Category Archives: History

****Love & Treasure

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peacock

photo: kansaikate, creative commons license

By Ayelet Waldman – This lovely novel opens with a prologue set in 2013, involving elderly Jack Wiseman and his granddaughter Natalie. Her new husband has abandoned her, and she’s just quit her Manhattan attorney’s job to come stay with Jack in Red Hook, Maine, and her beloved grandfather is dying. It’s questionable which of them needs more tender care.

Searching a drawer, Jack runs across a worn black pouch containing a jeweled peacock dangling on a chain. “Whose was it?” Natalie asks, her curiosity aroused. “Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.” He charges her with the near-impossible task of returning it to its rightful owner, which will require unraveling its history.

The book then reveals how the pendant came into Jack’s hands at the close of World War II. It had been one item among thousands and thousands on the Hungarian Gold Train, a 42-car freight train the Germans were using to remove valuables—most of them looted from Hungarian Jews—to Berlin. The train was seized by French troops and finally came under U.S. military control and the contents warehoused in Salzburg, Austria. (The U.S. government kept most details about the Hungarian Gold Train secret for 50 years.)

Items were pilfered from the horde by thieves and the soldiers guarding it; U.S. military commanders used the warehouse as a department store for outfitting their quarters with fine china, silverware, crystal, furniture, and oriental rugs. Jack, in charge of the loot, had to comply with his superiors’ orders and was constantly frustrated at his inability to protect and preserve these treasures, much less return them to their rightful owners. His responsibilities as a soldier and as a Jew are at war within him.

Waldman writes compellingly about Jack’s situation and the treatment of the Displaced Persons flooding Salzburg, many of whom were concentration camp survivors. He meets one, a Hungarian with flame-red hair, Ilona Jakab, and falls in love. Jack keeps the peacock pendant in her memory, but never loses the feeling that taking it was dishonorable.

In her quest to fulfill her grandfather’s charge to find the pendant’s rightful present-day owner, Natalie travels to Budapest and finds much more than she expects. That section of the book is a treasure hunt, a mystery story, and a romance.

The last major section of the book dips back in time to 1913. It’s narrated by a libidinous psychiatrist charged with “treating” Nina S., an early suffragist who wears the pendant, and whom he rapidly concludes is quite sane, just at odds with her repressive father.

Natalie, Ilona, and Nina are interesting, compelling characters in challenging situations. Waldman doesn’t tell a good story once, but three times. Descriptions are vivid, characters’ motivations heartfelt, and conversations witty and spirited. Occasionally, she may be a little heavy-handed, and occasionally a verbal anachronism or clunky love scene sneaks in, but overall, the stories have strong narrative power. I don’t quite understand all the carping about this book in the mainstream media—each reviewer seeming to fixate on some different issue. I found it not only an exploration of conflicting loyalties, identity, and the struggle to be honorable, but also a fascinating historical mystery.

Love & Treasure is certainly timely, given recent renewed attention to the issue of Nazi plunder. The peacock pendant, silent witness to the pain and abuse of history, is the treasure in Waldman’s story, but love is the constant.

Good Crime News? The Amber Room

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The Amber Room

The original Amber Room, photographed in 1917 by Andrei Andreyevich Zeest.

A Polish historian recently announced he believes he’s found The Amber Room (6-minute National Geographic video) hidden inside an abandoned Nazi Bunker. The Amber Room was a gift from Germany to Tsar Peter the Great, then stolen—or “repatriated,” as some would argue—in 1941 and subsequently lost in the waning days of WWII. Among the world’s most valuable lost works of art, if it could be found, it would be valued today at more than $500 million.

The Amber Room comprises panels of some 13,000 pounds of thin amber backed with gold leaf and mirrors and encrusted with carved amber and precious stones. It took more than a decade to create. The panels lined over 600 square feet of wall space in a room in Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo (the Tsar’s Village) near St. Petersburg. Many people considered Tsarskoye Selo the Russian equivalent of Versailles, and Tsar Nicholas II and his family lived there until forced into exile (and eventual execution) in August 1917 during the Russian Revolution.

Catharine Palace, St. Petersburg

Catherine Palace (photo: whereisemil, creative commons license)

On the eve of the Nazi invasions, Soviet officials tried to remove the precious amber panels, and when they were unsuccessful, attempted to mask them with nondescript wallpaper. The German military command occupied the palace during the War and immediately discovered the ruse. The Nazis rapidly disassembled the room (reportedly within 36 hours) and removed the panels to Königsberg, where they were put on display. In the final year of the war, Hitler ordered that looted art to be taken to a more secure location, but whether The Amber Room survived has been a matter of hope and conjecture for more than 70 years.

Many theories have been put forward regarding the fate of these panels, including that they were destroyed in wartime bombing, that they were hidden in the Königsberg castle’s basement. The palace was finally demolished under orders from Leonid Brezhnev in 1968, 23 years after Königsberg became the Soviet Union town of Kaliningrad. That act would make the panels, if they had survived in castle’s sub-regions, irretrievable. Time after time, individuals have claimed to know the Amber Room’s hidden location, but these claims have always been false.

Now Bartlomiej Plebanczyk, head curator at Poland’s Namerki Museum, has used ground-penetrating radar to find a previously undiscovered room within a large complex of undamaged bunkers and tunnels in the Masurian Lake District in northeastern Poland. The complex was extraordinarily well defended (with its own Panzer division) and considered a secure place for looted treasure. Now Plebanczyk awaits permission to drill into the bunker to insert a camera to check what is there.

After so many failed attempts to find the Amber Room, in 1979, the Soviets began an effort to recreate it based on photographs and drawings, and a touring group of workmen brought the story of room and its reconstruction to U.S. museum-goers (I saw this exhibit and the men working on the amber mosaics somewhere). The recreated room is now housed in Russia’s Catherine Palace.

You’ll recall that reclaiming looted art was a serious and ongoing endeavor after World War II, with the notable efforts of “The Monuments Men” (movie review) and continues up to today. Last year’s movie, The Woman in Gold, dramatized the heroic legal struggle to reclaim a single Gustav Klimt painting, now on permanent display at the Neue Gallery in Manhattan.

****American Nations

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American Nations, mapBy Colin Woodard – This 2011 book—a pick of my book club—is a thought-provoking analysis of the different cultural strains, mostly organized along geographic lines, that make up what author Sarah Vowell calls “the (somewhat) United States.” Woodard’s subtitle is “a history of the eleven rival regional cultures of North America.” Many of those rivalries, which date to our earliest history, well before the Revolutionary War, have been amplified, not erased, by subsequent events, and help to explain some of the political schisms we see today.

The answer to a frustrated electorate’s “Why can’t our politicians (and voters) ever agree on anything?” is partly that they never did. Of course, aggregate data hide a lot of individual differences, and none of the characterizations Woodard has developed for his eleven regions describe every individual living there, just the region’s general cultural tendencies. Some of his regions cross over into Canada and Mexico too.

The regions, which he says “have been hiding in plain sight throughout our history,” are:

  • Yankeedom began as a “religious utopia in the New England wilderness.” Those early colonies emphasized education, local political control, and efforts aimed at the greater good of the community.
  • New Netherland laid down the cultural underpinnings of greater New York City; a trading society that was multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and committed to freedom of inquiry. Its precepts were memorialized in the Bill of Rights.
  • The Midlands, founded by English Quakers and organized around the middle class people predominantly of German background and moderate political opinions who don’t welcome government intrusion.
  • Tidewater catered to conservative aristocratic elites who were gentleman farmers, strong on respect for authority and dependent on slave labor. It was dominant during the colonial period, but lost its standing by dint of its culture’s inability to expand beyond coastal areas.
  • Greater Appalachia was founded by “wave upon wave of rough, bellicose settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands” who in their native lands formed a strong independent spirit, suspicious of aristocratic overlords and social reformers alike (think Mel Gibson in Braveheart).
  • The Deep South, founded by Barbados slave lords, became the bastion of white supremacy and aristocratic privilege. It is the least democratic of the 11 regions while being “the wellspring of African American culture.”
  • New France is an amalgam of the Canadian Province of Québec and some other areas of far eastern Canada as well as the Acadian (“Cajun”) territories of southern Louisiana.
  • El Norte dates to the late 16th century, when the Spanish empire founded missions north into California. It includes Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Texas, as well as northern Mexican states that, Woodard says, are more oriented toward the United States than Mexico City.
  • The Left Coast is a narrow strip from Monterey, California, to Juneau, Alaska, and includes San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. The cities were originally developed by Yankee traders who came by ship and the countryside by overland arrivals from the Appalachian region and the culture today is an amalgam of Yankee idealism and Appalachian independence.
  • The Far West is the only area “where environmental factors truly trumped ethnic ones.” The region is unsuited for traditional farming, but its resources have been exploited by companies headquartered in distant cities and they and the federal government own vast tracts of land. Locals largely oppose federal interference (just in the news again lately), even as they depend on federal dollars.
  • First Nation he defines as a large region in the far north, where the indigenous population has never given up its lands and still employs traditional cultural practices.

Like any analysis intended to look at history through a single lens, Woodard may tailor his arguments to support his approach. Nevertheless, he presents an intriguing hypothesis that carries the ring of truth. In this political season, many of the old antagonisms and patterns he describes are newly visible and, frankly, any cogent explanation of why Americans do some of the things we do is welcome!

Asian Immigrants’ Tales

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suitcase, Asian

adapted from Roger Wagner, creative commons license

The recent success of the movie Brooklyn has reminds us of the universality of immigrant stories in American history (even as anti-immigrant, anti-refugee positions characterize the political discourse). While the immigrant experience is a common thread running through our national character, and the experiences of Irish and Italian immigrants relatively well known, each country’s immigrant story is in many ways as unique as the person and family who dons this new cultural garment.

Shawna Yang Ryan, writing for LitHub (“From There to Here: Five Essential Tales of Immigration”) says “Immigration is anything but pedestrian. To displace one’s self in adulthood, to uproot, to leave behind ways of speaking, moving, being that are second nature is a feat of true grit.” She tells of her own mother’s move to the United States from Taiwan after marrying an American GI, which helped inspire her novel Green Island. Among the tales from other immigrants that she recommends are:

  • Carlos Bulosan’s autobiographical America Is in the Heart, about the struggles and prejudices faced by Filipino farm workers. They worked in America legally (and, by the way, served in the U.S. military), but, says Ryan, were barred from citizenship. His book has been called a brown-skinned Grapes of Wrath.
  • The Namesake, a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, about the Ganguli family’s move from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Massachusetts and the inter-generational rifts that creates. Pulitzer Prize-winner Lahiri has now taken displacement one step further, living part-time in Italy and writing in that language
  • The “graceful essays” by Andrew Lam, collected in Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora, not only examine what it’s like to come to American, but also the experience of a return visit to Vietnam

On this  theme, I would add these classic award-winners from my bookshelf:

  • Anne Fadiman’s non-fiction The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, the tragic consequences for a Hmong family, whose child is afflicted with epilepsy, when their traditional beliefs collide with modern medicine. (National Book Critics Circle Award, 1997)
  • The unforgettable memoir, The Woman Warrior, by Maxine Hong Kingston, relates her “girlhood among ghosts”—both her female relatives’ ghosts from China and the New World ghosts she encounters: Policeman Ghosts, Social Worker Ghosts, Garbage Ghosts, and Wino Ghosts. (National Book Critics Circle Award, 1976)
  • Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker—one of the early books selected for community-wide reading—about Korean American Henry Park, the “perpetual outsider.” (PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel, 1996)
  • Asian American Dreams, by award-winning journalist Helen Zia describes the transformation of Asian Americans from a small and largely invisible minority to a presence in virtually every facet of American life.
  • In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Korean American businesses were especially targeted for destruction, with some 1500 looted and destroyed. Blue Dreams, by Nancy Abelmann and John Lie, explores the reasons Koreans were singled out and what happened in the aftermath.
  • The classic Strangers from a Different Shore, by historian Ronald Takaki, lays out the successive waves of Asian immigration in American history, with each nationality’s experience taking place in a different context.

Reader Question:

What favorite books would you recommend that tell the immigrant story?

*****Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence

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Declaration of Independence, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson

Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson (graphic: wikimedia)

By Joseph J. Ellis – What a wonderful way Pulitzer Prize-winner Ellis has of distilling complicated historical events and people into a readable narrative! I’ve read his His Excellency, George Washington, too, and for the first time truly appreciated our first President. Both books are relatively short—around 200 pages—so if you need a doorstop, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

In Revolutionary Summer, Ellis takes the reader through the events of 1776, both before and after the Declaration of Independence. He says most histories of that era concentrate either on the political machinations within Independence Hall or on the travails of George Washington leading the ragtag Continental Army. Ellis’s contention is that the two threads—military and political—are inextricably intertwined, and the fates of each depended on the other.

As an example, the individual colonies-cum-states put their local political autonomy (an early manifestation of “states’ rights”) above the needs of the combined entity that the delegates in Philadelphia were promoting. While they’d occasionally contribute a few ill-trained and ill-equipped militias to the cause, they wouldn’t necessarily respond to Washington’s pleas for more.

On the political side, says Ellis, “Virginia regarded itself as the most important player in this political crisis, and the Virginians sent their resolutions [regarding independence] to all the other colonies on the assumption that they set the standard for others to imitate.” This mindset accords perfectly with genealogical research I’ve done about my family, in which early Georgia settlers from Virginia generally held themselves in much higher esteem than the “uncouth and rowdy” settlers from the Carolinas (my people!).

On the military side, Ellis makes the interesting point that “both (the British and American) armies would have been better served if their respective commanders had exchanged places. For Howe, in targeting the territory rather than the Continental Army, pursued the cautious strategy when he should have been bold. And Washington, in his very decision to defend New York, pursued the bold strategy when he should have been cautious.”

This book is a highly readable refresher if you’ve neglected your American History since, say, 10th grade. The United States has a great historical legacy, but by and large greatness is not necessarily found in the teaching of history nor in its textbooks. Revolutionary Summer is a bracing corrective.

Savannah Walking Tours

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Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, John Berendt, Savannah, Georgia

Savannah (photo: wikimedia.org)

On a recent week-long trip to Savannah, my family group indulged in a number of interesting walking tours. Not only were they a good way to explore this beautiful city, they helped us stave off any extra pounds we might have put on, thanks to this city’s fabulous food! One of us wore a fitbit, which provided electronic validation of the more than 16,000 steps we accomplished on our most ambitious day, but 14,000 was not unusual.

Flannery O'Connor, Savannah

Mini-lending library outside Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home (she raised peacocks)(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

It’s hard to believe that at one point, developers wanted to destroy the system of squares that make the city so unique, as the nation’s first “planned city.” Each square has different features—statues, fountains, styles of benches—and most are filled with live oaks draped in Spanish Moss.

How much you enjoy walking tours depends a lot on the personality of your guides and what they choose to highlight. Maybe we were just lucky, but all our tours were great. In addition to several house tours—including the Mercer Williams mansion on Monterey Square, featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the tiny early childhood home of author Flannery O’Conner—we especially enjoyed:

  • The “Savannah Walks” one-and-a-half hour Civil War walking tour (912/704-1841). We heard the story of how Savannah wasn’t burned by General Sherman—the precise reason depending on the guide—probably some combination of: the Confederate forces had already abandoned the town, Sherman was set up in the beautiful and comfortable Green Meldrin house on Madison Square, and he had friends who lived in the city.
  • The “Southern Strolls” history walk (912/480-4477). I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this, as we’d already done so many, and maybe others felt that way, too, as only three of us showed up at the Johnny Mercer Bench in Johnson Square at the appointed time. The guide gave a very quirky, personalized tour, and while we saw a few of the same sights, his interpretations were so entertaining, we all agreed it was the best tour of all!
  • To explore some of the area’s African-American history, we took the Freedom Trail Tour led by Johnnie Brown. While not strictly speaking a walking tour, this minibus excursion does let passengers out to visit the Civil Rights museum and the First African Baptist Church—organized in 1773—whose upstairs pews, made by slaves, retain markings indicating which African tribe the congregants came from.
Savannah carriage

Our carriage awaits! (photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

For a general orientation to the city, the hour-long carriage tour that leaves from City Market provided a good overview (912/236-6756) at a pace slow enough to absorb the stream of information. We did that one our first morning. Later that day, we also took one of the many trolley tours. Although it covered a wider area, the presentation was canned, and added little to what we had already learned. There are several trolley tour companies and you can’t walk a block without seeing one pass.

So, going to Savannah? Pack your walking shoes!

Your Travel Circles:

Although Savannah is well worth a visit on its own, you can add on a couple of days there pretty easily if you’re traveling to:

  • Charleston, South Carolina (106 miles)
  • Jacksonville, Florida (139 miles)
  • Atlanta (250 miles)

Sophie Scholl – The Final Days

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Sophie Scholl, Nazis

Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl

Netflix finally sent a movie whose queue we’d been in for years (they must have only a single copy), and wouldn’t you know, it arrived the same week we saw another based-on-a-true-story German-subtitled movie about World War II, Labyrinth of Lies. But you don’t have to wait so long, the entire 2005 Scholl movie is available on YouTube, or you can watch this snippet (trailer).

Sophie Scholl, age 21, her older brother Hans, and several of their friends were students in Munich during the war and participated in a non-violent resistance organization called The White Rose. It was 1943. Stalingrad had just been lost, the Eastern Front was a disaster, and most German military leaders saw inevitable looming defeat. It was in that atmosphere that Sophie and her brother are arrested for distributing anti-war flyers at the university, and the movie focuses on her interrogation by the Gestapo. It doesn’t involve the thuggish violence one might expect; rather, it’s a duel of wits between Sophie and her interrogator, Robert Mohr, as she refuses to name accomplices.

Raised a Lutheran, Sophie’s religious beliefs were the basis for her opposition to the Nazi regime. In addition, her boyfriend Fritz Hartnagel who served on the Eastern Front had written to her about the mass murders of Soviet soldiers and Jews that he had seen. Her final words illustrate the strength of her convictions: “How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?”

Although the law and the punishment are clear, what is also clear is that Mohr (played by Gerald Held) comes to respect Sophie’s courage, as played so movingly by Julia Jentsch. You might be tempted to think that when the defendants appear in the People’s Court for their show trial, the court’s President is played too broadly, like a hysterical fanatic. Watch the “extras” that accompany the film—and you’ll see some footage made at the trial. The actor playing the judge got it exactly right. As Roger Ebert said in his review: “Those who know their actions are wrong are often the loudest to defend them, especially when they fear a higher moral judgment may come down on them.” The extras include a lengthy interview with Sophie and Hans’s younger sister, Elisabeth, as well. Today, in Munich and elsewhere, there are numerous memorials to Sophie and Hans and The White Rose.

This award-winning film, directed by Marc Rothemund, was an Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language Film in 2005.

Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%, audiences: 88%.

I’d “Mutch Rather See Them”

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Civil War, battlefield, cannon

Stones River National Battlefield (photo: wikipedia)

I spent Veterans’ Day yesterday deciphering four letters my great-great uncles wrote in 1863 and 1864 when serving in the U.S. Civil War. Men from my family served on both sides of that war, and the Tennessee ancestors on my grandfather’s side epitomize that truism about the border states, “it was brother against brother.” Those living in Wilson County, east of Nashville, fought for the South, while those who’d moved further west, to Carroll County, were Union men.

The war did not treat kindly the land of Wilson County and the Hurricane Creek area where my family lived. Just ten miles down the road in early 1863 raged the Battle of Stones River (also called the Battle of Murfreesboro). On the Union side, Gen. William Rosecrans led some 43,000 men of the Army of the Cumberland, while Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg brought 38,000 men from the Army of Tennessee. Although “tactically indecisive,” it was one of the war’s bloodiest battles, with an estimated 23,500 men killed or injured.

More than 80,000 men moving through an agricultural area does not leave much behind for the settlers. As a returning soldier wrote, “When I reached my grandfather’s farm, I saw something of what the home folks were enduring while we were away in the army: barns all gone, fine trees cut down in the front lot, stock all gone, everything in disarray.” Food and currency were scarce, and supplies were gone. “For two years there was no coffee, no sugar, no shoes.” The cotton crop of 1866 was meager, and an epidemic of cholera raged that summer, hitting Wilson County hard, only to be followed by smallpox in the fall. Thus the painted slogan “GTT” began appearing on the doors of people’s abandoned homes and farms—Gone To Texas.

Some family on my grandmother Smith’s side already lived in Texas and their sons were recruited into the Confederate forces. It is their letters I was working on, with the beautifully florid handwriting and many misspellings adding to their charm. These boys—John Ricerd (J.R.), about age 20, and George, 23—were two of eight sons of William and Elizabeth Smith, and they are intimately concerned about the fate of their younger brothers:

  • “Tell W. R. Smith if the war continues till he becomes 18 years old, tell him to go in Texas service, not to comb(come) out here. I hope though he will not have to Join the army.” (from J.R. Smith)
  • “William, you will try to beat me a(t) writing a letter the time, for you are going to School for some time as will be when this letter reaches to hand. You will apply your Self Closely and try to make a Smart man.” (from George Smith)
  • “I reckon I will never see home until this unholy war comes to a close and none but my Heavenly father knows when that will be.” (from George Smith)
  • “I want to here from you and Franklin and all the rest of my little Brothers. But mutch rather see them.” (from J.R. Smith)

You also get a sense of the conditions and concerns that plagued them as they fought in Arkansas and Louisiana in the Trans-Mississippi and Red River campaigns.

  • “I am anxious to here from Brother William. I expec that he has been in the fight. If so I hope that he came threw safe.” (from J.R. Smith)
  • “Father, I have been as wet as I could be for 2 days and a night and travailed (traveled) all one day. You will excuse my bad writing and my Short letter for I have travailed all day and am tired.” (from George Smith)
  • “The reson I don’t get letters regular is we have been running from place to place. The boys is all brokedown and need rest.” (from J.R. Smith)

America has had so many veterans of so many wars, and while the foes and armaments have changed, the human experience remains.

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

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Peggy Guggenheim, Alexander Calder

Guggenheim with an Alexander Calder mobile (photo: JR, creative commons license)

The new documentary Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict (trailer) tells the story of Guggenheim’s remarkable role in preserving and presenting modern art. The niece of Solomon Guggenheim, whose New York City museum is a fixture in the contemporary art scene, she immersed herself in art while living in Paris and London in the 1920s and 1930s.

The film was directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland (interview), whose first award-winning film focused on another larger-than-life woman, Diana Vreeland. In Guggenheim, the filmmaker saw a woman who was courageous, strong, and had the “ability to believe in underdogs. These artists were not mainstream, yet she had the vision to believe in them and create a new place in history for them and for herself.”

In 1937, she opened the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London, which showcased artists such as Jean Cocteau and Vasily Kandinsky. As World War II began in Europe, she purchased treasured works by artists such as Georges Braque, Salvador Dalí and Piet Mondrian, and as the war escalated, she arranged for over 150 paintings and sculpture to be shipped as “household goods” to New York, thereby saving seminal works from being confiscated or destroyed.

She conducted notorious love affairs with numerous artists, including Max Ernst, whom she married briefly after helping him leave Europe. Ernst has one of the best quips in the film saying, “I had a Guggenheim, and it wasn’t a fellowship!”

The documentary uses extensive interviews with art historians and curators to describe how Guggenheim became the protector and promoter of postwar art. As The Hollywood Reporter’s John Defore says, when she settled down in Venice, she would “throw great parties, tend to dozens of dogs, and watch the world grasp the scope of what she’d done.” Her Palazzo Venier dei Leoni on the Grand Canal is now home of The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, one of the most important showcases in Italy for the works of early 20th century American and European artists.

While the documentary has been making the film festival circuit, reportedly it will have a limited distribution in theaters beginning November 6.

UPDATE, 11/13: Los Angeles Times Credits Guggenheim’s perspicacity!

This review is by Tucson-based guest reviewer Jodi Goalstone, who writes the highly entertaining blog Going Yard, Offbeat Baseball Musings.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Piazza Venier dei Leoni, Venice

Piazza Venier dei Leoni (photo: wikipedia)

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The Witches are Back

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Puritans, Salem witch trials, The Crucible

(photo: Len “Doc” Radin, Creative Commons license)

Right on time for Halloween is a new book about the tragedy of the Salem witch trials. The Witches: Salem, 1692, by Stacy Schiff describes how—at the behest mostly of hysterical young girls—19 men and women in the Massachusetts colony were tried, convicted, and hanged for witchcraft. The punishment for a 75-year-old man was being crushed to death with stones: “More weight,” he legendarily cried. Two guilty dogs also were executed. In other words, plenty of wrongheadedness was going around that has never been satisfactorily explained or completely understood. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, “The Witches is the fullest and finest story ever told about Salem in 1692.”

Schiff’s September 7 New Yorker article about how the Puritans got so far off track focused much attention on the educated members of the colony, who were as caught up in the events as anyone, and especially the role of prominent ministers and intellectuals Cotton Mather and his father Increase, president of Harvard. The two had some different reactions to the hysteria, though Cotton Mather believed “he had made a case for prosecuting the guilty, his father for protecting the innocent. Were they not saying the same thing?”

It will be interesting to read Schiff’s book to find out to what extent she subscribes—if at all—to various alternative theories about the phenomenon, one of which is that a covetous desire for wealthier Salemites property was at its root. Many years ago, I read Joe Klein’s biography of Woody Guthrie, who suffered from Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that can cause an afflicted person to writhe uncontrollably and to appear wild and violent in speech and movement. In an afterword, the author reported genealogical research on Guthrie’s family, which he said revealed his ancestors included several of the condemned witches.

Of course, the practice and perils of the witchhunt haven’t died. Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible, in the guise of looking back to the late 1600’s, was written to demonstrate how it can reappear wearing modern-day political garb. A thoughtful reconsideration of 1692, such as Schiff’s book provides, is timely anew.