Sunday, June 19, 2005
Courteous Good Will
I finally got around to reading Blood Ties: A Woman's History--a memoir of dislocation--by my former professor Ani Mander, who passed away two years ago at the age of 67. Ani, as we affectionately called her, had been a wartime refugee from Sarajevo, and had only mentioned this once, briefly, within the context of the 9/11 disaster that occurred the week prior to our first class with her. Something, as I recall, about people who hadn't lived through the experience of war have difficulty grasping what it is like.
Like me, her father was a lawyer, and she grew up comfortably with many relatives nearby, in a neighborhood where she was safe to roam around exploring and immersing in the cosmopolitan, multicultural religious and ethnic bazaar that surrounded her home. The grandaughter of an Ashkenazim rabbi as well as Sephardim shopkeepers, Ani swam in a sea of exotic languages at home and in the street until at age six when her family abruptly evacuated to the Dalmatian island of Korcula within the Italian fascist zone, and later made their way to Palermo and Rome, where they lived for the four remaining years of the war.
Aside from the wonderful way she has of relating her displacement from Yugoslavia with the perspective of a child, it is the adventure itself--for that is how she experienced it--with all its tragic and anxious moments, that I find engrossing. But then she delights us with the complementary telling of this family epic by her maternal grandmother whom she interviewed for this 1976 publication. Alternating chapters between her voice and that of Baki, Anica (pronounced Anitsa) allows readers to experience such things as aerial bombardments, betrayals, confidences, capture, and escape on a Mediterranean journey by boat, mule, and train through both marveled and horrified eyes of two people united by blood but separated by six decades of life where Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Serbs, and Croatians flowed through a mountainous landscape like the snow waters that empty into the Adriatic.
Ani's tale of adaptation and coming of age amidst turmoil and disruption is pleasingly contrasted by her discovery of common humanity amongst the peasants and soldiers and bourgeoisie who became, for a time, an intimate part of her daily life between 1941 and 1949, when she began a wholly new adventure as an immigrant to the United States--one that would eventually, as I later learned, involve her in both the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for gender equality. And what I find especially heartwarming in her words from thirty years ago is the pervailing tone of both kindness and quiet moral courage that came to characterize this woman I once envisioned as a mentor with whom I might share many years together as colleagues in academe.
Alas, it is sometimes the too short but intense personal associations that we cherish most in our attempts at attaining a grace and decency that makes all the ugliness of this world endurable. And for that I am grateful.
Like me, her father was a lawyer, and she grew up comfortably with many relatives nearby, in a neighborhood where she was safe to roam around exploring and immersing in the cosmopolitan, multicultural religious and ethnic bazaar that surrounded her home. The grandaughter of an Ashkenazim rabbi as well as Sephardim shopkeepers, Ani swam in a sea of exotic languages at home and in the street until at age six when her family abruptly evacuated to the Dalmatian island of Korcula within the Italian fascist zone, and later made their way to Palermo and Rome, where they lived for the four remaining years of the war.
Aside from the wonderful way she has of relating her displacement from Yugoslavia with the perspective of a child, it is the adventure itself--for that is how she experienced it--with all its tragic and anxious moments, that I find engrossing. But then she delights us with the complementary telling of this family epic by her maternal grandmother whom she interviewed for this 1976 publication. Alternating chapters between her voice and that of Baki, Anica (pronounced Anitsa) allows readers to experience such things as aerial bombardments, betrayals, confidences, capture, and escape on a Mediterranean journey by boat, mule, and train through both marveled and horrified eyes of two people united by blood but separated by six decades of life where Ottomans, Austro-Hungarians, Serbs, and Croatians flowed through a mountainous landscape like the snow waters that empty into the Adriatic.
Ani's tale of adaptation and coming of age amidst turmoil and disruption is pleasingly contrasted by her discovery of common humanity amongst the peasants and soldiers and bourgeoisie who became, for a time, an intimate part of her daily life between 1941 and 1949, when she began a wholly new adventure as an immigrant to the United States--one that would eventually, as I later learned, involve her in both the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for gender equality. And what I find especially heartwarming in her words from thirty years ago is the pervailing tone of both kindness and quiet moral courage that came to characterize this woman I once envisioned as a mentor with whom I might share many years together as colleagues in academe.
Alas, it is sometimes the too short but intense personal associations that we cherish most in our attempts at attaining a grace and decency that makes all the ugliness of this world endurable. And for that I am grateful.
