Boiled Eggs, Fresh Flowers, Chicken Fat, & An Old Cat Not Pictured

Even though I write fiction and nonfiction, I primarily read history – good history that focuses on persons and presents the human element, the pathos, suffering, evil and good, very intimate moments, or just minute details that have no significance other than that within the context of the immediate story or narrative.  And these details – such as boiled eggs, fresh flowers, chicken fat, or the simple act of opening the door to let an old cat come in – bring history alive for me, providing textured meaning, connecting the narrative with the ordinary circumstances of the lives of others, which deepen my understanding of their lives, and my own, in the process.

Elie Wiesel in, “Night” describes the very early morning of the night the Jews were ordered to be ready for transport – a word, by the spring of 1944, full of fear and terror – as the Jewish ghetto in the Hungarian town in which he and his family lived in was to be liquidated.  He writes of how the women – his own mother within that plural noun – “were boiling eggs, roasting meat, preparing cakes, sewing backpacks”  as part of their hurried preparations for leaving and feeding their families along the way, wherever they were going.  I would not have thought of boiling eggs, and I made a mental note of this for if and when my family and I were ever in a similar situation – of course now unimaginable, but it had also once been unimaginable for the Jews of this small town in Hungary, and for millions of other Jews, of other persons like us, scattered throughout Europe.  I think of this at times when I now boil eggs.

In Russia, after the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917, the Imperial family was for a time confined under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo near St. Petersburg, and then detained at various other locations before their final confinement and eventual execution in Ekaterinburg in July 1918.  The Empress Alexandra, at some point during this period of confinements, wrote in a letter or remarked to a surviving friend – I forget which – that one of the things she truly missed was always having fresh flowers around her – a very human joy of the Empress, that I have not forgotten.

Chicken fat.  During World War II, the Lodz ghetto in Poland where two hundred thousand Jews were gathered and housed – for a time – was comprised of three walled off sections of the city separated by major open “Aryan” streets.  Three bridges eventually were built over the streets to handle the necessary Jewish foot traffic from one walled section of the ghetto to the others, mainly for work purposes.  As the years went on, food within the ghetto was made scarce and starvation was a planned reality within the ghetto.  Climbing up and down and crossing the bridges burned precious and essential calories, and at one point, the Jewish ghetto administration, to entice members of the various governing boards to meetings, promised all members attending a slice of bread smeared with chicken fat, a promise that was kept.

“So Sad to Fall in Battle” by Kumiko Kakehashi – is an account of the WWII battle for Iwo Jima though the eyes of General Kuribayashi, the Japanese defender of Iwo Jima against the American invasion and assault.  In the book, the author writes of her visit in 2003 – almost sixty years after WWII ended – to the general’s son, Taro, then age 79, where he brought out to her a binder which he urged her to open, within which were forty-two letters that General Kuribayashi wrote from Iwo Jima to his family in Japan, which became the principal basis of the book she was to write.  She writes of Taro during this visit who “every time his old cat scratched on the door…he would get to his feet and open it”, further adding that, “There was nothing in his gentle, slow way of speaking or his benevolent, slightly drooping appearance to suggest that he was a son of a “military hero.”  And so, within the brutality, bloodiness, and horror of the battle on Iwo Jima, and the pathos and the human and familial sufferings described within the book, it is this one detail, this one human touch, that has deeply remained with me – this one old man, the son of a military hero, who, every time his old cat scratched at the door, rose to his feet to open it.

All these details at some point, touched something deeply within me, and they still remain.  Do any of these details profoundly speak of human life?  No…  But details, perhaps truly without significant meaning in and of themselves, can become enticing points of light, illuminating ordinary, everyday events, into impressions remembered with the awe of clarity.  A detail can be given an enduring new life when the object appears in someone else’s life as something new and clearly focused.  For regardless of how different the culture of the detail is from our own, and regardless of how far distant in the past it opened into view, the detail, when revealed, does acquire a new living meaning and significance – familiar and known, yes, but somehow made startingly new – as an old well-known painting presented in a different museum room, with a different lighting, in an entirely different frame.  For all human past is never far from us, for it is embedded in all that we share as humans, verily infused in all which makes us fully human.  And when the spoken or written word is able to offer these moments of our past as the heartbeats of a living human heart, that truly is a gift to us all, and something of value and worth.

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