And Yet the Books, by Czeslaw Milosz

And yet the books will be there on the shelves, separate beings,
That appeared once, still wet
As shining chestnuts under a tree in autumn,
And, touched, coddled, began to live
In spite of fires on the horizon, castles blown up,
Tribes on the march, planets in motion.
“We are,” they said, even as their pages
Were being torn out, or a buzzing flame
Licked away their letters. So much more durable
Than we are, whose frail warmth
Cools down with memory, disperses, perishes.
I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

------------------------------------


If I'd not decided to write the notebook in the park, the robbery would never have happened. But what would the world be now without books?

A gentle freshness flourishes

The weather shamans were right. Today will bake, releasing gentle plant odours. Light illuminates fresh details - the white fluff of a seed caught in a spiderweb, a dried-out shoot wrapped like Asclepius's snake around a hose. This is light on nature's bounteous continuum, remembering decay and the renewal of life.

Family History 1: Russia and the Rule of Law

Manabohzo will have to wait a while, till the spirit of party is once again upon me. I've been wanting to do something on my patrilineal history for a while now, and I now feel confident writing about it.

My father runs the Moscow office of a major London-headquartered law firm. His grandparents came from Russia and much of his favourite literature is Russian, so in historical, cultural and business terms he loves working there.

Nonetheless he also says he was born into a boring age. Had he been born into his parents or grandparents' time, he would have been like them - politically active, possibly even revolutionary. Instead he realised he would thrive as a lawyer, and chose that career. He really enjoys it, and compares Russia to the Wild West.

I don't quite understand the analogy - maybe something to do with commerce springing up, to the point where Moscow is bustling with hypercapitalism; the occasional maverick businessman; crooks to stay away from, and wild gamblers; and the fact that there are some notable gaps in Russian law which can be exploited. People like my father can provide advice and thoughtful criticism to help solve the problems this creates.

The real legal problem, as many distant observers see it, is unpredictable government behavior - particularly when they seize commercial assets for purposes which are, to say the least, hard to justify and seem like pure exercise of state power. My brother, who has also spent a lot of time in Russia, is less optimistic and deeply worried by the autocratic tendencies of Putin, and the appropriation of private property by Medvedev's government.

Of course, it was once a lot worse. Flicking through my dad's Introduction to Jurisprudence (a far more interesting subject than we were allowed to study on the GDL), I noticed in the margin to 'Law in the Soviet State':

 "resulting in that bloody, lawless regime - perhaps a prime example of a lawless state, nonetheless imperative and coercive"

My dad and his father before him absolutely loathed the Communists.

-------------------------------------------------

At an early age, my great-grandfather was persuaded to join the Socialist Revolutionary Party. My grandfather, who wrote a book about his early life and his father, says this:

When mother met father, he was a law student studying law at the university in Kiev, the capital of the region.  In his youth he was well know as a Talmudic scholar and was a promising Rabbinic student.  But somewhere in between being immersed in the learning of the old and venerable Talmud, he somehow became exposed to Spinoza, Kant and Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Lermontov and Pushkin, and others, all books that a devout Rabbinic scholar is not supposed to and is not expected to read...Nothing could hold him back once he discovered the secular world of learning beyond his Yeshiva.  

When he was seventeen, [he] enrolled at the University of Kiev. [This task was hard.] Jews were admitted under strict quotas after passing extra examinations...After admittance, the Jewish student could hardly take part in the life of the university as an equal.  The Jewish student was the butt of all jokes and kept on separate seats in the back of the class.  Naturally, Jewish students were thereby left as easy prey to the recruitment by the varieties of revolutionary political parties.  When father was in his senior year at the university, he was arrested as a member of the S.R. (Socialist Revolutionary Party) and sentenced to serve three years at the Fortress of Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, after which his sentence decreed that he serve for two years in the army.  Upon conclusion of his army service, he was sent into “internal exile” to be kept away from any industrial area to “prevent him coming in touch with the industrial segment of the working classes”.  He chose and was allowed to go back to Krivoy-Rog.  

By this time, my great-grandfather was alienated from the Revolutionary cause. When he asked his "comrades" to respond to the Tsar's pogroms, he was told "Jewish blood is the best lubricant for the wheels of the revolution." Instead he devoted himself to the Jewish revolution, Zionism.

"There, mother was waiting for him, and as soon as he arrived, they were married.  Theirs was a love that bloomed from their youth.  But no sooner did they settle, and discovered that mother was with child, than their happiness was threatened on the very first year of their life together, when the Russo-Japanese war broke out. (1905).  Word reached them through their underground connections that father was about to be mobilized – outside his draft turn – as a continuing punishment for his past revolutionary activities, and was to be sent directly to the front in the Far East. "After long discussions, both father and mother decided that he would not “go to war” for the Tzar and they made plans for his move abroad.  He would go to England in preference to any other country in Europe because it was “a Country of Law”.  In a short while, father left and reached England.  Mother followed him.  She could travel without any legal difficulties and they were reunited in London.  For several months, father tried to find suitable work for himself.  Unfortunately, one of these periodic recessions set in and when the JCO (the Jewish Colonization Organisation) which was settling Jews of eastern Europe in Argentina, offered him a position in their school system there, he gladly accepted especially with a child expected soon.  And so their first child was born, of all places, in Argentina, a most unanticipated place for them to be settled. "

Over the following years, they would move back to Israel and then be forced into Egypt, where my great-grandfather contracted tuberculosis and died. (I hope to discuss this in more depth later.) My great-grandmother decided to return to Krivoy-Rog. Her family (the Streltzovs) had been boyars, by then a minor level of the aristocracy, and had been exiled there when her grandfather converted their whole family to Judaism. Nonetheless she still had some sway in the Ministry of Education, and managed to persuade the government to transfer the Jewish school her family had been running to her sisters and her.

Then came 1917, and once again the rule of law broke down:

"By the end of the year civil war was in full conflagration.  Bands and newly sprouted armies roamed the length and breadth of that endless country.  All of them making their own law and order and robbing the citizenry.  Some just robbed, others did it with some decorum.  While taking over the region or town they would issue “their own money”.  The people had to accept their money or be declared “enemy of the people” and be shot on the spot.  Of course, supplies were hard to come by as the peasants were afraid to bring their produce to the market.  One had to stand in line for bread as for everything else.  The boy became an expert “line stander”.  As school was completely disrupted, he spent much time in “lines”.  He would stand in line for his mother; for some neighbours, and especially for the refugees.  There were a number of refugees in the neighbourhood.  These were mostly elderly people that were driven out of the western provinces bordering Austrian territory.  These border territories were where the Russian Armies suffered the greatest losses and the official as well as unofficial excuses for the losses were the “traitors and spies”.  And these elderly were the saboteurs and spies.  They were naturally destitute and often sick.  The boy would be asked, and did stay in line at the drugstore awaiting and delivering their medicines to them.  It was a constant adventure to the boy.  He always saw all the shatterings and upheavals going on all around him as a preordained adventure designed for his life."

Eventually, Krivoy-Rog was besieged and my grandfather witnessed devastating combat on the streets. My grandmother realised that even though the Reds were not anti-Semitic (or didn't appear to be as yet - see the recent book Bloodlands for what actually happened), they would not tolerate the Zionistic ideals of her family, and once again she was forced to flee. And that was the end of my family's centuries old existence in Russia. Communism was the final straw. 

So it's pretty obvious why the rule of law matters so much to my father, and why even though a streak of idealism runs through me, I'm wary of taking any part in activist left movements. The repercussions of the Russian revolution were so awful, and still affect the nature of power in Russia to this day. Establishing the rule of law firmly will be a slow and difficult process.

Manabozho the trickster god

Pagan is a great theme for a summer party. Painted druids and woodwomen with garlands in their hair wander about with confident energy. As per normal, I lope through in my Amerindian wolf-headress t-shirt and with African rug draped across my shoulders... more to come.