Kathleen Hague; Michael Hague; Nancy Willard:East of the Sun and West of the Moon
- Taschenbuch 2001, ISBN: 9780152247034
Bantam. Very Good. 5.25 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches. Paperback. 2001. 192 pages. <br>At home in her Pennsylvania kitchen, Joann Leonard makes soup. In her grandfather's pot, she improv… Mehr…
Bantam. Very Good. 5.25 x 0.5 x 7.75 inches. Paperback. 2001. 192 pages. <br>At home in her Pennsylvania kitchen, Joann Leonard makes soup. In her grandfather's pot, she improvises, using her great-grandmother's unwritten recipe. As she does, amid the fragr ant steam rising from the pot comes a stream of memories, half-to ld tales, and departed ancestors asking that their stories be tol d. And what stories they are: of a family terrorized by Cossacks in its Eastern European village; of a man hiding twenty-eight da ys beneath a barn floor to avoid being murdered; of a tiny girl l eft behind with others for safety, lost for twelve long years and then miraculously found. Theirs is also the vivid story of new l ives made from old in America, the Golden Land, lives rich in hum or, wisdom, and bone-deep faith. Written as a spiritual legacy f or her two grown sons so that they may know their roots, and illu strated with old family photographs, this highly praised history of a remarkable family is a testament to the miracle of what happ ens when we invite the past into our lives. Editorial Reviews R eview [Leonard's] stories are translated into tender prose-poetry ... The Axelrood saga is in microcosm the story of East European Jewry and the American immigrant experience. ... A lyrical requi em composed with love and wisdom. -- Hadassah Magazine 'And tho u shalt teach unto thy children, that they may remember.' A wonde rful book told in a beautifully flowing lyrical voice ... An inva luable and lasting contribution. -- Alicia Appleman-Jurman, autho r of Alicia: My Story A heartfelt, bittersweet memoir of a woman rediscovering her Jewish ancestry as much for her children as fo r herself. -- Marie Claire The vivid reminiscences of her family show Leonard to be a truly gifted writer; this is a warm and mov ing work. -- Booklist From the Inside Flap er Pennsylvania kitch en, Joann Leonard makes soup. In her grandfather's pot, she impro vises, using her great-grandmother's unwritten recipe. As she doe s, amid the fragrant steam rising from the pot comes a stream of memories, half-told tales, and departed ancestors asking that the ir stories be told. And what stories they are: of a family terro rized by Cossacks in its Eastern European village; of a man hidin g twenty-eight days beneath a barn floor to avoid being murdered; of a tiny girl left behind with others for safety, lost for twel ve long years and then miraculously found. Theirs is also the viv id story of new lives made from old in America, the Golden Land, lives rich in humor, wisdom, and bone-deep faith. Written as a s piritual legacy for her two grown sons so that they may know thei r roots, and illustrated with old family photographs, this highly praised history of a remarkable family is a testament to the mir acle of what happens when we invite the past i From the Back Cov er [Leonard's] stories are translated into tender prose-poetry .. . The Axelrood saga is in microcosm the story of East European Je wry and the American immigrant experience. ... A lyrical requiem composed with love and wisdom. -- Hadassah Magazine 'And thou s halt teach unto thy children, that they may remember.' A wonderfu l book told in a beautifully flowing lyrical voice ... An invalua ble and lasting contribution. -- Alicia Appleman-Jurman, author o f Alicia: My Story A heartfelt, bittersweet memoir of a woman re discovering her Jewish ancestry as much for her children as for h erself. -- Marie Claire The vivid reminiscences of her family sh ow Leonard to be a truly gifted writer; this is a warm and moving work. -- Booklist About the Author Joann Rose Leonard writes an d directs plays for children and teens as an outreach program of the Penn State School of Theatre. She and her husband, Bob, a pro fessor and theater director, live in State College, Pennsylvania. Excerpt. ® Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Slowly , by degrees, I wake. From under the comforter, I slip out of Dad 's embrace, leaving those inscrutable coordinates of sleep that s play from the point where all space begins, where all time meets. Where dreams unite people, out of sequence, out of place. My fe et burn as they touch the floor, unable to cipher for a moment wh ether it is heat or cold that shocks them. Some mornings I'm so p erforated with fear, so gape-mouthed with awe at the undertaking of another day, that in order to reach the window, I pass over li ve coals, over ice undercut with chasm. Outside, the colorless s crim between sleep and waking begins to lift, and from the haze, apparitions of the familiar seep into shape: a density in the dis tance that will darken into Mount Nittany, the spreading red mapl e by the road, the shed; the forty-foot blue spruce that, when yo u were three, Josh, you climbed bough by bough to the top as I ga rdened. Joshy, I called. Come down, you are too high. No, I'm no t, you replied. I'm more than that. I'm three high, four high, fi ve high. In the widening, granular light, forms are so blurry, a moth wouldn't be able to find a leaf or twig substantial enough to grasp. Cries of a cardinal pickax their bright metal into the morning, the crimson flight across the yard as startling as blood outside the body. I tiptoe downstairs in an erratic pattern to avoid the maze of creaks that plague old wood. Not that there is anybody to wake now. Both of you are gone and Dad sleeps heavily. But just as new habits are hard to form because we forget to use them, old habits perpetuate because we forget to stop. I discove red that along with the true meaning of body of knowledge when ou r beloved dog, Chita, died. My head knew she was gone, but it was well over a month before I could get out of bed without wide-ste pping over her place on the floor. The body holds on to what it k nows far longer than the brain. In the kitchen, I pour some coff ee and sip in the silence. Sweet and milky, it rolls down my thro at opening round as an O. Astonished, I begin the day just as if I had never before tasted the elixir of that first swallow of cof fee, never felt the exquisite lick of morning light warming my ch illed skin, never experienced the sweet pressure of chair rungs h olding up my body like outside bones. All this newness despite th e fact that I am surrounded by visible history. Over in the corne r, holding the spider plant, is the junior chair that held each o f you long before you learned that the world turns on its own wit hout your spinning. You learned quickly, though. When you were si x, Josh, you came into the kitchen while I was scrambling eggs an d said, Mommy, did you know that if you woke up in the middle of the night, the kitchen would be where the living room is? How do es that happen? I asked. Because, you replied, every day the wor ld turns the whole way round. Perhaps that's the reason I can ne ver find my way to where I'm supposed to be--the green center tha t eludes the chomp of chaos. Sometimes when I'm driving along the highway, the road hums under the tires as they revolve over traf fic strips grooved like a phonograph record. Was it National Geog raphic that postulated the theory? -- recreating the voices and s ounds of ancient artisans by placing a phonograph needle on a rou nd clay pot and following the ridges made by the potter's tool. A nd what sound might have been captured? Would humming be heard, s ome heart, unleashed from time and flesh, spinning out from an an cient potter's wheel? Or instead, hoarse hawkings, a rusty guffaw ? Some stories from the past may be as speculative as sound twis ted from the carapace of a vanished potter. But not yours, Jonny and Josh. Not this story. Not when you can look at a photograph o f your Aunt Lisa taken in 1937 and see a bandage on her left ankl e. I remember the stories told to me about Aunt Lisa and her sore that never healed. The ulcer appeared in 1919 (eighteen years be fore the photo) as she walked from village to village searching f or her two-year-old daughter who was lost as they fled the pogrom s. Everywhere I look, Josh and Jon, your history is chaptered; t he lopsided basket that holds pencils, the clay pinch pot that ho lds paper clips, woodshop projects of towel rods, napkin holders and spice racks. And especially the pine trestle table that bears your early hieroglyphs incised right through paper into its soft wood -- alphabets and numbers, stick figures, rainbows, suns as big as teacups, plus marks and equal signs proving that the world adds up. This is not remembered history that the mind can cobbl e into its own versions, it is as real and present as the dust th at accumulates on it. It belongs to the everyday -- a past you ca n pull up to the table or use to flavor today's soup. A past that echoes in the particulars of daily life. Life may be created in the bedroom, but it is the kitchen where it is sustained. Still barefoot, I head to the basement, taking from the sink as I go t he metal bowl heaped with kitchen scraps. Rinds, shells, piths, s eeds. Lacking sturdier digestive systems, we feed mostly on the f leshy middle of things, just as we receive the heart of each day from the cracked bones of our ancestors. I tug the cord to the b asement light. The bulb flickers, then goes black. I feel my way down the uneven cellar steps, sponging in the dank air. It's not a smell I relish, but an animal quickening compels me to scent it deeply. A cold sweat of groundwater exudes from the pores of the cellar stones; water that has filtered through centuries of the living and dead, now bound in this subterranean space. I shove my feet into a pair of mud-encrusted clogs and clop out to the gard en. The morning is mistress and defined now. No fog to muffle cl arity of thought. Rising beyond the woods on the opposite side of the creek, the green hills are pricked with the first red of the season, and slow rust gnaws at the leafy edges of the garden. I unlatch the gate to the chicken yard and fling the scraps in a w ide arc into a flurry of squawks, then go to gather eggs. In the dusty, slatted light of the chicken house, I reach into a nesting box, sliding my hand under the spread breast feathers of a golde n brown banty -- like the one that, when you were five, Josh, you dubbed Judy Morning Daylight. Groping gently, my hand curves aro und a warm oval, and I grasp the age-old paradox in my palm. Chi cken or egg, I wonder? The answer, I suppose, lies in the egg tha t lies within the chicken that is in the egg. Like this story. Wh ere does it begin? Which birth? Which mother? How can I speak you r story, Josh and Jonny, without a long history of mothers nudgin g these words into a laundry list of things that must not be forg otten? After collecting the eggs, I stride to the garden. Cold circles of damp seep through my sweatpants as I kneel on the grou nd to grip the sinewed stems of a beet. This, I imagine, is the w ay it would feel to throttle someone's scrawny neck. Shivers tunn el down my spine at the thought. In the maelstrom of daily fears- -illness, accidents, random violence--it's odd to feel my own bod y turn predator. I tug. The stem resists. Again I yank, and fro m deep inside, from that place where energy turbines into action; where chromosomes and coffee swirl together with daily need and lunatic dreams, memory churns into motion, fueled by a list of he lping verbs (like the one you, Jonny, brought home from fourth gr ade)-- am is was have had do did might must would shou ld can will be being been Surging from that place that comp els us to scratch our nose or journey to the moon, I hear a voice . Shalom, Joann, Great-grandmother Chana says. Such a nice garde n you've planted. Your first beets? Startled, I feel my blood je t through my veins and pound against my eardrums. Yes, I whisper. Detroit reds. Fifty-nine days. You hoed, Chana says. Got bliste rs. Blisters, I remember. Watery, aching pillows for the seeds t o dream and grow lush upon. The first green, says Chana. So hard to tell leaf from weed. And now time for pulling easy for a stro ng woman like you. Pull, Joann. Pull. The root's long, I say. L ong? Of course it's long. It reaches all the way to my gratchkeh in Tetiev. It begins here, here in Die Goldeneh Medina, your gold en country, where people drink sun from a cup. And then, you know what happens? Along the way it sips from your buried relatives: Cousin Roochel, Uncle Berney, Uncle Itzzy, Lisa and her baby... Finally, I wrestle the beet from the earth. It lies, dark red, in my throbbing palm. Eat, child, eat, Chana urges. So you shouldn 't be hungry. I pull more beets and carry them to the house, the long roots trailing. Overhead, a flock of geese honk. I stand l ooking upward, head flung back, to watch them inscribe the frail blue. The sky, vast as a whale's belly, swallows me whole. What c an I say that makes any sense? Dear God, what did I do to deserve this? Joy or sorrow, the answer is always the same. Nothing. Eve rything. The geese surge on, receding in the distance, pulled th rough ancient starlight to the place where they belong. What gold , I think: to know unquestioningly where you belong, what it is y ou are supposed to be doing. And then, when the time comes, to be called from some deep knowing to the next place. Slowly, I moun t the cellar steps and begin to scrub the beets in the sink. Chan a, compact, sprightly, her keen blue eyes sparking like flint, fo llows with the surety of seasons. It is hard to imagine so small a woman, a woman who has borne and raised seven children, still s o e... ., Bantam, 2001, 3, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1989. Paperback. Good. Disclaimer:Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed., Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1989, 2.5<
