A Deeper Meaning Of Books

I recently discovered the book A Vanished World--a collection of photographs of Jews in Germany and Eastern Europe on the cusp of World War II taken by Roman Vishniac, a Russian-American photographer with Jewish roots. Vishniac risked his life and freedom numerous times to snap these pictures with a hidden camera to smuggle them out to people who might be in a position to help. By the time the shots reach 1938 the photos are, of course, stark and bleak. Most of his pictures--something like 15,000 out of 17,000--were confiscated and/or otherwise destroyed. You can guess how many people listened to his photographic warnings otherwise.

He didn't just take pictures of people, though, but elements of Jewish culture that were likewise threatened. The second picture is this photo of a Ukranian rabbi's books, and Vishniac offered the following commentary, which I'll reproduce here with no further commentary of my own:

In the shtetl, people lived in poverty but were rich in the wisdom of Jewishness. These books, as crowded together as the people, were like living beings. I can almost hear, still, the krechtzen (groans) and moans of suffering and feel the hopes and expectations of the worshippers reading the pages. Like the undernourished children of the shtetl, the books were frail. So tragic, that the books and the people shared a common fate. Three years after this picture was taken, this community and its books were destroyed by the Nazis.

A Writing Problem I Like Having, With A Bit Of Lawless

After my aforementioned multi-months of weekly overtime, I'm out of practice at keeping tally of my daily word count when the writing actually is (almost) daily--particularly when I'm going back to the previous chapter and making changes and additions based on notes I wrote onto the pages while in Arizona. So instead of trying to work it out I just did a general chapter-by-chapter word count again and came up with 166,800, which puts me up by about 8,000 words from a week ago.

Vegas, of course, guarded his box pile, while Nate took a deceptively lounging position on the table. Dr. Pepper, glass-bottled sugar Coke, and fruit punch snow cone were consumed. Exercise was various walks, sometimes with Laurie and always with at least one dog, around the neighborhood and campus. (Tucker the Big Dog is a little sad that all of his biggest fans among the students graduated this past May.) I'm still walking through Rutherfurd, plodding through Galbraith, and just swept through Larry McMurty's Dead Man's Walk.

It's bad enough that bits and pieces of my mind like to skip ahead to the next book while I'm in the middle of the current book, but there's also a back-burner in my brain that is poking around at ideas for the second Giant Historical Epic after that: it's playing with Florida. Brain, we'll get to that. Let me finish Arizona first. And preferably The Great River too.

In other happy writing news, today's e-mail delivered the contract for my next poem in Asimov's, "Sunday at the Quantum Revival". I don't have any idea when the poem will appear, but my last couple of poems there appeared relatively quickly after I returned the signed paperwork.

In non-writing related stuff (except that this movie was based on a book), a couple of friends and I went to see Lawless this past Saturday at a theater in the town where the movie takes place. I liked the fact that they didn't automatically default to making Franklin County residents look like idiots, though saying "They stretched the truth" is like saying "War and Peace isn't short". Yes, the Bondurant brothers were moonshiners in Franklin County. Yes, Jack and Forrest were shot by Charles Rakes at a bridge. And I do believe that Rakes was shot by a police officer to get him to quit shooting at the Bondurants. But that's about the extent of the correlation between truth and movie.