In December of this year, as I was making a list of books and movies I wanted to read and see during the following months, I decided to keep a media journal in which I would engage with each work by commenting on issues such as impact, intent, aesthetic quality, and why/why not I would recommend the work to others. The following two books, paired in some cases with “companion reads” (books I read at random around the same time or as a result of a previous read) or movies, are some that made a significant impact on me this spring, and the commentary accompanying them are largely excerpts from my media journal. Perhaps you will be inspired to keep your own such journal, and find, as I have, that writing about what you see and read increases your enjoyment of your media consumption, forces you to be more analytical about your media “diet,” and in the long run makes you savvier about it.

Poetry: Here, Bullet, by Brian Turner

Written from the perspective of a solider-poet during a tour in Iraq, these poems are so heavy (as in “ponderous”) that even though I can say I finished the book, I don’t feel as if I was able to digest it completely. It certainly ushered the war into the cozy living room of my mind, and, along with A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini) and the movie Paradise Now* (Hany Abu-Assad), made the conflicts in the Middle East tangible, close and terrible. My biggest fear going into this book was that poetry would take a back seat to political statements. I was happy to find that while there may be political statements to be interpreted as such throughout, they are not the book’s main focus.

Stylistically, I admire Turner’s work for its spare, gritty elegance. He manages to say so much with few well-chosen words that pack either a punch or paint a vivid picture with the most startling, minute details. I like that Turner does not wallow in the rough language often associated with the military, army life; he does use it sparingly in certain poems to make us see, feel and experience events as though we are one of his men. To see/hear excerpts from this book, please visit NPR.org.

*This movie deserves more commentary here, but I refrain for lack of time and space. Should anyone be interested in a discussion of it, do email me!

Autobiography: Alicia: My Story, by Alicia Applemen-Jurman

I felt a burning sensation inside of me again, a feeling of hatred for the Germans, the Ukrainians, and our former neighbors, who had helped to kill us in order to get our homes […] Ukrainians cooperated zealously in the elimination of the Jewish population (70, 132).

This is the story of a young Holocaust survivor and rescuer, and with words such as these, she attributes a legacy to the Polish/Ukrainian people that makes my blood nearly freeze in fear even today. Alicia was nine when the Germans invaded her home town in southeastern Poland, and by the time the war ended six years later, she had lost all three of her brothers, her father, best friends, and witnessed the brutal murder of her mother by an SS officer. The prose of this book is very stark, straight-forward and unadorned. It only enhances the brutality of the stories told, and the author succeeds in making the reader feel her crushing pain as she loses one loved-one after another.

Of all the Holocaust-era books I have read, I found this one to be one of the most crushing. It is a riveting—almost hypnotizing—read, but it feels like drinking poison at some point, and I have to stop and catch my breath. One of the reasons I believe it impacted me as much as it did is because I had just been to Ukraine, where the friend I was visiting there horrified me with tales of anti-Semitism she has encountered during her stay. It is frightening to think that there is no remorse for the unthinkable deeds chronicled in this book.

Several months after finishing Alicia’s story, I ran across the movie Everything is Illuminated, in which a young Jewish man goes to Ukraine to discover a place/woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis…or so he is told. A “blind” and rather anti-Semitic taxi driver and his grandson help him hunt (reluctantly at first) for answers to his questions about his past. What struck me was the point in the story where Alex, the translator-grandson, asks his grandfather incredulously whether Ukrainians were actually anti-Semitic before the war! This seemed to me an incredulous question, and I could not help but wonder who—if any—the intended audience of this film was: Americans? American Jews/Ukrainians? Ukrainians? It seems to me not the latter, since surely everyone in Ukraine knows they were anti-Semitic before the war, when many still are. In the end, not quite everything is illuminated, but, especially coupled with Alicia’s story above, it is a thought-provoking and fascinating film. (Warning: it does require some patience to watch, as the story unfolds rather slowly).

Copyright © 2008 by Charity Gingerich Share