Savage Coast (44 page)

Otto's letters came, from training, from hillsides near Huesca, from Huesca, from near the Segre River. Then they stopped. I was able sometimes to hear about other people with the International Brigade—with the Lincoln Battalion—but nobody could send me word of Otto.

One freezing January evening, Ernst Toller came over to me in a restaurant and told me the news was very bad. The Republicans had been driven far north and the fighting seemed to be entering Barcelona.

The help that in Spain seemed sure to come from the United States to the Republic had never come. People here had a hard time sorting out the “teams”; Loyalists, in our American usage, were people against the Republic. And there were powerful, all-powerful, forces here on the side of Franco. Joseph Kennedy's argument to Roosevelt was one we would come to know—that Spain was the place to “stop communism.”

I went home and sent a cable to Otto's Barcelona address, the permanent address, military headquarters, and slept a terrible sleep. The next day, the news of Barcelona's fall was on the radio.

Had the cable arrived? Had it fallen into the wrong hands? Had it killed Otto?

The stories of the Spanish walking in the rocks and snows of the Pyrenees were coming in. There was talk of a buffer zone to be created, and I thought: it will be a paradigm of all boundaries. Let me tell the story of the beginning and this first ending of the war, I had asked publishers. My publisher (by then there was another book of poems) said, “Of course, if you can get a press pass.”

I called Henry Luce, for whom I had done a story with Margaret Bourke-White. “See Whit in the morning,” said Luce. Now that was Whittaker Chambers. I had not even known there was a left wing until a story of Chambers',
Can You Hear Their Voices
, was done as a play my freshman year at college. I told him that, early the next morning, sitting at his desk at
Time.

It was the last thing he wanted to hear. He was in a different incarnation by now, hating the Left, and living in an enormous hollow construct of his own.

He changed the subject. “What have you got for us on Spain?” he asked me.

I told him I wanted to get the story of the refugees and the buffer zone—the “end” of the war.

“But what can you give us?” he repeated. It was clear, slowly, that this was some game of his—a supposed deal in which I would have a story.

“I want to
get
the story, I want to write it,” I said. It sounded foolish as I said it. He expected some spy stuff.

He exploded. “If you haven't got something for us—! I can send someone down from Paris.” That ended it.

NEARER OUR OWN
time. The Olympics in Mexico City, where the black athletes made their protest. In the meantime, the acts of this century, events which said in tragic clarity that our lives would not
be shredded, not as athletes nor women nor as poets, not as travelers, tourists, refugees.

The high-rise apartment houses going up in Spain, the supermarkets, the tourist industry, the American naval bases.

NEARER. AT THE P.O.W
. camp in Hanoi. The American prisoners want two kinds of news: word of the coming elections, and word of the Olympics just now held in Munich.

“Killed! Jewish athletes killed during the Games!” the prisoners say in horror. There are eight officers who have been brought down, safely, from their bombers.

“Eleven of them,” answers Jane Hart, Senator Hart's wife. The prisoners respond to her coolness, her friendliness, her factuality. They are lean and tanned, wearing their Asian robes of dark red and purple.

“Athletes—shot!” they say. We tell them we will phone their families when we get back to the States.

THINGS THAT ENDURE
to our own moment. Word finally came, through the Germans in Mexico, that Otto had been killed in the battle on the banks of the Segre River, at a machine-gun nest where six hundred out of nine hundred were killed that day. It is in the Franco histories. Their intelligence worked very well. They knew every gun position.

Not to let our lives be shredded, sports away from politics, poetry away from anything. Anything away from anything.

“Why do you care about Spain so much?” a friend asks me, a curious look in her green eyes, the question real on her fine face. She is watching the Derby on TV with passionate interest. During the time before starting, there are film clips of human runners. “It was so long ago,” she said.

Going on now. Running, running, today.

*
Originally written for and published by
Esquire
magazine, October 1974.

T
his project is indebted to the considerable help of a number of people. I'd like to thank William Rukeyser for his enthusiasm and permission to work on
Savage Coast
; Ammiel Alcalay for his tireless dedication to recovery projects, and for his invaluable intellectual guidance and friendship; and Jane Marcus for encouraging me to go into the archive in the first place, and especially for her mentorship, humor, and radical spirit of inquiry. Thanks to David Greetham and Richard Kaye for their insights, interest, and excitement; Jan Heller Levi for helping put the pieces together; Robin Vogelzang for her expertise and good eye. A special thanks to Aoibheann Sweeney, at the Center for the Humanities, CUNY, for consistently giving me a place to make this work visible; and to the participants in the Center for the Humanities 2011–12 Mellon Seminar, who workshopped part of the introduction. I'd also like to thank the participants in the Muriel Rukeyser celebration at the Century Club, the Modernist Studies Association seminar on Women's Documentary Forms, and the Modern Language Association Rukeyser Centenary Roundtable— in particular Anne Herzog, Elisabeth Däumer, Eric Keenaghan, and Stefania Heim—for affirming the importance of Rukeyser studies, and for their intellectual solidarity. The research for this project has spanned seven years, and much of it has been enabled by fellowships from the Graduate Center, CUNY, for which I'm very grateful. Thanks especially to Amy Scholder, Jeanann Pan-nasch, Elizabeth Koke, and Drew Stevens of the Feminist Press for
their fantastic work on the book. To Cecily Parks, for her friendship through the student years, and now in work and motherhood; also to Miciah Hussey for his generosity and humor. To Theresa Epstein, Perry Kennedy, and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy for their sustaining support, and to August, who's been an exciting beginning as I end this project. Most especially, thanks to Casey Hale, my best friend, for his dedication to our family and this book—“love's not a trick of light.”

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HIROSHIMA IN THE MORNING

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto

eISBN: 9781558616684 | ISBN: 9781558616677

2010 FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD.
In June 2001, Rahna Reiko Rizzuto went to Hiroshima in search of a deeper understanding of her war-torn heritage. She planned to spend six months there, interviewing the few remaining survivors of the atomic bomb. A mother of two young boys, she was encouraged to go by her husband, who quickly became disenchanted by her absence.

It is her first solo life adventure, immediately exhilarating for her, but her research starts off badly. Interviews with the
hibakusha
feel rehearsed, and the survivors reveal little beyond published accounts. Then the attacks on September 11 change everything. The survivors' carefully constructed memories are shattered, causing them to relive their agonizing experiences and to open up to Rizzuto in astonishing ways.

Separated from family and country while the world seems to fall apart, Rizzuto's marriage begins to crumble as she wrestles with her ambivalence about being a wife and mother. Woven into the story of her own awakening are the stories of Hiroshima in the survivors' own words. The parallel narratives explore the role of memory in our lives, and show how memory is not history but a story we tell ourselves to explain who we are.

“A brave compassionate, and heart-wrenching memoir, of one woman's quest to redeem the past while learning to live fully in the present.”

—Kate Moses, author of
Cakewalk, A Memoir
and
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath

“This searing and redemptive memoir is an explosive account of motherhood reconstructed.”

—Ayelet Waldman, author of
Red Hook Road

“This book is an important contribution to the growing understanding that we are all part of history, and we all make history. A moving account of a contemporary voyage, which is also a voyage back in time, reckoning with and bearing witness to one of the great tragedies of the last century.”

—Susan Griffin, author of
A Chorus of Stones

RAHNA REIKO RIZZUTO
is the author of many books, including the highly acclaimed
Why She Left Us
. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College.

GOYA'S GLASS

Monika Zgustova

eISBN: 9781558617988 | ISBN: 9781558617971

The Duchess of Alba, known as Goya's muse, recalls the passions of youth on her deathbed in the royal court of eighteenth-century Madrid. A young woman defies the protocols of her arranged marriage and pursues love—and the life of a published writer—until her readers condemn her as a danger to society in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Nina Berberova escapes persecution during the Russian Revolution and flees to Paris, where the
intelligentsia
naively covet the promise of a Soviet Union. These three women attempt to find passion and intimacy in worlds that rarely accommodate female desire.
Goya's Glass
is an unforgettable novel of guilty pleasures coursing through history.

“Monika Zgustova's concerns are close to my own: the fate of the individual in the hands of totalitarianism. She is an outstanding writer, whose fiction invokes the politics and culture of people throughout history.”

—Vaclav Havel

“Three centuries, three solitudes, three unbridled passions, three indomitable women—Monika Zgustova is a born storyteller. Goya's Glass is a magnificent achievement.”

—Josef Skvorecky,
The Engineer of Human Souls

“The portraits of three women of different nationalities and centuries in Goya's Glass reveal a unique voice that owes as much to Kundera as to Flaubert, to Hasek as to Tolstoy. Monika Zgustova is a perfect example of a writer without borders, whose literary creations include the cultures and languages that she has accumulated throughout her lifetime.”

—Juan Goytisolo,
Exiled from Almost Everywhere

MONIKA ZGUSTOVA
has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play and a biography, and translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry into both Spanish and Catalan.

THE SILENT WOMAN

Monika Zgustova

eISBN: 9781558618411 | ISBN: 9781558618428

A rapturous novel of love, longing, and exile,
The Silent Woman
depicts a twentieth century woman's life against a backdrop of war and political turmoil.

Syliva, half-Czech and half-German, is born into an aristocratic family and lives in a castle outside Prague. She marries a man she doesn't love, and is seduced by the joyful madness of Paris in the 1920s as an ambassador's wife. When the Nazis force her to state her loyalty, she capitulates, not realizing how this decision will inform and haunt the rest of her life. Sylva's story is interwoven with a contemporary sex chronicle of her son Jan, a world-renowned mathematician and émigré living in the United States, who exudes the restlessness of a man without a country.

MONIKA ZGUSTOVA
has published seven books, including novels, short stories, a play and a biography, and translated more than fifty books of Russian and Czech fiction and poetry into both Spanish and Catalan.