Max Nemtsov, editor of my wife Nonna’s Russian translation of my new novel, notes that a British publisher is redacting racial slurs and politically incorrect wording from a bestselling writer’s old books.
Did somebody predict this? I think so! In my satirical novel, The Insurrectionist, a Chicago newspaper forces a troublesome reporter to spend his workdays weeding such expressions from 172 years’ worth of digital archives. Which is why Max tagged me on Facebook. He writes, “As they say, life is more shameless than literature.”
The Guardian newspaper reports that Scottish writer Val McDermid was annoyed to be assigned a “sensitivity reader” to remove offensive language from her earlier works. She has sold more than 19 million copies worldwide and is known for her authentic dialogue, the paper notes.
A Soviet poster reads, “Rats of the Ku Klux Klan: American Democracy.”
My wife’s Christmas present for me last month was inspired. For years I have talked about taking a drawing class, so she signed me up for one at an art studio in our Chicago suburb.
The class is ongoing, and the teacher began the session by laying out the previous week’s artwork (white pencil or gouache on black paper) and asking for critiques.
Disturbingly, one student artist had sketched a rat in a red MAGA cap crawling out of a tipped-over trash can. The message wasn’t as original as he perhaps imagined. Portraying one’s adversaries as vermin has a long and venomous history in Nazi, Soviet, North Korean, and other totalitarian propaganda.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. We are delighted to have younger son Lev home, but we dodged a culinary bullet. We nearly had to dine on Russell’s famous Thanksgiving fried liver.
The trouble was, I was late in getting started cooking. I’d worked on a short story, gone to the gym to work out, and strolled to the store to get the butter we’d forgotten. Plenty of time, methinks.
We’d decided to skip turkey this year, opting for a huge pork shoulder. But when we got it out of the fridge and unwrapped it, the carcass smelled like roadkill. I checked the sell-by date: Oh. This past Monday.
“We have liver,” said Nonna, my Russian wife. “I like your fried liver.”
“Not for Thanksgiving! We can’t eat liver. It’s un-American.”
She checked the freezer. “There’s pelmeni.”
“No! We’re treasonous enough not eating turkey. We can’t possibly eat pelmeni. Or liver. They’ll strip us of our citizenship.”
“I’ll never understand these Thanksgiving traditions of yours. What does it matter what we eat?”
“God is watching.”
I dumpstered the dead hog flesh, dashed to the store (by car this time), and got another ample pork shoulder. After speeding home, I hastily Grokked how long I should cook a six-pound pork shoulder, and…. What!? Seven hours!?
By now it was one o’clock. And I had to pick Lev up at the Greyhound station in 50 minutes.
Oh, well. Thanksgiving dinner at 8 PM. We doused the hog meat in olive oil and our very delicious mix of herbs and spices and stuck it in the oven.
When I picked up Lev, I broke the bad news. “Looks like we’re going to have to cook liver if you’re hungry. The pork shoulder won’t be ready until 8.”
“I’m down with that,” he said. “I like liver.”
How long, O Lord, must I dwell among the Philistines?
Luckily, as it turned out, the AI lied. Three hours was enough to cook us a crispy-crusted, tender, delicious heap of pork. And the liver can wait for another day.
I called my mother on Saturday, and as usual nowadays, she couldn’t really hear me. She misplaced her hearing aids while in rehab earlier this year, probably the third or fourth pair she has lost. Pity, because these were very advanced and expensive ones, probably costing $5,000.
But really, they provided only limited help. Her hearing, like my own, has declined to a point where hearing aids can’t do much to correct the problem.
Mom mentioned something annoying one of her caregivers had done. I said, “Was it Alejandra?”
“What?” Mom said.
“Was the caregiver Alejandra?”
She said, “I heard you say, ‘Was there a salamander?”
Since editors and companies are asking, I’ve added a tab above with examples of my writing. Many stories and photographs are lost after a 40-year career, but here is your go-to site for the works of Working.
The other day at the Art Institute of Chicago, we ran into a familiar figure: a bronze of the Roman general Nero Claudius Drusus Germanicus, generally known simply as Germanicus.
The statue stands in an exhibition of ancient Roman sculptures from Italy’s Torlonia Collection in Italy.
I felt as if I knew him. I first encountered Germanicus in 1976 as a teenager, while watching the BBC Masterpiece Theatre series “I, Claudius.” He was seen as was something of a first-century JFK, charismatic and full of promise before he was tragically assassinated.
I later read the source novel by Robert Graves, a tale of intrigue, murder, and palace coups among Caesar Agustus’ family. Germanicus won victories as a general on the German frontier but was later poisoned in Syria. Many blamed Emperor Tiberias, a brooding dissolute who was jealous of Germanicus’ popularity. Most dangerously to Tiberias, the soldiers adored their general.
Or, a son’s letter recalls an amphibian’s ignoble end.
My mother has been diagnosed with dementia, so I have been sending her letters to spark old family memories. This week I wrote to her about our family’s visit to the Calaveras County Fair & Jumping Frog Jubilee in the mid-1960s. More on that below.
Dementia takes many forms. The rehab facility wing where she’s staying features a rectangular hallway around a courtyard where shrubs and eucalyptus trees are planted. Some patients sit staring out the window wherever staffers park them. Others propel themselves in their wheelchairs with their stockinged feet, determined to keep circling, circling, hour after hour. Get out of their way or they’ll scowl at you and gibber a rebuke. During my recent visit, one poor fellow asked me whenever he circled by, “Where am I?”
The Workings in the late ’60s, several years after the Angels Camp trip.
Mom can appear mentally sound if forgetful—conversant and aware of where she is. But she often falls into confusion. At first she thought she’d been kidnapped, rather than transferred here from a hospital after a fall. She still keeps telling us that my mentally disabled brother Jeff is lost, out wandering the Mojave Desert where we lived fifty-seven years ago.
This is the third post in a series about a mysterious suitcase that once belonged to a young Briton who followed his father into a career as a diplomat in the USSR in the 1930s. Check here for parts one and two.
Even before his posting abroad, George already had connections with the Soviet literary scene. With Reginald Merton he translated Aleksandr Neverov’s 1923 novel Tashkent: City of Bread (Victor Gollancz, London, 1930). The work prefigures the defining horror of George’s time in the Soviet Union: the famine induced by the Bolsheviks’ violent collectivization. From 1931 to 1934, millions would die in Ukraine, Russia, and Kazakhstan under the communists’ harebrained war on successful farmers, whom it dubbed “kulaks.”
In the novel, famine stalks the Volga River region around Samara. Twelve-year-old Mishka Dodonov has lost his father, grandparents, and other relatives to the hunger. To find grain for his mother and brothers, he rides the rails 1,300 miles to Soviet Uzbekistan.
From America to the starving of Russia: a 1922 poster hails food aid from the U.S.
In the Walton-Merton translation, the novel reads:
“The two younger ones were useless little people in these hard times; one spent his time begging for gruel, while the other was carving a toy windmill for the roof. The mother was weak with hunger. She used to go down to the stream for water but had barely strength enough to get back. But for all her cries and laments the famine showed her no mercy.
This is part two in a series about a mysterious suitcase that once belonged to a young Briton who followed his father into a career as a diplomat in the USSR in the 1930s. Check out parts one and three.
A school rugby team photo with the future Captain W.R. Frecheville of the Royal Engineers, whom the Bolsheviks would capture and execute in 1920.
Even as young George Walton was at Sedbergh, studying French, passing the ball on the rugby field, and bowling on the cricket pitch, he must have avidly followed his father’s career abroad. The Civil War was raging from 1918-1920. The U.K. deployed troops from the White Sea to the Sea of Japan.
In the south, where W.S. was stationed after he left Murmansk, the Royal Air Force flew combat missions against the Red Army. British ground troops and heavy Mark V and light Whippet tanks joined in the White attacks, Lauri Kopisto writes in a dissertation titled “The British Intervention in South Russia 1918-1920” (University of Helsinki, 2011). British tank crews led a successful assault on the Bolshevik stronghold of Tsaritsyn, later renamed Stalingrad. The Bolsheviks made clear their hatred for the foreigners, threatening to castrate and crucify any British prisoner of war who fell into their hands.
The Elephant Box 