I like reading books set in other eras of history mainly because it confirms that I'm a gigantic wuss with no practical survival skills. Reading Lonesome Dove last summer led to a particularly candid discussion with Kerry about how long each of us would have lasted in Reconstruction Era Texas. Kerry decided I would have succumbed to diptheria or the measles as a baby and she would have perished giving birth, probably around seventeen or eighteen. The astute reader will notice that even in Hypothetical Lives, Kerry wins.
Which leads me to A Long, Long Time Ago And Essentially True, by Brigid Pasulka. The novel skips back in forth through time, detailing the blossoming romance between two Polish youth, Anielica and the Pigeon, and their granddaughter fifty years later as she finally leaves her village and moves to Krakow. It's important to note that the grandparents fall in love in 1939. In Poland. Which begs the debate of the summer, how long would 1939 Kerry and Brendan last in Nazi-occupied Poland?*
Pasulka takes what could have been rote tales (Love in the Shadow of War, Country Mouse Becoming City Mouse) and infuses them with complexity and moral shadings. Anielica and the Pigeon are full-blooded characters who more than rise to the challenges the war offers, yet are still recognizable human beings. Their granddaughter, who is known only by her nickname "Baba Yaga" through most of the book, is so sweet and endearing that it's all you can do not to find some way to transport yourself into the book so as to protect her from any of the dangers of life.
The stories begin to bleed into each other, with themes repeating over the span of years, and snippets of family lore one hears about in Baba Yaga's section is filled out in detail in the grandparents'.
Pasulka's book is, in a lot of ways, a love letter to Poland, a country which up until now I had no opinion about ever visiting. More importantly, it's a love letter to grandparents. Even if you have a luke-warm (at best) view of your parent's parents, you'll be a sniveling mess by the end as Pasulka reveals the full extent of Anielica and the Pigeon's love for their granddaughter. Pasulka hints at how we can never fully know the depth and complexity of our grandparents' lives (apparently they did stuff before I was born? Huh.) and plays at what family stories can't capture and leave out. Needless to say, I have spent the last week since reading the book and walking up to random eighty-year-olds and thanking them for all they've done.
Yet perhaps the greatest gift Pasulka gave me was the fact that her book won the Pen/Hemingway Award. Two points!
*Answer: Kerry would have become an active leader in the Resistance, cutting off German supply lines and risking her life to communicate with the Allies. Brendan would have stood very still in a fountain and pretended to be a statue for fifty years.
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