{"id":110425,"date":"2017-05-02T14:56:12","date_gmt":"2017-05-02T18:56:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110425"},"modified":"2017-05-02T16:14:08","modified_gmt":"2017-05-02T20:14:08","slug":"refuge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/","title":{"rendered":"Refuge"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Wolf Kahn, Dark on the Right<\/em> (detail), 2009, oil on canvas, 24″ x 26″. From the cover of The Farm in the Green Mountains<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I first read Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer\u2019s The Farm in the Green Mountains<\/em><\/a>, a blustering butthole had just been elected president of the United States of America, and everyone was freaking out. Via any number of platforms on any number of screens, there was a cacophony of anxiety and grandstanding and myopia and rage and despair such as I have never seen, or maybe the sheer number of platforms and screens were the never-before-seen entity. Regardless, things seemed to be turning faster and faster in some widening gyre, to borrow a phrase from Yeats, who didn\u2019t know the half of it. So it came to pass that I found great comfort in the voice of Auntie Al, as I came to think of the indomitable Herdan-Zuckmayer (I can\u2019t imagine she\u2019d mind).<\/p>\n

It was, in other words, just the right book at just the right time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Exiled from Germany at the start of World War II, when the murderous fascist dictator of the hour didn\u2019t take kindly to her famous playwright husband (\u201cZuck\u201d)\u2019s satirical critiques, left cold by stints in New York (\u201cWe saw everything, we went everywhere, but never found ourselves\u201d) and Los Angeles (Zuck didn\u2019t want to write tripe for the movies), Alice and Zuck find their way to the titular 193-acre farm in the \u201cgreen mountains\u201d of Vermont.<\/p>\n

These were urbane sophisticates, mind you. These were celebrated artists with connections and good clothes. These were not people who know farming. They had no clue if or when they might ever return \u201chome.\u201d The very idea of home had become impossibly muddled, if not permanently eradicated. They were emigrants. They were immigrants. They had no choice. They had to find themselves a new<\/em> home, and they had to get to work. They chose the farm in Vermont. They got to work.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the usual course,\u201d Alice says. \u201cOne had no right to be an exception.\u201d<\/p>\n

She refuses to be exceptional; this is one of the things that make her exceptional. There\u2019s no grandstanding here, no hand wringing, no self-pity. These twenty vignettes started out as letters to her in-laws, back in Germany: updates, explanations, that\u2019s all. She is practical, sensible, and \u201cwithout illusion.\u201d How utterly refreshing.<\/p>\n

The Zuckmayers learn by necessity. They learn by doing. They acquire domestic animals (cats, dogs) and farm animals (chickens, geese, ducks, pigs, goats). They figure out feed and disease and shelter and care. They chop wood and they tend fire. They navigate dense woods and icy, snowy, muddy dirt roads. They obey the rules set forth by the seasons, the weather, the landscape, their rural community, the animals, and the land itself. They plant crops for sale and vegetables for their own sustenance. They harvest and slaughter and cook and clean. They bake and sew. They fight a harrowing infestation of rats. They take instruction from USDA pamphlets and from friendly neighbors. Farm life turns out to be a never-ending cascade of chores. Back breaking, spirit-bending labor. But \u201cmaking the best of a difficult situation\u201d is what New Englanders do<\/em>, apparently, and so Auntie Al fits right in. She does the very best she can with what she has. She gets by on a sense of wonder and curiosity. These are old-fashioned ideals, by which I mean essential and revolutionary. She\u2019s what my Yiddish grandmother would\u2019ve called a \u201cshtarker\u201d: a\u00a0hippie before there was any such thing. Open-minded and up for anything. DIY before DIY was a marketing ploy.<\/p>\n

I fell hard for her spirit (hence the audacity of a nickname). She has a real lot to teach us. Such as, for starters: The hardest times in life are often tangled up with the happiest. What is most difficult can be most rewarding. \u201cProgress\u201d is never simple or wholly positive. Sometimes when we lose, we gain, and when we gain, we lose. Our fears and joys are bound up inextricably, pleasure in pain and pain in pleasure, and our efforts to detangle and isolate human experience can leave us confused and depressed. Happiness means choosing to be productive and optimistic, recognizing despair for the ancient parasite that it is, and outsmarting it.<\/p>\n

Alice never mentions the name of that insane murderous fascist dictator back in Germany, by the way. She barely discusses the cultural framework that enabled said murderous fascist dictator and set in motion her own exile. \u201cThe situation,\u201d she calls it. \u201cCurrent circumstances.\u201d In another context this might be irritating, to say the least: call it what it is, lady! Millions upon millions of people in Europe are concurrently being systematically murdered while you wax on about the pigs and the poultry and the party line and the road conditions in Vermont! But we have a lot of literature already, don\u2019t we, about the millions upon millions, about the systematic murder. What we have less of, what we have never enough of, actually, is literature like this: literature about what to do instead<\/em>. Literature about embodying an alternative, creating something from nothing, inhabiting one\u2019s life fully, no matter how far circumstances deviate from expectation. Behold how, from blood and sweat and tears and toil, a livable, sustainable, eminently sane life can be forged.<\/p>\n

\u201cA change for the better can happen,\u201d Auntie Al muses, \u201ca change that won\u2019t come from common sources, like the government, nor from indefinite sources, like historical developments, but can and will proceed from individuals.\u201d If there is a comforting thought to be had in these dark times (and all times are dark, are they not? Some admittedly darker than others, but I\u2019m not in the business of relativism), surely it\u2019s this. Or, as the sages of Pirkei Avot<\/em> put it:\u00a0It is not your responsibility to finish the work of perfecting the world, but neither are you free to desist from it.<\/em>\u00a0The wood always needs chopping. The furnace always needs tending. The animals always need feeding. The goats always need milking. The floor always needs washing. Things always, always need doing with hands, with bodies, in the physical realm. Always.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis endlessly repetitive, primitive process of accomplishment was a greater protection against care, anxiety, and fear for one\u2019s life than the application of all manner of understanding, reason, and religion,\u201d she observes. An idea whose time has come yet again, as we slowly tire of staring at never-ending streams of ads and personal PR campaigns, liking, liking, loving, favoriting, liking, buying, not liking, liking, not liking, liking some more, and wondering half-heartedly why everything seems at once so trite and so dire.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Resistance can take many forms. Sometimes resistance means simply turning away and busying oneself elsewhere. Think of stressed insomniac social-media addicts \u201cdiscovering\u201d the Danish tradition of Hygge<\/em>, wherein it\u2019s reportedly nice to sit around the fire with loved ones, eat home-cooked meals, and talk to one another.<\/p>\n

But as we squirm in our own dystopia, squint at dystopias past, and tremble in fear at the dystopias that lie in wait, let us not get carried away by romantic notions of the pastoral (adj: Having the simplicity, charm, serenity, or other characteristics generally attributed to rural areas<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe took care of the pipes like babies, the animals like children, and the stoves like tempermental animals. Wood was sacred. We stood at the center of everything, and to survive we had to be watchman, caretaker, and protector, constantly blocking a return to chaos,\u201d Alice recalls. Nature\u2019s no warm blankie. So how was it that she managed to find in every hardship an opportunity, in every setback a gift, in every unforeseen problem an adventure, in every new obstacle a good story to tell later? Could nothing get this woman down?!<\/p>\n

The intricacies of the Zuckmayers\u2019 days, the ins and outs of life on the farm as it is learned and lived by these unlikely inhabitants: this is superficially what The Farm in the Green Mountains<\/em> is about. On a deeper level, it\u2019s a story of perseverance, protection, heroism, and joy. Refuge is the heart of this impossibly rich book. The farm is Alice\u2019s refuge, and Alice\u2019s recounting of it became my own. Never mind that she\u2019s on the run from murderous fascist apes amidst a world war while I\u2019m on the run from Facebook. And never mind the fact that behind the facade of the pastoral is the wild brutality of Nature. (Which we\u2019ve worked so long and hard to dominate! So that we may now bemoan its decline! LOLZ.)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Alice carries on a surprising love affair with the history of the early Middle Ages, undertaking grueling and giddy weekly journeys to and from the Dartmouth College library so she can sit and study for her own singular pleasure, a sweet reprieve from the endless farm chores. Just the way<\/em> to the library, an ordeal unto itself, gets its very own chapter, immensely endearing for what it reveals about so many of us in this raggedy, time-traveling tribe of book lovers. \u201cThe meaning is in the books,\u201d she writes, \u201cstored up as a latent energy, and the important thing is to carry this energy over into life and make it useful to living people.\u201d So lovingly does she speak about the library that I feel it as yet another refuge, having never set foot in it. (I\u2019d love to hear from the librarians and students at Darmouth about how her rendering holds up. Also, respectfully, regarding the history and founding of the college itself, the \u201csavage\u201d Native Americans were never in need of \u201ctaming\u201d or conversion to Christianity, but I suppose one\u2019s refuge is inevitably another\u2019s ruin.)<\/p>\n

For a biblical seven years, the Zuckmayers live and work on the farm. Then the war is over and it\u2019s time to go see what remains of the cities, friends, and relatives back \u201chome.\u201d They return to find unimaginable destruction, the aftermath like \u201ctender skin that begins to grow over infected wounds.\u201d Alice isn\u2019t foolish enough to imagine that life will ever be the same again. The murderous fascist elements of society \u201care just waiting for a new era of insanity, when crimes will again be legally permitted and the mentally ill will again achieve power and honor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, the sun will rise and set. Winter will follow fall will follow summer will follow spring will follow winter. Death and decay will spare no living thing; creation and destruction will continue to exist in perpetual cycles. Folksy wisdom, you might say, but don\u2019t tell me it isn\u2019t resonant when the dystopias are scratching and slobbering at the door.<\/p>\n

There is no such thing as a long time ago in America<\/em>, Alice observes at one point, and it\u2019s not hard to see why the Zuckmayers hold fast to living here. Immigrants, we\u2019re told, often describe their acclimation as a kind of \u201csecond childhood.\u201d Within what is projected as the \u201csimplicity and independence\u201d of their adopted homeland, the Zuckmayers seem to have had a particularly happy one: \u201cWe have suffered no real disappointments, for if you accept people and things as they are you cannot be disappointed.\u201d Truth bomb, Auntie Al.<\/p>\n

The farm is both a literal and metaphoric refuge, where the madness and brutality of a deranged world can\u2019t touch us, because we are so removed, so utterly reliant upon ourselves, and so thoroughly beholden to our work, our responsibilities. Our toil is our treasure; the landscape is our home. The best can be made of literally anything, at any time.<\/p>\n

And so the emergence of a new massive highway right alongside the farm in the 1950s\u2014when America was on its postwar progress, progress, progress kick\u2014feels like a knife in the heart. \u201cThe farm is now easy to reach,\u201d Alice informs us sadly in her postscript.<\/p>\n

Because it wasn\u2019t supposed<\/em> to be easy! It was supposed to be hard<\/em>. Intensely, gloriously, redemptively, all-consumingly hard<\/em>. Who came up with the idea that anything\u2019s supposed to be easy<\/em>? Refuge is a full time job, make no mistake. Whatever are we to do with ourselves now? Wherever shall we go?<\/p>\n

This essay appears as the introduction to New York Review Books\u2019 new edition of\u00a0Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>The Farm in the Green Mountains<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Elisa Albert is the author of <\/em>After Birth, <\/em>The Book of Dahlia, and <\/em>How This Night Is Different, and the editor of <\/em>Freud\u2019s Blind Spot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first read Alice Herndan-Zuckmayer\u2019s The Farm in the Green Mountains, a blustering butthole had just been elected President of the United States of America, and everyone was freaking out. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1103,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[28634,25288,2857,28631,25704,28633,247,2391,26275,28632,635,1022,19080,570,9985,23467,28630,2426,28629,17884,28628,2021],"class_list":["post-110425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-alice-herdan-zuckmayer","tag-donald-j-trump","tag-escape","tag-escape-literature","tag-farm","tag-german-writer","tag-germany","tag-hitler","tag-hygge","tag-idyllic","tag-memoir","tag-nature","tag-new-york-review-books","tag-new-york-review-books-classics","tag-nyrb","tag-nyrb-classics","tag-pastoral","tag-politics","tag-refuge","tag-resistance","tag-the-farm-in-the-green-mountains","tag-world-war-ii"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nFinding Refuge in the \u201cGreen Mountains\u201d of Vermont<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer\u2019s memoir, reissued this month, celebrates inhabiting one\u2019s life fully\u2014even when the world is as bleak as ever.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Refuge by Elisa Albert\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"May 2, 2017 \u2013 When I first read Alice Herndan-Zuckmayer\u2019s The Farm in the Green Mountains, a blustering butthole had just been elected President of the United States of America, and everyone was freaking out.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2017-05-02T18:56:12+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2017-05-02T20:14:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wolf-kahn-dark-on-the-right-1.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1000\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"750\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Elisa Albert\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Elisa Albert\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"11 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Elisa Albert\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/a25c46fb32af8958ab355b62fb1fd025\"},\"headline\":\"Refuge\",\"datePublished\":\"2017-05-02T18:56:12+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2017-05-02T20:14:08+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/\"},\"wordCount\":2116,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/02\/refuge\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/05\/wolf-kahn-dark-on-the-right-1.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Alice Herdan-Zuckmayer\",\"Donald J. 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