Alex Kudera's Blog, page 32

pleasantly calm

"It has been calm for a few days, even pleasantly calm. Nothing special has happened. Better and better news comes from the front. It grows clearer by the day that a big breakthrough is coming. The Germans are running away from the Caucasus. The Stalingrad-Rostov and Rzhev-Rostov fronts have bigger successes from one day to the next. Today, as I write these lines, the Reds are 120 kilometers from Kharkov and a few dozen from Rostov. Leningrad is liberated [from the siege], and the Germans are driven out of Kronstadt. Today Leningrad celebrates the liberation of the city. In short, it is calm in the ghetto, even pleasantly calm."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

Police Will Collect Library Books

"There are subscribers to the library in the ghetto who do not return their borrowed books. Now such 'frozen' readers are put on a special list to be given to the police. The books of such subscribers are recalled by force.

"In especially malevolent cases, people will be punished for keeping library books."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

a flower

"Outside, it is late autumn. I am not allowed to buy a flower in the street, although I am among the happy ones, who have the right to 'pass.' So I gather beautiful golden oak leaves. Instead of a flower, a leaf, a dried, yellow autumn leaf.

"It is autumn and sad in my soul. . . ."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

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Fante's Hunger

"From the bookcase behind his writing table, I pulled down a copy of Hunger by Knut Hamsun. This book, my father used to say, caused him to become a writer. I held it in my hand and flipped through the old pages. Somewhere in the middle, I discovered a sheet of typing bond that had been folded in quarters. It looked to have been used as a bookmark. It was yellow from age at the top where it had been exposed to the air.
"I unfolded the make-shift bookmark and immediately recognized the handwriting as my father's. But over and over, the signature written was Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun. Knut Hamsun. A paper was filled to the bottom of the page. The eccentricity jolted me because I'd done the same thing a hundred times, filling legal tablets with E. E. Cummings' signatures. The old man and I had things in common after all."

~~ from  Chump Change  by Dan Fante

Life got away from me

"We drank coffee together standing in the kitchen. He wanted to know what had happened to me. Why had I landed in the nut ward? He was a very intense guy, and his directness came from a fear that what I had, might be inherited by him too.
"I had not planned to be crazy, I said. Arrests for lewd practices in public were things that happened when I drank. I'd not planned on being a degenerate. Life got away from me. Out of hand. I couldn't figure it out either . . .
"We talked about him too. Fab was proud that he had put himself through college and into grad school mostly from working in a supermarket. When the old man had gotten sick and his only income had been his Social Security and Writers Guild Pension, my brother had paid for his education by himself. At one store, working his way up from box boy to checker to assistant manager. Union wages. Vacations. Dental benefits. Six years at USC. The CPA exam."
~~ from Chump Change by Dan Fante

#fridayreads

Don't be shy about messaging me if you'd like a signed copy of Auggie's Revenge or Fight for Your Long Day.

T. C. Boyle's collected stories

T. C.'s phone books, I & II
 

Life for Sale

I'll soon return to Yukio Mishima's Life for Sale. It's good.

Beyond Good and Evil Sold Eleven Copies

Will Lloyd hearts the lads.