A Certain Slant of Light

Sliding in under the wire of 2022 with the last of the Newbery Honor books of the 1960s! Really galloped through the 1960s: I zoomed through in just slightly over a month.

Olivia Coolidge’s Men of Athens is a collection of short stories set before, during, and after Athens’ brief golden age, often with an intriguingly slantwise choice of narrators. The final story, for instance, centers on a member of the jury that condemned Socrates: a poverty-stricken old man who always turns up for jury duty because his crippled leg leaves him with few other avenues to make money.

Randall Jarrell’s The Animal Family is a fable that received absolutely rapturous reviews in its day: it was proclaimed an instant classic by none other than P. L. Travers, author of the Mary Poppins novels. Awkwardly, I’d never heard of The Animal Family before, so these prognostications have not been borne out by time.

The book is about a mermaid who comes ashore to live with a hunter (no one has names in this book), and they adopt a bear and a lynx and at last a shipwrecked boy, and coming together and caring for each other is what makes a family. It’s nice, and I enjoyed it, and I remain baffled by the reviewers' euphoria over the book.

Ester Wier’s The Loner also grapples with the question of what it means to be a family. It also starts out with a hero who has no name, as the boy has long since forgotten whatever name he had before he was orphaned and left to fend for himself in a series of picking camps. He meets a girl named Radelia, who decides that she will give him a name, but just as she swings around to tell him the name she’s picked, her long yellow hair gets caught in a potato harvester that rips off her scalp!

The boy, stunned with grief, leaves the potato farm, collapses in the wilderness, where he is found by a sheepdog and adopted by the shepherd, a six-foot-two fifty-something woman named Boss who has been grieving the death of her son Ben, killed last year by a grizzly bear. The boy gets a name by pointing at a passage in the Bible (it is, of course, about David, the famous shepherd lad), learns how to herd sheep, and makes friends with a dog who does not die. But the one sheep with a personality gets mauled to death by the grizzly who killed Ben (David shoots the bear dead), the 1960s being perhaps the peak era for Newbery Pet Death.

And finally, Carol Kendall’s The Gammage Cup is a secondary world fantasy (a great rarity in Newbery land!), featuring the Minnipins, who live in 1950s conformity hell where everyone wears a green cloak and every house has a green door and Curly Green who has painted her door scarlet is regarded as a dangerous disturber of the peace.

Our heroine Muggles stands somewhere in between: she isn’t so dangerously strange as Curly Green and company, but her habit of occasionally wearing a flagrant orange sash shows that she’s not a good conformist Minnipin, either. And soon events conspire to push her closer to Them, as the oddballs collectively are called, culminating in a scene where They are banished from the village.

While Muggles and company make a home for themselves on the mountain, they discover that the Minnipins’ ancestral enemies the Mushrooms (hairless mushroom-colored creatures with potbellies) are tunneling through the mountains to get into the valley… and soon enough, the invaders take one of Muggles’ friends CAPTIVE! Whereupon he discovers that the Mushrooms have a magical healing salve. “Is this is a sign that we are going to get some more in-depth exploration of Mushroom culture?" I wondered.

ABSOLUTELY NOT. The Mushrooms remain faceless enemies to be slaughtered. Their army is dispatched to a Mushroom, Muggles and company are welcomed back to town, and the Minnipins rejoice!

***

Although I enjoyed this madcap dash through the Newbery Honors of the 1960s, I intend to slow down considerably going forward. Take my time! Stop and smell the roses! Perhaps make more space in my life for things that are not books.

Sadly I will not be finishing the Newbery Honor books of the 1960s by the end of 2022, because SOMEBODY (one of the school libraries attached to my library system) sat on The Gammage Cup for a month and I still don’t have it. But I remind myself that it is about the journey, not the destination, this project is a meander up the garden path and not a race, etc. etc., the point is to read books and ponder the development of children’s literature in the United States and perhaps find a few new authors I like.

On that note, I will start this raft of reviewlets with Mary Stolz’s other Newbery Honor book, The Noonday Friends, a contemporary novel about a girl whose home duties mean that she can mostly hang out with her best friend only at the school lunch hour. As such it is less about friendship than I hoped from the title (I basically hope all friendship books will be The Changeling), but I enjoyed the family dynamics and the New York City setting. (You can tell how much the city has changed in the last few decades: the heroine's father comments that owning an apartment building in Greenwich Village wouldn't necessarily make the owner rich.)

Also, shoutout to Stolz for writing a book where the main character’s father had what sounds like a heart attack a few years ago but does NOT die over the course of the story. In fact, he doesn’t even get close to dying! No dramatic scenes where he clutches his chest and collapses.

Mary Hays Weik’s The Jazz Man is a short book illustrated by Weik’s daughter Ann Grifalconi’s dramatic woodcuts. The woodcuts are the best part; the story, about a young boy in Harlem who is transported from his depressing life by the stylings of a jazz quartet across the alley, is forgettable.

Eloise Jarvis McGraw’s The Golden Goblet suffered from “unfortunately, I know the title of this book, and the character doesn’t.” In between the title, the cover of the book which depicts Ranofer finding the golden goblet stashed in a chest, and the fact that I have read books before, ( Spoilers, but I bet you’ve guessed based on the information I’ve just shared )

I don’t mind knowing where a book is going, but I do mind figuring out every revelation ages before the main character does. Maybe if I had read the book at the target age I would have found it less predictable? But I did read Mara, Daughter of the Nile at the target age and didn’t much like it either, so maybe I just don’t get on with McGraw’s ancient Egypt books. It’s too bad, because I SO loved her book The Moorchild, and none of her others have hit the spot the same way.

Edwin Tunis’s Frontier Living is about daily life on the American frontier - not just the Wild West (we don’t get to the Wild West till the last twenty pages or so, in fact) but the Appalachians, Spanish California, etc., all copiously illustrated with intricate pen-and-ink drawings like David Macaulay’s Cathedral. I love books about daily life in the past, so I quite enjoyed this, although Tunis is not as interested in my pet subject “What did people eat?” as I would have preferred.

Today I returned to the Purdue Library to continue my quest for Newbery Honor books, including Mary Stolz's The Noonday Friends. Now you may recall Stolz as the author of the delightful Belling the Tiger, in which two brave mice named Bob and Ozzie set out to bell a cat and through a series of misadventures cross an ocean and bell a tiger instead.

Purdue had the original 1960s edition, with pen and ink illustrations by Beni Montresor, so of course I took it out for a look.

In short order I discovered:

1. In the original edition, the mice were named Asa and Rambo. (Also, the cat July was originally named Siri.)

2. There is apparently a Belling the Tiger extended universe, as I discovered upon removing the book Maximilian's World from the shelf. (Maximilian is a chihuahua puppy. "The fact is, I keep forgetting you are a dog," [Siri] said in a complimentary fashion. "I look upon you as my son."

Maximilian, who looked upon Siri as his father but still thought of himself as a dog, was so confused that he didn't know what to think. He decided to work it out later. After he'd eaten perhaps.)

3. The Belling the Tiger extended universe contains two more books, The Great Rebellion and Siri the Conquistador! These two stories plus Maximilian's World (though oddly not Belling the Tiger, the first book in the sequence) have been published as Tales at the Mousehole... which one of the schools connected to my library owns... but does not lend out.

4. Mary Stolz also wrote Casebook of a Private (Cat's) Eye, which is about a lady private investigator in Victorian world populated by cats! This book was serialized in Cricket, or perhaps only one chapter was excerpted in Cricket?, anyway I read it in my youth and loved it and it is where I learned that "receipt" is a ye olde timey word for "recipe," a fact which so delighted me that I deployed it years later in The Threefold Tie.

5. ANYWAY. Obviously I will be reading the rest of the Belling the Tiger books, and of course The Noonday Friends for Newbery reasons. I would like to explore Stolz's oeuvre further, but she wrote MANY books, so I thought I would throw it open to see if anyone has recommendations for a favorite Mary Stolz book they have read?

After visiting the Yiddish Book Center I was seized by the desire to read some works in translation from Yiddish. Conveniently, this desire intersected with my Newbery project, as Isaac Bashevis Singer won a Newbery Honor three years running for works that he wrote in Yiddish then translated (with Elizabeth Shub as co-translator) into English.

In 1967, the book was Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, a series of folk-tale style stories, although I believe they’re Singer’s original work. (The Newbery Committee of the 1960s was apparently on a folk tale kick and I am HERE for it.) These stories are set in eastern European Jewish communities and are sometimes magical and sometimes merely zany, as when the foolish elders of Chelm decide to solve their money problems by gathering the “diamonds” (snow) falling from the sky, only they need to ensure the villagers won’t trample it, so they decide to send around a messenger to tell everyone not to go outside. Only they realize that the messenger will, himself, trample the snow, so they have him carried on a table by four bearers… only to see in shock the next morning that the bearers trampled the snow! If only each bearer had been carried by yet another bearer, maybe that would have protected the snow?

In 1968, the Honor went to The Fearsome Inn, a picture book (with gorgeous misty illustrations by Nonny Hogrogian) about an inn run by a witch and her demon husband. One night, they have three guests, and are looking forward to a night of plunder… only one of their guests is a cabala student (this is Singer’s chosen spelling), who has a magic piece of chalk which can trap anything if used to draw a line around it! Our student traps the witch and the demon until they agree to leave the inn forever. Then three guests marry the three maids who had been enslaved at the inn, and everyone lives happily ever after!

And in 1969, Singer rounded off his streak with When Shlemiel Went to Warsaw and Other Stories, which is very much of a piece with Zlateh the Goat. My favorite story is perhaps the title story, where Shlemiel attempts to go to Warsaw, but gets turned around on the way. Therefore, when he arrives back in Chelm, he decides that this must not be the original Chelm, but a second Chelm, even though it has all the same people as the original Chelm, including his wife and children, who must be the wife and children of a second Shlemiel!

Since of course he can’t live with another man’s wife, Shlemiel ends up living in the poorhouse, and the elders pay him to look after the children (which previously he was doing for free) so his wife (who is not his wife) can sell vegetables in the market. As she is still cooking for Shlemiel and mending his clothes, Shlemiel turns over the money to his wife (who is not his wife) (but really she is his wife), thus contributing more to the household income than he ever did before. And everyone is happy!

When I posted about Thistle and Thyme, luzula noted that it was on archive.org, and in this way I realized that the Internet Archive/Open Library (they are related in some arcane way) hosts MANY Newbery books, which has allowed me to push through the Newbery Honor books of 1928.

Specifically, it has Ella Young’s The Wonder-Smith and His Son, a collection of Irish folk tales about the Wonder Smith (mostly called the Gubbaun Saor within the book) and… well, actually much more about his daughter Aunya than his son; Aunya is the clever one who is always solving riddles and saving the day, while the son doesn’t even get a name.

After Thistle and Thyme I was quite looking forward to more folk stories, but unfortunately I didn’t enjoy the style of The Wonder-Smith and His Son nearly as much: I found the stories hard to follow, and many of them end abruptly. My impression is that Young set them down exactly as she heard them, which is admirable in its way, but not necessarily satisfying as a literary experience.

The Internet Archive doesn’t have Caroline Snedeker’s Downright Dencey, but as Snedeker was an Indiana writer (a descendent of the founders of the utopian community at New Harmony, in fact!), I ran the book to ground at the Indiana State Library.

This story takes place in Nantucket in the early 19th century, a fascinating setting beautifully realized. Dionis (Dencey) Coffin is a daughter of one of the most prominent Quaker families on the island; Sammy Jetsam is a foul-mouthed, bad-tempered foundling boy, given the name Jetsam because he washed ashore after a shipwreck, more or less. (I fully expected him to turn out to be the son of a stalwart whaling captain, if not a full-blown aristocrat, but his parentage remains a mystery to the end.)

Goaded by her classmates and Jetsam’s own rotten behavior, Dencey hurls a rock at Jetsam. Soon after, she’s overcome by remorse, and seeks him out to beg his forgiveness - only for Jetsam, realizing that he has Dencey over a barrel, to refuse to grant it. He will forgive her, he announces, only if she teaches him how to read! For Jetsam has never had the opportunity to learn, having gotten nothing but abuse from his guardian (who might be his real mother) Injun Jill.

Yes, I know. I know.

Do Dencey and Jetsam fall in love? Well, he was a boy, she was a girl, so… No, that’s unfair, and really undersells the thorniness of their relationship, the almost Renaultian vibe of a love affair where one party falls in love and the other succumbs to compassion. “Yet, as she ran, there came upon her again that sense of belonging to Jetsam - the terrible, intimate responsibility for him. She could not tell whether it was intense gladness or intense sorrow.”

There is nothing quite so satisfying as running a book to earth after years of searching, and so I read William Heyliger’s The Spirit of the Leader with the deep, satisfied sigh of one who drinks a cup of cool water after a long sweaty hike on a hot summer’s day.

Even for Heyliger, this book is extremely Heyliger, by which I mean that it is so earnestly idealistic that one pictures young Steve Rogers reading it as a guilty pleasure: he knows that people aren’t really like this (he fails to notice that he himself is a close approximation of a Heyliger hero), but wouldn’t it be nice if high school students were truly this honest and upright?

The Spirit of the Leader takes place at Northfield High, and particularly focuses on the students’ attempts at self-government. Their student council has actual power, a fact that struck me as absolutely novel when I first read an excerpt from this book during my own high school days. Not only that, but led by George Praska, the student body marches eight hundred strong on the city building to demand that the pot-holed street in front of their school should be paved. (The city government, presumably petrified by the specter of eight hundred high school students marching for anything, gets on it double-quick.)

The book is an ensemble piece, featuring Perry (clever, funny, unathletic but yearning to be a part of a team), his best friend George Praska (solid, athletic, smart but not quick-witted; he needs time to think things through), and various other school types, including - wait for it - that unusual creature in a Heyliger book: a girl!

In this case the girl is Betty Lawton, a leader among the girls of the school. (The girls, Heyliger notes in passing, outnumber the boys; this was common in early twentieth-century high schools.) She is here to demonstrate to the reader that girls can be good citizens too; that, as Praska puts it, girls “are just as much alive to the real things as any of us are. I think they’d be insulted if they thought the school had one line of treatment for the boy citizens and another for the girl… They’re citizens; and the fellow who refuses to judge them as citizens belittles them and belittles the school.”

Betty proves this point of view correct by throwing her weight behind the candidate who truly has the school’s best interests at heart (Praska, of course) and becoming a pillar of the later campaign to win the school an athletic field.

You might imagine that, having introduced a girl to the scrum, Heyliger might also introduce a hint of romance. Absolutely not. Sexual attraction is absolutely alien to the Heyliger verse. I strongly suspect that babies come into being when their parents hold hands while wishing on a star till a stork drops a baby in the cabbage patch.

Despite this general atmosphere, I have long cherished the hope that I might find a slashy Heyliger novel (not least because then I might be able to drag other people into my Heyliger readings)... and we do, finally, get a glimmer near the end of this book! Praska hero-worships former Northfield quarterback Carlos Dix, to the point that a friend teases him, “I’ll bet there was a time you dreamed of him at night.” When Praska thinks Dix might be involved in a shady real estate deal, Praska nearly loses faith in humanity: if you can’t trust Carlos Dix, “a keen, alert man, generous, public spirited, and straight as a string,” then who can you trust?

But of course it all turns out to be a misunderstanding. Praska restores Carlos Dix to his pedestal and gazes at him in the Heyliger version of love, where you just really, really, really admire someone’s outstanding good citizenship.

I am darting through the Newbery Honor books of the 1960s! It helps that many of them are quite short.

Mary Stolz’s Belling the Tiger, for instance, is a picture book (though a very wordy picture book), about two young mice who find themselves chosen to put a bell on the household cat. They acquire the collar, but through a series of misadventures, they end up on a boat, which takes them to a jungle… where they put the collar on a tiger’s tail! The tiger, pleased by his new adornment, helps the mice find their way back onto the ship home, where their adventures give them new courage to stand up to the autocratic mouse who put them in charge of belling the cat in the first place.

I particularly liked the element of satire in this book, as in this exchange when the mice attend a meeting near the beginning of the book:

”What’s a Steering Committee?” said Bob, one of the two smallest mice, to his brother, Ozzie, the other smallest mouse.

“It’s Portman and his friends deciding before the meeting starts what we’re going to decide in the meeting,” said Ozzie.

“Is that fair?” said Bob.

“It’s customary,” said Ozzie.

“I see,” said Bob.

Scott O’Dell’s The Black Pearl is also a svelte number, and feels in a certain sense like a children’s version of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl: both feature pearl-divers from La Paz who find a wonderful, lustrous pearl that ruins their lives. In Steinbeck’s novel, the pearl-diver is a father who loses his son; in The Black Pearl, it is the son who loses his father.

However, in The Pearl, the villain is human greed, while in The Black Pearl, the villain is… well, still human greed, but also human pride, human vanity, human “I’m giving this gift to the church supposedly out of piety but really to show off,” and also the Manta Diablo, a giant manta ray who hunts Ramon across the sea after Ramon steals the pearl from his cave.

Actually there’s a lot more going on here than there is in The Pearl, which I recall finding dull and formulaic. It’s like O’Dell riffed on the earlier book and came up with a much richer exploration of the theme, and also threw in a giant manta ray because WHY NOT. Let that be a lesson to us all to include giant manta rays when we can.

Only the first and third books of Gerald W. Johnson’s 1959 trilogy about American history, A History for Peter, won the Newbery Honor, but it seemed silly for me to skip directly from the American Revolution to Woodrow Wilson, especially given that the middle volume is most useful for Sleeping Beauty reasons, offering a sixties-eye-view of the Civil War and aftermath.

Johnson propounds the then-current view that Reconstruction failed because Congress was too harsh on the South. The pendulum has since swung in the opposite direction, to the view that Congress was too lenient, and if Congress had hit on a Goldilocks level of just-right sternness, they could have convinced Southern whites to go, “You know what, let’s give racial equality a try!” (Maybe if that just-right sternness involved decades of military occupation.)

The books are America Is Born, America Grows Up, and America Moves Forward, and they start with Columbus and go right up through the Korean War. I’ve read about various parts of this history at various times, but history is so protean that you almost always pick up interesting new tidbits, especially about things like Spanish explorers that you haven’t studied since elementary school. (This is probably incorrect, but my recollection is that we covered those explorers in at least three grades, and they got more boring every time.) A few interesting facts:

- Johnson notes that the Spanish explorers were probably not more wicked than the English ones. American history books just tend to portray Spanish explorers in an especially dim light because they draw on accounts written by the English, who were intensely anti-Spanish. (This was the era of the Spanish Armada, after all.)

- During the Constitutional Convention, the representatives of small states were genuinely concerned that the large states might invade their territory and gobble them up, partly because of the entire history of the European continent and also because there had been armed clashes between the colonies before. The eventual solution was equal representation for every state in the Senate. As with many highly effective solutions, this one worked so well that the original problem it was intended to solve now seems mildly comical (what? Like New York is going to invade Connecticut?), while we are left with the unintended consequence that sparsely populated states punch far above their weight in the Senate.

- Speaking of unintended consequences: the fact that every permanent member of the UN Security Council has a veto over action was originally intended as a sop to the US Senate, to ensure that the Senate allowed the US to join the UN, as they had not joined the League of Nations. If the US has a veto, went the reasoning, then the US can’t be forced into action against its will! Unfortunately, and although this was clearly unintentional one would think it must have been very foreseeable indeed, this has the side-effect of making it almost impossible for the UN to act.

I’m just ripping through the Newbery Honor resources of my hometown. For some reason, this consists mainly of biographies, and somewhat to my surprise, for I don’t usually seek out biographies, I’ve actually been quite enjoying them. These are all at least fifty years old, all intensely readable, almost like novels, without footnotes (I pine for footnotes; I’d like to know exactly which parts of the dialogue are made up) and without any interest in debunking their subjects. Except perhaps Jeanette Eaton’s Gandhi, Fighter Without a Sword, I wouldn’t call them hagiographic, but they’re definitely written in the older biographical tradition where their subject is an interesting person and a role model whose faults will be noted but not emphasized.

And Eaton has the excuse that her biography was published three years after Gandhi’s assassination. The man was freshly martyred! Of course her view was reverent. And Eaton does an excellent job balancing incidents from Gandhi’s personal life (he appears to have been one of those people who makes friends for life about three minutes after arriving anywhere) with the wider story of Gandhi’s part in the struggle for Indian independence.

(At some point I ought to read a biography of Jinnah, because so far everything I’ve read/watched about the Partition is from the Indian point of view and as such Jinnah is always the snake in the garden who destroys the dream of united India.)

Then there's Clara Ingram Judson’s Mr. Justice Holmes is a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Junior, who appears to have been the Ruth Bader Ginsburg of his day, famous for writing dissents. Judson notes that he didn’t actually dissent that often, but apparently some of them were doozies. I say “apparently” because Judson talks very little about Holmes’s cases, and I realize that you don’t want to get into a bunch of dry legalese in a children’s book, but all the same I would have liked a little more detail about the work that made him worthy of a biography.

However, the book is more focused on Holmes’s personal life, in particular his strained relationship with his father (the Oliver Wendell Holmes famous for writing the poem that saved the USS Constitution: “Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!”). I particularly enjoyed the detail about daily life in Boston in the nineteenth century.

Constance Rourke’s Audubon, on the other hand, is ALL about the birds. Simply wonderful descriptions of Audubon’s bird paintings (my kingdom for an illustrated edition of this book!) and his travels in the United States looking for new birds to paint. I was devastated when it turned out that he never fulfilled his lifelong dream of visiting the Rockies to paint the birds there.

When Rourke wrote, Audubon’s early years were still shrouded in mystery. (In fact, I thought they were still shrouded in mystery today, but his Wikipedia article sounds pretty certain about his origins.) Rourke outlines the leading theories at the time, but her favorite, to which she returns at the end of the book and at length in her endnote, is that Audubon was the escaped dauphin of France, who had been spirited into the Vendee and adopted by Captain Audubon to protect him from the excesses of the Revolution!

Rourke is not quite enough of a crank to assert this as fact or even to wholly believe it. Sometimes she swings toward the idea that Audubon was not the dauphin but believed he was, and rather than wasting away his life in trying to assert this claim, channeled its sense that he was special into his ferocious confidence in his own self-imposed project to paint all the birds of America.

In any case, I found the appearance of this unlikely theory in an award-winning work of nonfiction weirdly delightful - like the time I read M. Scott Peck’s book about the psychology of evil People of the Lie and all of a sudden he was talking about demonic possession. Why not, I guess! There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio!

Finally, a non-biography. Sorche Nic Leodhas’s wonderful Thistle and Thyme: Tales and Legends from Scotland is a collection of folk tales. (The copy I read is evidently a compilation of the original Thistle and Thyme with Leodhas’s earlier book of folktales, Heather and Broom. This edition was published only in England. How did it end up in a library in Indiana?)

This book has maybe the most delightful table of contents I’ve ever seen, because each entry is accompanied by a little note about what kind of story it is or at what sort of occasion it might have been told or how the author came across it: A wedding sgeulachdan from Ardfainaig in Perthshire. It was told at the wedding of a cousin of my grandfather, who told it to my father, who told it to me.

A lovely book if you’re interested in folktales or Scotland or just a good lively story, with plenty of brave clever girls and Fairy Folk. I’m planning to get my hands on more of Leodhas’s work.

While I was in Boston I forced skygiants and genarti to watch the first episode of Cheburashka, which led to a discussion of Soviet animation, which led to an admission that I’ve been meaning to read more about the topic for years and never have… which ended in putting a hold on Maya Balakirsky Katz’s Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation, as it’s the only Soviet animation book my library owns.

The prose is very readable (not always a given in film or literary criticism), although when I was familiar with the animation in question I often had doubts about Katz’s interpretations. For instance, in discussing the Cheburashka series (produced by a mostly Jewish creative team), Katz suggests that Cheburashka’s best friend Crocodile Gena “is a sell-out: an old Party Jew who walks around with a pipe dangling from his mouth but without a pair of pants to show for all his compromises.”

I mean, sure, MAYBE Gena’s red coat is a sign that he’s an old Bolshevik, and MAYBE “Crocodile Gena’s African roots speak to his status as a member of the ancient Hebrew race,” and MAYBE when Gena offers to make of list of all the lonely people who want to make friends this is a reference to KGB references making up lists of all the people who visit Jewish gathering places…

Or MAYBE Crocodile Gena is simply Cheburashka’s best friend, a kind-hearted crocodile who works at a zoo! Just perhaps.

However, the book did furnish an excellent list of films to watch, many of which are available on Youtube. I watched:

Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys, the first Soviet animated film, from 1924. (Vertov is best known for the documentary Man with a Movie Camera.) It really feels like a Soviet political cartoon brought to life: a worker and a farmer meld together into one terrifying Janus-faced creature and defeat a bourgeois capitalist who looks like the Monopoly man!

Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s Black and White, a 1932 animated short that was the only remnant of a larger project to make a film about American race relations. There were so few Black actors in the Soviet Union that a delegation of twenty-two Harlem Renaissance intellectuals crossed the sea to star in the film, including Langston Hughes, who cried when he read the script, because “the writer meant well, but knew so little about his subject, and the result was a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts…”

Hughes informed the Soviets they would need to start over and write a new script, which scuppered the project, except for this animated short. Most of Hughes’ criticisms of the full-length film script seem to apply to the short, too.

Boris Stepantsev’s The Pioneer’s Violin, a wordless seven-minute short in which a grinning Nazi tank driver demands that a Young Pioneer play a German folksong on his violin… and the Young Pioneer responds by playing the Internationale, for which he is gunned down. The film is inspired by a true story of a Jewish boy, Avram “Musya” Pinkenzon, who really was a Pioneer and whose defiance was celebrated as a Pioneer story. (Pioneer Heroes were a whole Soviet genre.) The screenwriter was Jewish, and Katz argues that Stepantsev (although probably not Jewish) directed the short in ways that suggest the nameless Pioneer’s Jewish identity. This is a stronger argument than Crocodile Gena, Old Bolshevik, although it may be one of those things that you only see if you are looking for it?

The film is stunning: an incredible depiction of the shift from abject terror to enraged defiance. I’ve included a link in case anyone wants to watch it.