform, but it
might smell bad. If you slept on the seats
you were also warmer, but the seats were
narrow. The granite platforms were
cold to sleep on, but some people had
brought inflatable mattresses. Extension
cords meant people could plug in their
phones, but they could not plug in their
kettles because they blew the fuses.
When he was not delivering aid, forty-
seven-year- old Vasil Ryabko played
music. While I was in Kharkiv, his rock
band Papa Karlo played a concert in the
basement of a nineteenth- century fac-
tory where Oleksandr Honcharov, aged
forty-two, had recently been building a
music studio. The livestreamed concert
was to raise money for Ukraine’s volun-
teer Territorial Defense Force.
Honcharov said his nearby home had
been damaged early in the war, so he
had moved into the basement, and now
up to fifteen people a night also slept
there. The atmosphere was more hip-
ster club than stuffy shelter. Yuliia Ili-
ukka, a forty-year- old poet from North
Saltivka, came to read her new poems
“about war and love.” She said that
she had sent her nine-year- old son to
live with his grandparents in a village
outside Kharkiv and that this war was
being fought so “our children can live
in their own land, in Ukraine, not in
Russia.”
In this historically Russophile city,
people were baffled and angered by the
invasion. Avdeeva told me that since
the Russians had failed early in the
war to seize Kharkiv, their missile and
rocket attacks were now a deliberate
policy aimed at “terrorizing civilians
and making any kind of normal life in
Ukraine’s second city impossible.”
What was happening in Kharkiv has
been happening elsewhere as well. The
Russians bombarded Chernihiv, one
hundred miles northeast of Kyiv, for
almost a month before withdrawing at
the beginning of April when their at-
tempt to seize it failed. There condi-
tions had been particularly bad, since,
unlike in Kharkiv, water, gas, and com-
munications had gone off in large parts
of the city for much of the time that the
Russians had been on the outskirts,
and in some areas they have still not
been restored.
In the city’s Yuri Gagarin sports sta-
dium, there were some of the deepest
craters I have seen in the war so far.
Just outside were the ruins of a small
but elegant nineteenth- century gothic-
revival library, where books still clung
to the surviving shelves. You can see
the ghost of the library, like many
of the other destroyed and damaged
buildings here, by “driving” past on
Google Street View.
You can’t “drive” through the outly-
ing village of Novoselivka, but from the
main road you can get an idea of what
it was like. I wanted that idea because
it has been completely flattened. There
Oleksandr Chuhay, aged fifty-three,
and his family were poking about in
the wreckage of their house to see
what they could salvage. The village
was “unlucky,” he said, because it had
been destroyed once before, in 1943,
when the Germans, in a revenge attack,
had gathered people together, executed
them, and then burned it down. But he
added, surprisingly cheerfully, “If they
announce tomorrow that the war is fin-
ished, we will start rebuilding.” There
were no military positions here, he
said, but Ukrainian tanks would pass
by on the main road on the way to the
front. The road did not look like it had
been hit.
Volodymyr Boyko, a civil servant and
historian, showed me around the town
center. He pointed at buildings such as
the Hotel Ukraine, half of which was in
ruins after a direct hit, and said, “Ger-
mans built, Germans built, Germans
built . . .” He told me that by the end of
World War II, 75 percent of Chernihiv
had been destroyed and so, as elsewhere
in the Soviet Union, German POWs had
been deployed as laborers to rebuild it.
Now, he added, “Germans built, Rus-
sians destroyed!” and joked about the
possibility of having Ukraine’s Rus-
sian POWs rebuild his city. We visited a
pizza restaurant, the Barashaka restau-
rant, and some warehouses. In all of
them, teams of volunteers were sorting
truckloads of humanitarian aid, which
was now flowing into the city. Parcels
were being bagged up and drivers were
setting off to find the elderly and others
who depended on these deliveries.
It is not well understood abroad just
how sophisticated and well organized
Ukraine’s volunteer networks are.
Many of them grew out of the Maidan
Revolution of 2014, and even if many
had been dormant since then, they
have sprung back to life now via social
media, giving people the opportunity
to help. And that feeling of pulling to-
gether and wanting to be involved in
however small a way is widespread. To
get to Chernihiv I hitched a ride with
some Ukrainian journalists. As we re-
turned to Kyiv I took out some cash to
pay for my share of the gas. Then, while
we sat at a checkpoint waiting to enter
the city, the colleague who was driving
whipped out his phone and the money
was promptly donated to the Ukrainian
army.
B orodyanka, about thirty miles north-
west of Kyiv, is another town that was
heavily bombed by the Russians. Un-
like Chernihiv, however, they actually
captured it. Much of the horror here
has yet to be revealed. Entire apart-
ment buildings were brought down at
the beginning of the conflict by Russian
aerial bombardment. When I visited, a
team from the emergency services was
standing on top of the rubble of one

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Another random document with
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squamous, yellowish, sticky covering, under which the psoroptes lie
hidden and which affords them nourishment.
The crusts steadily grow thicker and lift the individual fibres of
wool, tearing them from their follicles, so that patches of skin
become bare. The patches thus formed increase in diameter, for the
acari leave the centre, where crust-formation is replaced by
abundant desquamation of the epidermis. The skin is thickened,
assumes the character of parchment, and in old-standing cases
becomes wrinkled.
The disease always commences along the back, withers, loins, and
the upper part of the quarters. Thence it spreads to the flanks and
sides of the chest. The psoroptes are almost exclusively confined to
recently affected points on the edges of the scabby patches. They are
visible to the naked eye, and appear as little whitish-brown points.
Scab is specially liable to attack a flock containing lambs and
yearling sheep, whose skin is thin, fine and supple, and therefore
more susceptible to their attacks. If a portion of a scabby flock be
shorn, the shorn animals will probably recover on account of the
psoroptes transferring themselves to the animals with long fleeces.
The diagnosis is easy. Psoroptic mange cannot be mistaken for
sarcoptic mange, on account of the different points affected.
Psoroptic mange only attacks regions covered by wool, and
sarcoptic mange those free of wool. A microscopical examination of
acari removed from the diseased animals will, however, immediately
remove all doubt.
Nor can the disease be confounded with phthiriasis, the
trichodectes being immediately distinguished from the psoroptes by
their greater size and the shape of their head. Moreover, they are
usually to be found on the front portions of the shoulders.
It is more likely to be mistaken for another disease, termed by
some writers seborrhœa and studied and described by Delafond
under the name of sebaceous folliculitis. This disease appears mostly
in autumn, and attacks animals much exposed to the weather and on
moist, cold soils. It begins with very violent pruritus, followed by
biting and loss of portions of the fleece. The skin is red, inflamed and
painful, and the wounds are covered with large quantities of
yellowish acid discharge of a sticky and offensive nature. The
treatment of this disease consists in placing the sheep in clean, dry,
well-ventilated sheds. Recovery is assisted by clipping and the
application of some emollient dressing to the diseased parts.
The ease with which the disease can be cured and the absence of
parasites enable one to readily distinguish it from psoroptic mange
(scab).
Prognosis. The disease is not specially grave, so long as only a
few animals are affected, for it is not difficult to cure by isolation,
good feeding, and proper external treatment; but if scab appears in a
flock, the freedom with which the animals intermingle is such that all
are rapidly attacked, and the irritation produced at once checks their
growth and causes loss in condition. Many ewes give birth to small,
feeble lambs, which are almost certain to die, and in any case the
wool is considerably diminished in value.
Delafond estimated that psoroptic mange formerly attacked one
thirty-fifth of all the sheep in France every year, causing damage to
the extent of five francs per head. At the present time, and since
proper sanitary laws have been instituted, it has become much less
common.
During the bad season of the year the mortality is greater, and may
reach as much as from 40 to 50 per cent. In cases where scab is
accompanied by some other disease, such as distomatosis, it may
even rise to 80 per cent.
The treatment is preventive and curative. Preventive treatment
consists in separating the healthy from the diseased animals and in
disinfecting the folds, sheds, etc.
Curative treatment. The first point in this treatment consists in
improving the diseased animal’s food both as to quality and quantity.
It is to be observed that the parasite has more difficulty in living on
robust and well-nourished animals. Moreover, observation shows
that transference from poor land to rich pastures is sometimes in
itself sufficient to bring about a spontaneous cure. Such, at least, is
the belief of the Spanish sheep farmers in Estramadura and of the
French shepherds.
The shepherd can do a great deal to arrest the course of the
disease. If he is careful, zealous, intelligent and observant he will
quickly note the first indications of the disease and, by isolating the
animals, check its spread.
The second point consists in shearing the diseased animals, and
this must be carried out at any season of the year. The money loss is
sometimes important, but must be met, for otherwise treatment is
impossible. In cases of localised scab, empyreumatic oil, oil of cade,
solutions of sulphuret of potassium, decoctions of black hellebore
(water 1 quart, fresh rhizome 4 ounces or dry rhizome 2 ounces),
decoction of tobacco and diluted tobacco juice (6 ounces in 1 quart of
water) have been recommended. Such local treatment, however, is
often useless, because incomplete.
When scab is generalised and it is impossible to define the parts
attacked, general treatment is indispensable and the diseased sheep
should be dipped.
As a preliminary, however, and in order to make sure that the
application will produce its effect, the animals after shearing should
be passed, twenty-four hours before the medicinal bath, through a
warm bath containing soap in order to soften and remove the scabs.
Applications of oil or some fatty substance will also soften the scabs,
which may afterwards be removed with a scraper without producing
bleeding. One pound of soft soap may be dissolved in fifty quarts of
water and each sheep plunged into this and scrubbed with a brush
for a few minutes. Washing alone removes a large number of the
parasites.
Whatever bath be used it should not be given until four or five
hours after the last feeding. The dips most popular in France are as
follows:—

Tessier’s Bath (1810).

For 100 sheep Arsenious acid 1½ parts or lbs.

Sulphate of iron 10 „
Water 100 „
 The above materials should be boiled for ten minutes, and, as a
consequence of the chemical fusion which occurs in the process, the
proportion of arsenious acid dissolved amounts to about 2 drachms
per quart instead of 3¾ drachms.
In this bath the arsenious acid acts as a parasiticide and the
sulphate of iron as an astringent, the latter checking the absorption
of toxic principles by the skin and sores, and preventing the sheep
from licking themselves.
Absorption by the skin is not so dangerous as has been believed.
Rossignol has shown that poisoning need not be feared in chemical
baths unless the proportion of dissolved arsenic is above 150 grains
per quart, especially if the period of immersion does not exceed five
minutes. Even pure solutions of arsenic, free from any astringent,
may be used, provided the quantity in the bath does not exceed 120
grains per quart.
The bath should, if possible, be kept warm—85° to 95° Fahr. (30°
to 35° C.).
Four men are generally employed for the operation. One drives in
the sheep, two others hold and brush them in the bath, and the
fourth holds the head of the animal above the liquid. Tessier
recommended gloves for the use of the operators, but experience has
shown that such a precaution is unnecessary. The udder, and
particularly the teats, of ewes with young may, if necessary, be
smeared with some fatty substance, such as vaseline or oil, in order
to guard against the astringent action of the liquid.
Each sheep is plunged in the bath for one or two minutes, or five
minutes at the most. All the diseased spots must be brushed, rubbed
and cleansed; but care must be taken not to make them bleed.
Tessier suggested leaving the animals for twenty-four hours in
some disinfected place, without straw or food, to prevent these
materials from being wetted by the liquid which runs from the fleece,
and which, if afterwards eaten, might have a poisonous effect. Here,
again, the danger has been exaggerated. Delafond has shown that
sheep may be given a fluid ounce of Tessier’s bath for eight days
running without producing the slightest unfavourable symptom.
Tessier’s bath is excellent from the therapeutic standpoint, but it
imparts a yellow tint to the fleece, which is thus rendered less
valuable. The mixture has therefore been modified in various ways.

Clément’s Bath (1846).

For 100 sheep Arsenious acid 1·5 parts or lbs.

Sulphate of zinc 5 „
Water 100 „

In this bath every quart contains about 2½ drachms of arsenious

acid. Its toxic power, therefore, is considerably greater than that of
Tessier’s bath.
Clément’s formula has one drawback. The sulphate of zinc may be
mistaken for a non-astringent alkaline sulphate (sulphate of soda),
and as a consequence poisoning may occur, as experience has shown.
Mathieu of Sèvres replaced the sulphate of iron by an equal
quantity of alum. In this case, each quart of the bath contains 2½
drachms of arsenious acid.
Clément’s and Mathieu’s formulæ have given just as good results
as Tessier’s.
A last formula is that of Professor Trasbot. The aloes is of very
little use, however, because it is almost insoluble.

For 100 sheep Arsenious acid 2 lbs.

Sulphate of zinc 10 „
Aloes 1 „
Water 25 gallons.

Condition of the animals after the bath.—On leaving the bath the
abraded parts are slightly cauterised. During the five or six following
days the skin is stiff, and covered with adherent crusts over the
points attacked by the parasites. The animals no longer scratch or
bite themselves.
Towards the eighth day the crusts fall, the skin appears supple and
of a pink colour, and the wounds cicatrise. In animals which have
suffered for a long time recovery is much slower, and may extend
over from thirty to fifty days. The wool again grows soft and bright,
while the sheep rapidly regain their spirits and condition. The
cicatrisation of the wounds is often accompanied by intense itching,
which must not be taken as a sign of the persistence of the disease. It
is well, however, to keep the animals under observation at this
period.
Under any circumstances, six weeks or two months should always
be allowed to elapse before giving a second bath. Should a few spots
appear to be attacked secondarily, they may be moistened with a
little of one of the bath liquids.
In Germany the creolin bath is generally employed:

For 100 sheep { Water 250 gallons or parts.

{ Creolin 6·5 „

Each sheep is bathed a second time after an interval of one week,

the animal being immersed for three minutes in the bath and
thoroughly scrubbed with a brush. The efficacy of this method,
however, is less certain.
In America, where the flocks are large and scabies is frequent,
sulphur baths are employed, the baths themselves being of great size.
The animals are forced to pass through them and remain there for
some minutes.
The size and value of American, Australian, and New Zealand
flocks demand that the modes of treatment practised and the
experience gained in these countries should receive something more
than passing notice. We therefore purpose giving a short résumé of
some parts of the very valuable monograph on sheep scab issued in
1897 by Dr. Salmon and Mr. Stiles, for the American Bureau of
Animal Industry.
In selecting a dip the question of expense will naturally arise; next,
the question as to whether or not scab actually exists in the flock to
be dipped. The facilities at hand, the set-back to the sheep, and the
length of the wool are also matters for consideration, as well as the
pastures into which the dipped sheep are to be placed.
Expense.—In estimating the expense one should consider not only
the actual outlay for the ingredients of the ooze, but the cost of fuel
and labour, the injury, if any, to the sheep, and the liability of not
curing the disease. It is much more economical to use an expensive
dip and cure scab, than it is to use a cheap dip and fail to cure it.
Does scab exist in the flock?—If scab does not actually exist and
the wool is long, the dipping in this case simply being a matter of
precaution, it is best not to select a dip containing lime.
The facilities at hand for preparing dip.—If fuel is very scarce, so
that it is impracticable to boil the mixture for at least two hours, the
lime-and-sulphur dips should not be selected.

Fig. 256.—A comparatively early case of common scab, showing a bare spot
and tagging of the wool.

The pastures.—In case it is necessary to place the dipped sheep on

the same pastures they occupied before being dipped, it is always
best to use a dip containing sulphur. If a proprietary dip is selected
under those circumstances, it is suggested that sulphur be added,
about 1 lb. of flowers of sulphur to every 6 gallons of dip. The object
in using sulphur is to place in the wool a material which will not
evaporate quickly, but will remain there for a longer period of time
than the scab parasites ordinarily remain alive away from their hosts.
By doing this the sheep are protected against reinfection.
Sulphur is one of the oldest known remedies for scab; its use is
best known in the tobacco-and-sulphur dip and in the lime-and-
sulphur dip. These home-made mixtures are the two dips which have
played the most important rôles in the eradication of scab from
certain English colonies, and their use is extensive in America.

The Tobacco-and-Sulphur Dip.

Fig. 257.—A slightly advanced case of common scab.

 The formula as given here, and as adopted by the New South
Wales sanitary authorities, appears to have first been proposed in
1854 by Mr. John Rutherford. “On the Hopkins Hill Station Mr.
Rutherford, with two dressings of these ingredients, then cured over
52,000 sheep which had been infected for eighteen months. Since
then millions of scabby sheep have been permanently cured in
Victoria in the same way, and in South Australia and New South
Wales hundreds of thousands of scabby sheep have also been
cleansed with tobacco and sulphur. Judging, therefore, from the
experience of the three colonies, there is no medicament or specific
yet known that can be compared with tobacco and sulphur as a
thorough and lasting cure for scab in sheep.” (Dr. Bruce, Chief
Inspector of Sheep for New South Wales.)
The proportions adopted by Rutherford, and afterwards made
official by the scab sanitary authorities, are—

Tobacco leaves 1 lb.

Flowers of sulphur 1 „
Water 5 gallons.

The advantage of this dip lies in the fact that two of the best scab
remedies, namely, tobacco (nicotine) and sulphur, are used together,
each of which kills the parasites, while the sulphur remains in the
wool and protects for some time against reinfection. As no caustic is
used to soften the scab, heat must be relied on to penetrate the
crusts.
Directions for preparing the dip.—Infusing the tobacco:—Place 1
lb. of gold-leaf or manufactured tobacco for every 6 gallons of dip
desired in a covered boiler of cold or lukewarm water, and allow to
stand for about twenty-four hours; on the evening before dipping
bring the water to near the boiling point (212° Fahr.) for an instant,
then remove the fire and allow the infusion to stand overnight.
Thoroughly mix the sulphur (1 lb. to every 6 gallons of dip desired)
with the hand in a bucket of water to the consistency of gruel.
When ready to dip, thoroughly strain the tobacco infusion from
the leaves by pressure, mix the liquid with the sulphur gruel, add
enough water to make the required amount of dip, and thoroughly
stir the entire mixture.

Lime-and-Sulphur Dips.

Under the term “lime-and-sulphur dips” is included a large

number, of different formulæ requiring lime and sulphur in different
proportions.
To give an idea of the variety of the lime-and-sulphur dips, the
following list is quoted, the ingredients being reduced in all cases to
avoirdupois pounds and United States gallons:
(1.) The original “Victorian lime-and-sulphur dip,” proposed by Dr.
Rowe, adopted as official in Australia:

Flowers of sulphur 20⅚ lbs.

Fresh slaked lime 10⁵⁄₁₂ „
Water 100 gallons.

(2.) South African (Cape Town) official lime-and-sulphur dip,

February 4th, 1897:

Flowers of sulphur 20⅚ lbs.

Unslaked lime 16⅔ „
Water 100 gallons.

(3.) Fort Collins lime-and-sulphur dip:

Flowers of sulphur 33 lbs.

Unslaked lime 11 „
Water 100 gallons.

(4.) A mixture which, used to some extent by the Bureau of Animal

Industry, contains the same proportions of lime and sulphur
(namely, 1 to 3) as the Fort Collins dip, but the quantities are
reduced to—
 Flowers of sulphur 24 lbs.
Unslaked lime 8 „
Water 100 gallons.

In case of fresh scab Formula No. 4 will act as efficaciously as the

dips with a greater amount of lime, but in cases of very hard scab a
stronger dip, as the Fort Collins dip, should be preferred; or, in
unusually severe cases, an ooze with more lime in proportion to the
amount of sulphur, such as the Victorian (No. 1) or the South African
(No. 2) dip might be used.

Prejudice against Lime-and-Sulphur Dips.

There is at present great prejudice (a certain amount of it justified,

no doubt) against the use of lime and sulphur, emanating chiefly
from the agents of patent or proprietary dips and from the wool
manufacturers.
In the first place, it is frequently asserted that lime and sulphur
does not cure scab. Experience in Australia and South Africa, as well
as in America, has shown beyond any doubt that a lime-and-sulphur
dip, when properly proportioned, properly prepared, and properly
used, is one of the best scab eradicators known.
It is claimed by some that it produces “blood poisoning.” But the
cases of death following the use of lime-and-sulphur dips have been
infinitesimally few when compared with the number of sheep dipped
in these solutions, and when compared with the deaths which have
been known to follow the use of certain proprietary dips. The details
of such accidents, so far as they have been reported, have not shown
that death was due to any property prepared and properly used lime-
and-sulphur dip. It is highly probable that the cases of so-called
“blood poisoning” of shear-cut sheep are generally due to an
infection with bacteria in stale dip containing putrefying material.
The greatest objection raised against the use of lime-and-sulphur
dip is that it injures the wool. This objection is raised by many wool
manufacturers and echoed with ever-increasing emphasis by the
manufacturers of prepared dips; while, after years of extensive
experience with properly prepared dip, its injury to the wool is
strongly and steadfastly denied by the Agricultural Department of
Cape Colony.
It is believed that a certain amount of justice is attached to this
objection to lime and sulphur as generally used; unless, therefore,
lime and sulphur can be used in a way which will not injure the wool
to an appreciable extent, we should advise against its use in certain
cases; in certain other cases the good accomplished far outweighs the
injury it does. Let us, therefore, examine into this damage and its
causes.

Fig. 258.—A more advanced case of common scab.

The usual time for dipping sheep is shortly after shearing, when
the wool is very short; whatever the damage at this time, then, it can
be only slight, and the small amount of lime left in the wool will
surely do but little harm.
In full fleece lime and sulphur will cause more injury. In Australia
the deterioration was computed by wool buyers at 17 per cent.,
although in Cape Colony the Department of Agriculture maintains
that if properly prepared, and if only the clear liquid is used, the
sediment being thrown away, the official lime-and-sulphur formula
will not injure the long wool. The United States Bureau of
Agriculture have found some samples of wool injured by dipping,
while on other samples no appreciable effect was noticeable.
If a lime-and-sulphur dip is used, care must be taken to give the
solution ample time to settle; then only the clear liquid should be
used, while the sediment should be discarded. In some of the above
tests on samples of wool it was found that the dip with sediment had
produced very serious effects, even when no appreciable effects were
noticed on samples dipped in the corresponding clear liquid.
Experience has amply demonstrated that a properly made and
properly used lime-and-sulphur dip is one of the cheapest and most
efficient scab eradicators known, but its use should be confined to
flocks in which scab is known to exist, and to shorn sheep, with the
exception of very severe cases of scab in unshorn sheep. It should
only be used when it can be properly boiled and settled. The use of
lime-and-sulphur dips in flocks not known to have scab, especially if
the sheep are full fleeced, cannot be recommended; in such cases
tobacco, or sulphur and tobacco, is safer and equally good.
All things considered, where it is a choice between sacrificing the
weight of sheep and to some extent the colour of the wool by using
tobacco and sulphur, and sacrificing the staple of the wool by using
lime and sulphur, the owner should not hesitate an instant in
selecting tobacco in preference to lime. The loss in weight by using
tobacco and sulphur is not much greater than the loss in using lime
and sulphur, while the loss in staple is of more importance than a
slight discoloration.
Preparation of the mixture.—Take 8 to 11 lbs. of unslaked lime,
place it in a mortar-box or a kettle or pail of some kind, and add
enough water to slake the lime and form a “lime paste” or “lime
putty.”[8]
8. Many persons prefer to slake the lime to a powder, which is to be sifted and
mixed with sifted sulphur. One pint of water will slake 3 lbs. of lime if the slaking is
performed slowly and carefully. As a rule, however, it is necessary to use more
water. This method takes more time and requires more work than the one given
above, and does not give any better results. If the boiled solution is allowed to
settle the ooze will be equally safe.
Sift into this lime paste three times as many pounds of flowers of
sulphur as of lime, and stir the mixture well.
Be sure to weigh both the lime and the sulphur. Do not trust to
measuring them in a bucket or to guessing at the weight.
Place the sulphur-lime paste in a kettle or boiler with about
twenty-five to thirty gallons of boiling water, and boil the mixture for
two hours at least, stirring the liquid and sediment. The boiling
should be continued until the sulphur disappears, or almost
disappears, from the surface; the solution is then of a chocolate or
liver colour. The longer the solution boils the more the sulphur is
dissolved and the less caustic the ooze becomes.
Pour the mixture and sediment into a tub or barrel placed near the
dipping vat and provided with a bung-hole about 4 inches from the
bottom, and allow ample time (two to three hours, or more if
necessary) to settle.
When fully settled draw off the clear liquid into the dipping vat,
and add enough water to make a hundred gallons. Under no
circumstances should the sediment be used for dipping purposes.
 Fig. 259.—A shorn sheep with large bare area due to scab.

To summarise the position of the United States Department of

Agriculture on the lime-and-sulphur dips:—When properly made
and properly used these dips are second to none and equalled by few
as scab eradicators. There is always some injury to the wool resulting
from the use of these dips, but when properly made and properly
used upon shorn sheep, it is believed that this injury is so slight that
it need not be considered; on long wool the injury is greater and
seems to vary with different wools, being greater on a fine than on a
coarse wool. This injury consists chiefly in a change in the
microscopic structure of the fibre, caused by the caustic action of the
ooze. When improperly made and improperly used the lime and
sulphur dips are both injurious and dangerous, and in these cases the
cheapness of the ingredients does not justify their use. In case scab
exists in a flock and the farmer wishes to eradicate it, he cannot
choose a dip which will bring about a more thorough cure than will
lime and sulphur (properly made and properly used), although it will
be perfectly possible for the farmer to find several other dips which
will, when properly used, be nearly or equally as effectual as any
lime-and-sulphur dip. There is no dip to which objections cannot be
raised.

Arsenical Dips.

There are both home-made arsenical dips and secret proprietary

arsenical dips. It is well to use special precautions with both, because
of the danger connected with them. One of the prominent
manufacturers of dips, a firm which places on the market both a
powder arsenical dip and a liquid non-poisonous dip, recently
summarised the evils of arsenical dips in the following remarkable
manner:
“The drawbacks to the use of arsenic may be summed up
somewhat as follows: (a) Its danger as a deadly poison. (b) Its drying
effect on the wool. (c) Its weakening of the fibre of the wool in one
particular part near the skin, where it comes in contact with the
tender wool roots at the time of dipping. (d) Its not feeding the wool
or stimulating the growth, or increasing the weight of the fleece, as
good oleaginous dips do. (e) The danger arising from the sheep
pasturing, after coming out of the bath, where the wash may possibly
have dripped from the fleece, or where showers of rain, after the
dipping, have washed the dip out of the fleece upon the pasture. (f)
Its occasionally throwing sheep off their feed for a few days after
dipping, and so prejudicing the condition of the sheep. (g) Its
frequent effect upon the skin of the sheep, causing excoriation,
blistering, and hardness, which stiffen and injure the animal,
sometimes resulting in death.”
Although this manufacturer has gone further in his attack upon
arsenic than the United States Bureau of Agriculture would have
been inclined to do, it must be remarked that when a manufacturer
of such a dip cannot speak more highly of the chief ingredient of his
compound than this one has done in the above quotations, his
remarks tend to discredit dips based upon that ingredient. Bruce, the
Chief Inspector of Live Stock for New South Wales, speaking of
arsenical dips, says: “Arsenic and arsenic and tobacco (with fresh
runs) cured 9,284 and failed with 9,271.”
It may be said, on the other hand, that arsenic really has excellent
scab-curing qualities; it enters into the composition of a number of
the secret dipping powders, and forms the chief ingredient in one of
the oldest secret dips used. This particular dip has been given second
place (with some qualifications) among the officially recognised dips
in South Africa.
Formulæ for arsenical dips.—Finlay Dun recommends the
following:—Take 3 lbs. each of arsenic, soda ash (impure sodium
carbonate) or pearl ash (impure potassium carbonate), soft soap, and
sulphur. A pint or two of naphtha may be added if desired. The
ingredients are best dissolved in 10 to 20 gallons of boiling water,
and cold water is added to make up 100 gallons. The head of the
sheep must, of course, be kept out of the bath.
A mixture highly endorsed by certain parties consists of the
following ingredients:

Commercially pure arsenite of soda 14 lbs.

Ground roll sulphur 34½ „
Water 432 gallons (U.S.)

The arsenite of soda is thoroughly mixed with the sulphur before

being added to the water.
Precautions in use of arsenical mixtures.—Any person using an
arsenical dip should bear in mind that he is dealing with a deadly
poison. The following precautions should be observed:
(1) Yards into which newly-dipped sheep are to be turned should
first be cleared of all green food, hay, and even fresh litter; if
perfectly empty they are still safer. (2) When the dipping is finished,
the yard should be cleaned, washed, and swept, and any unused ooze
should at once be poured down a drain which will not contaminate
food or premises used by any animals. (3) Dipped sheep should
remain in an open, exposed place, as on dry ground. (4)
Overcrowding should be avoided, and every facility given for rapid
drying, which is greatly facilitated by selecting fine, clear, dry
weather for dipping. (5) On no account should sheep be returned to
their grazings until they are dry and all risk of dripping is passed.
The feeling of the United States Bureau of Agriculture towards
arsenical dips is shown by the following:
Suggestion as to danger.—The formulæ given above are copied
from the writings of men who have had wide experience in dipping,
but this Bureau assumes no responsibility for the efficacy of the dips
given, or for their correct proportions. Furthermore, as long as
efficacious non-poisonous dips are to be had, we see no necessity for
running the risks attendant upon the use of poisonous dips.

Carbolic Dips.

This class of dips kills the scab mites very quickly, but
unfortunately the wash soon leaves the sheep, which is consequently
not protected from reinfection in the pastures. If, therefore, a
carbolic dip is selected, it is well to add flowers of sulphur (1 lb. to
every 6 gallons) as a protection against reinfection.
The advantages of carbolic dips are that they act more rapidly than
the tobacco or sulphur dips, and that the prepared carbolic dips are
very easily mixed in the bath. They also seem, according to Gillette,
to have a greater effect on the eggs of the parasites than either the
sulphur or the tobacco dips. The great disadvantages of this class of
dips are—first, in some of the proprietary dips, that the farmer is
uncertain regarding the strength of material he is using; second, the
sheep receive a greater set-back than they do with either lime and
sulphur or tobacco.
Fig. 260.—An advanced case of common scab.

The United States Bureau of Agriculture is inclined to be extremely

conservative in regard to them, and to advise their manufacturers to
prepare them in a guaranteed strength with more explicit directions
for use than are to be found in the present circulars.
One of the prominent proprietary carbolic dips was formerly
recognised as one of the three official dips in New South Wales, but it
has now been erased from the list. In Cape Town carbolic dips are
not much used, and in the official reports little is said concerning
them.
The United States Bureau of Animal Industry gives the following
advice as regards dipping:
(1.) Select a dip containing sulphur. If a prepared “dip” is used
which does not contain sulphur, it is always safer to add about 16½
lbs. of sifted flowers of sulphur to every 100 gallons of water,
especially if, after dipping, the sheep have to be returned to the old
pastures.
Fig. 261.—An American sheep-dipping plant in operation.

(2.) Shear all the sheep at one time, and immediately after
shearing confine them to one-half the farm for two to four weeks.
Many persons prefer to dip immediately after shearing.
(3.) At the end of this time dip every sheep (and every goat also, if
there are any on the farm).
(4.) Ten days later dip the entire flock a second time.
(5.) After the second dipping, place the flock on the portion of the
farm from which they have been excluded during the previous four
or five weeks.
(6.) Use the dip at a temperature of 100° to 110° Fahr.
(7.) Keep each sheep in the dip for two minutes by the watch—do
not guess at the time—and duck its head at least once.
(8.) Be careful in dipping rams, as they are more likely to be
overcome in the dip than are the ewes.