Still from Mary Pickford’s 1911 film Their First Misunderstanding.

I’m a crier by nature, but as I have aged, my reasons for tearing up have become more elusive, even to me. Where once I could predict a crying spell, like spotting an East Texas thunderstorm moving across the landscape, now they arrive fast and sharp, like hail in New England on a March day. More and more frequently, I find myself wiping away tears while asking with plaintive frustration, “Wait, why am I crying right now?”

I had one of those spells this morning while I holding a very old book in the rare books room of the Health Sciences Library at the University of Pittsburgh. Our group of visiting scholars had been warned not to lick or cough or sneeze on the old books, a warning that I had impressed on my soul, as I do with all advice from all librarians. Thus, the arrival of unexpected tears—one moment I was paging carefully through the book, scanning, not terribly attentive, the next I was sobbing—mostly triggered my consternation at producing forbidden fluid.

“I didn’t know I was going to cry!” I wanted to yell, as I grabbed a tissue from the librarian’s desk, keeping my face averted from anything old. “I did not deliberately get bodily fluids on your books!”

Of course, no one was paying me the least bit of attention, intent as they all were on their own research in their own old books. The librarian didn’t notice me either, thankfully, as she passed around cloth gloves to scholars who wanted to touch very, very old books. So I wiped away my tears, resanitized my hands, and went back to the book I had been looking at to figure out what had made me cry.

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Over the course of her career, the Nobel Prize–winning writer Svetlana Alexievich has tirelessly chronicled some of the most monumental events of the twentieth century, including World War II, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each of her “documentary novels,” as she calls them, is the result of hundreds of interviews with ordinary people, whose accounts she meticulously synthesizes and weaves into sweeping, coherent narratives. “It all forms a sort of small encyclopedia, the encyclopedia of my generation, of the people I came to meet,” Alexievich has said. “How did they live? What did they believe in? How did they die and how did they kill? And how hard did they pursue happiness, and did they fail to catch it?” Last Witnesses, Alexievich’s 1985 collection of memories from Soviets who were children during World War II, has just been translated into English for the first time by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. A selection of stories from the book appears below.

Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of World War II. Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #137811 / Yaroslavtsev / CC-BY-SA 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)). Via Wikimedia Commons.

ZHENYA BELKEVICH
SIX YEARS OLD. NOW A WORKER.

June 1941 …

I remember it. I was very little, but I remember everything …

The last thing I remember from the peaceful life was a fairy tale that mama read us at bedtime. My favorite one—about the Golden Fish. I also always asked something from the Golden Fish: “Golden Fish … Dear Golden Fish … ” My sister asked, too. She asked differently: “By order of the pike, by my like … ” We wanted to go to our grandmother for the summer and have papa come with us. He was so much fun.

In the morning I woke up from fear. From some unfamiliar sounds …

Mama and papa thought we were asleep, but I lay next to my sister pretending to sleep. I saw papa kiss mama for a long time, kiss her face and hands, and I kept wondering: he’s never kissed her like that before. They went outside, they were holding hands, I ran to the window—mama hung on my father’s neck and wouldn’t let him go. He tore free of her and ran, she caught up with him and again held him and shouted something. Then I also shouted: “Papa! Papa!”

My little sister and brother Vasya woke up, my sister saw me crying, and she, too, shouted: “Papa!” We all ran out to the porch: “Papa!” Father saw us and, I remember it like today, covered his head with his hands and walked off, even ran. He was afraid to look back. Read More

A silent rant in answer to a friend.

Because why the fuck should I? Seriously, why the fuck should I?

I should leave it right there but this is a rant, and isn’t the thing about rants that they lurch onward unnecessarily after what needed to be said has been said? A rant by its nature says more than it needs to, which makes it, already, antithetical to the short story but in any case I’m not going to do it, defend the short story again, I’m tired of it, half-drunk as I am on this plane that amid heavy turbulence is flopping over Omaha as we speak. I refuse to grovel, to attempt to put into words what will always be unsayable, which is to say that what makes certain stories reach into your chest cavity and rip out what is left of your heart needs not be discussed. It is itself all the justification a story will ever need. The best offense being no defense at all. And so: none offered. And you, my friend, recently said to me, “You’re lucky you write stories. I mean the form is an ideal forum for today’s uber-distracted society. Don’t you think?” And because I love and respect you, in spite of the pain in my soul the question inflicted, here I am answering by not answering which has been my MO for much of life. No I do not think. Ah, screw it: the short story is, with the glorious exception of poetry, absolutely the least ideal mode of expression for our distracted society because it takes a certain kind of intense concentration. Compassionate concentration? To appreciate. To grasp. To love. I’m talking about a reading a story, a good story. What’s a good story? How am I defining—

You tell me. Because you know. This is personal. To you and to me. And anyway, I refuse to even—

See where this going?

Nowhere it is going nowhere.

And yet. There’s an Isaac Babel story called “Guy de Maupassant.” You know it? I love this story beyond all rational measure. It’s eight and a half pages. In it a guy in wartime Saint Petersburg gets a gig as a translator of Maupassant. Because this is what people need in the middle of rampant bloodshed. A new edition of Maupassant stories. Right? I don’t have the story in front of me. I’m drunk on American Airlines, seven dollars for a little bottle of warm white wine, I’ve had two, that’s fourteen bucks I’ll die short of, where was I? In the story, the Babel character reports for translation duty at the house of a rich couple. The husband, a banker, I think, is bankrolling the Maupassant project. I should have made this clearer. The Babel character is hired to assist the banker’s wife with her translations. Kind of like a translator’s helper. The wife whose name I seem to remember is Raisa (or am I for no reason at all thinking of Gorbachev’s wife? Is she dead, Raisa Gorbachev?) is a terrible translator. Her versions of Maupassant’s stories are god-awful. Stiff, flat nothings. The Babel character takes them home with him and makes them sing. Sing as any Maupassant story must sing, sing with such simplicity you hardly even notice, because this is what makes them so singular, even in translation they must read like that whacked Frenchman is whispering, singing softly in your and only your—

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Original illustration © Daniel Gray-Barnett

Ten days after I called off my engagement I was supposed to go on a scientific expedition to study the whooping crane on the gulf coast of Texas. Surely, I will cancel this trip, I thought, as I shopped for nylon hiking pants that zipped off at the knee. Surely, a person who calls off a wedding is meant to be sitting sadly at home, reflecting on the enormity of what has transpired and not doing whatever it is I am about to be doing that requires a pair of plastic clogs with drainage holes. Surely, I thought, as I tried on a very large and floppy hat featuring a pull cord that fastened beneath my chin, it would be wrong to even be wearing a hat that looks like this when something in my life has gone so terribly wrong.

Ten days earlier I had cried and I had yelled and I had packed up my dog and driven away from the upstate New York house with two willow trees I had bought with my fiancé.

Ten days later and I didn’t want to do anything I was supposed to do.

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Margarita Liberaki (left) and her daughter, the novelist Margarita Karapanou (right), on the island of Hydra.

“That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one.” The beginning of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, at once vivid and hazy, evokes the season and the story of adolescent girlhood that the book will unfold. The novel tells the story of three sisters living outside Athens: Maria, Infanta, and Katerina, the youngest, who tells the tale. The house where they live with their mother, aunt, and grandfather is in the countryside. Focusing on the sisters’ daily life and first loves, as well as on a secret about their Polish grandmother, the novel is about growing up and how strange and exciting it is to discover the curious moods and desires that constitute you and your difference from other people. It also features a stable cast of friends and neighbors, all with their own unexpected opinions: the self-involved Laura Parigori; the studious astronomer David and his Jewish mother, Ruth, from England; and the carefree Captain Andreas. The book is adventurous, fantastical, romantic, down to earth, earthy, and, above all, warm. Its only season, after all, is summer.

The world inside the book could not be more unlike the world the book came into when it was first published in 1946, immediately after the terrible famine and the Axis occupation of Greece during World War II, and on the brink of the even more devastating civil war, barely a shadow of which can be found in the idyllic world between its covers. In fact, its cover originally featured a garden. In the story we learn that just as each of the three girls wears a suitable hat of her own choosing, so each of them has her own garden patch to tend. In Katerina’s, we learn, the flowers pop up in a crazy, haphazard way. To describe it, Liberaki uses the word pardalo, meaning “splotched with color,” a word derived from the ancient Greek for “leopard” that suggests the wildness in Katerina’s heart. The whole summery world of the book is wildly, sometimes dangerously alive—one year the countryside is swept by a devastating fire—and it is nature, growing plants and growing girls, that makes it so. To its first Greek readers, this novel must have offered an oasis from the unbearable realities of the day, a place to live out the life-and-death implications of war in the smaller details of flowers, birds, and bees. Read More