206. Xenophobia

hermanusrainbowtrust.blogspot.com

Xenophobia: an undue or irrational fear of foreigners or outsiders

Okay,  some will say, but this is a natural human fight-or-flight response, stemming from the days when outsiders were a threat to one’s very survival; for that matter, they still can be, and are.

Fair enough; but allow me to make just three points.

First, note the “undue” and “irrational” in the definition:  a natural instinct to be a little wary of outsiders at first encounter is understandable; but a paranoia that persists even after the outsiders are a known quantity is unreasonable.

Second, ask yourself if you know who these outsiders are. Do you mean the people who come from outside your community or country or who speak a different language from your own? I submit to you that any of us can feel like or be perceived to be an outsider, even if we share the same nationality and language as our peers and have lived in the same community from birth. Once you recognize the impossibility of knowing who the outsiders are, xenophobia becomes all the more irrational.

The third point is the kicker. I propose that the fear of foreigners or outsiders often stems from the secret knowledge that you are an outsider yourself.  A story from my own experience, not a pretty one, may serve to illustrate.

When I was at boarding school in India two new students, a brother and sister, thirteen, perhaps fourteen years old, joined us. It might have been mid-year, I don’t remember. What I do remember is that they had just come from England where they had been living for a time, their parents having returned to India. Naturally, everything was new and strange to them, and they couldn’t help but compare much of what they were encountering with their experience in England.  It seemed to us, though, that every five minutes they were saying, “In England this” or “In England that.” We claimed to find it intensely irritating and started jeering, “In England,” whenever they opened their mouths.

They were pleasant, quiet, and good-natured, those two. The problem was ours, not theirs, but we made it theirs by the way we treated them. Why were we so unkind and intolerant? The obvious answer is that in the 1960’s, barely 20 years since Independence from British rule, we didn’t take kindly to anything Indian getting compared negatively to its English counterpart. But if I search my own motives, a still more troubling—and telling—explanation emerges. I was arguably at least as much of an outsider as the two newcomers were, perhaps more, in that I was half-English, had been born in England, and, at 13, had lived outside of India for almost half of my life. Of all people, I ought to have had some empathy for them, to have been able to reach out and make them feel welcome. But I didn’t, however ashamed I feel about it now. If they ever read this story, I hope they will be able to forgive me.

I could attempt to justify my behavior with the protestation that at the time I was unaware of the personal motivation for it, for the fears about my own belonging that made me challenge theirs all the more vehemently. But that is precisely my point: I contend that many of those who engage in xenophobic behavior are unaware that what drives it is their own insecurity about their status as insiders.

We are all foreigners. And it is our human task to help one another feel a little more at home.

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205. Weeping Willow

There is a tavern in the town, in the town,
And there my dear love sits him down, sits him down,
And drinks his wine ’mid laughter free,
And never, never thinks of me.

[Chorus] Fare thee well, for I must leave thee,
Do not let the parting grieve thee,
And remember that the best of friends must part, must part
Adieu, adieu, kind friends adieu, adieu, adieu,
I can no longer stay with you, stay with you,
I’ll hang my harp on a weeping willow tree,
And may the world go well with thee.
— F. J. Adams, 1891

I don’t remember having seen any weeping willows in my childhood in India, and knew of them only through There’s a Tavern in the Town, a song my mother used to sing. Although she would never have said so to us children, she was probably homesick for England when she sang these old songs. That hidden emotion and the longtime association of the weeping willow with parted lovers imbued my image of the tree with sentiment, deep, but non-specific.

It was not until we immigrated to the United States that weeping willows became a common feature of the cultivated landscape, and not until we moved out to the farm in Winchendon and started homesteading ourselves that we learned of the practical dangers of planting them anywhere near a house.  Although the tree is beautiful—one of the first to turn a delicate yellow, then green, in the early spring—and useful for preventing erosion, it craves water, and its large, thirsty roots gravitate toward septic pipes and storm drains, work their way in through cracks and crevices, and soon block them.

When my parents moved into their current house, there was a small weeping willow down in the far corner of their back field, in the lowest-lying part of their property. It was well away from the house and its roots would be likely to gravitate down and ever farther away, so they let it be. It thrived there, and now, twenty years later, it has filled out the entire corner and grown up to its full, mature height.

The weeping willow (salix babylonica) is native to northern China. Being highly desirable, it was traded along the Silk Route to south-west Asia and Europe, and has now spread worldwide. The tree at my parents’ is now so large that it can be seen from the other side of the world. Here’s how we found out:

My nephew Pinakin came to the U.S. from India for his doctoral studies. When he visited us for the first time and I was driving him over to meet my parents, he asked me excitedly if he could navigate. “You see,” he explained, “I’ve looked you all up on Google Earth.” Sure enough, Pinakin gave me flawless directions across town. When we drew up at the house, he exclaimed with satisfaction, “It’s all here: the house, the fields, and the big tree in the corner!” That weeping willow can now be spotted from India via satellite! I can’t quite describe what that made me feel: the tree that has so long been a symbol of parting and loss is now a landmark that our distant loved ones can seek out, zoom in on, and find us by.

Earlier this evening, in the gathering dusk, when I gazed on that tree clothed in its delicate Spring green, with the last rays of the setting sun lighting the adjacent clouds on fire, I thought of my mother in India half a century ago, long before the days of satellites, singing of her distant loved ones.  When I was a child, I thought that the woman in “There’s a Tavern in the Town” was singing, “I’ll hang my heart [not harp] on a weeping willow tree.” I still think that my version describes best what we have hung on that tree, that continues to seek water and light wherever it is transplanted, regardless of the human heart.

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204. Victory V’s

Old poster for Victory V’s

During the  year or so that I lived in England in the late 1960s I became something of an expert on English sweets (or candy, if you’re from the U.S.). I always maintain—and this from a person who takes pride in eating all organic—that the English (who have long been featured in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest per capita candy consumption)  make the best artificial flavors for their sweets. Barratt Sherbet Fountains, sherbet lemons, Trebor Refreshers, Maltesers, Maynard’s Wine Gums, Rowntree’s Fruit Pastilles, Crunchie bars, Bassett’s Jelly Babies, I loved them without reservation, and strove—always in vain—to emulate my Auntie Bette, the Queen of Sweets, in her expertise on everything related to confectionery and in the sheer volume she managed to put away.

I’ve written in an earlier story about how I was introduced to English sweets and to television advertising at the same time. Some of the advertising slogans and jingles are burnt into my brain. “Opal Fruits: Made to make your mouth water,” for instance. Victory V’s were old-school: no TV advertising for them. But their slogan was unforgettable:

Victory V: It’s got a kick like a mule

Victory V’s were not very prepossessing in their appearance: flat, rock-hard brick-like lozenges the color of dirty khaki. Their decidedly acquired smell and taste was no better: it was more than mildly medicinal, and seemed to shoot straight up your nose and into your brain. One might well ask why anyone would want to subject herself to such an ordeal, and it might have remained a mystery to me had I not read the ingredients list. That is interesting in itself, since most British food products weren’t required to have an ingredients list until quite recently. But Victory V’s did have one and when I read it I discovered why the product had such a “devoted band of asbestos-mouthed fans”: two of its active ingredients were chloroform and ether!

Yes—you read it right: chloroform—the stuff in which comic-book no-good-niks soak a rag to overpower their victims—and ether—the stuff that anesthetists administer before their patients go under the knife. No wonder so many schoolchildren consumed the nasty-tasting throat lozenges as if they were candy! After you had sucked your way through two or three of those babies, breathing deep all the while, you were guaranteed to feel no pain.

Remembering Victory V’s a little while ago, I wondered if perhaps I had misremembered about the chloroform and ether. If it were true, then surely they would not have sold these things over the counter in sweetshops, and to schoolchildren. Some quick research gave me a bit of a history lesson. Apparently, Victory V Lozenges started out in the mid-1800s as a patent medicine, Victory Chlorodyne Lozenges with the original ingredients of pulverised sugar, linseed, liquorice, chlorodyne (a soothing mix of cannabis and chloroform) and pure acacia gum. They was later renamed Linseed Liquorice V Lozenge Victory and sold as a confection. They acquired their current name, Victory V lozenges, back in 1911, even before the First World War, long before Churchill popularized the V sign in the Second.

My research also confirmed that my memory of the active ingredients had been correct, although it also revealed that the Victory V’s of today no longer contain them, just simulations of their original flavor, and that their sales have plummeted, most likely due to the public’s preference for natural ingredients over synthetic ones.  The new slogan is “Victory V: Forged for Strength”; but it just doesn’t have the kick that the old one did.

Note: Several of my favorite English sweets now have versions with natural favors and colors and, to my surprise, they are delicious. There is such a thing as Progress.

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201. Screaming Women

(from jollygoodshow.net)

In the evenings, after the storytime ritual was over and our son had gone to sleep, I would be faced with the choice between relaxing on the couch and grading student papers before class the next day. But no sooner had I settled down with a cup of tea and a sigh, than it would begin: the screaming women.

When I was first introduced to television in England as a child of nine, the government  was very strict about what could be shown on television during the daytime, when children might be awake and watching. Children’s programs were aired in the morning and afternoon, then the news, documentaries, and family programming—soap operas, comedies, music and game shows. It wasn’t until after 9 pm that adult programs were screened, including dramas, thrillers, mysteries, and anything with violent content. Even so, back in the 1960s the British rules governing TV violence were restrictive. Compared to U.S. standards British television was permissive about sexual content but much less so about violence. All that has changed now, of course; as much as I admire Helen Mirren, I had to avert my eyes again and again throughout the long-running crime series, Prime Suspect (1992-2006), and after just one episode I can see that it’s going to be more of the same with the new mini-series, The Bletchley Circle.

In the U.S. during the 1970s and 1980s the television networks were encouraged to self-regulate when it came to  shows with graphically violent content, reserving the time-slot of 8-9 pm Eastern Standard Time for “family viewing.” But after 9 pm, violent programs would crowd the line-up on every channel without fail, and it only got worse in the 1990s. I’m not just talking about Miss Marple whodunits in which one family member after the other is poisoned in a stately home or Westerns with to-the-death shoot-outs in front of the saloon; these were films about sadists, psychopaths, and serial killers who invariably targetted women, predictably barmaids and prostitutes. Not content with one killing, it seemed, there had to be a sickening succession of them, each one more grisly than the last.

So the nightly onset of this programming would be signaled by the screams of members of my own sex. There was no way I could relax when one of those screams rent the air and my heart, and threatened to wake the baby to boot. The “screaming women,” our shorthand for that perverted category of entertainment,  were my signal to gather up my papers and retire to the study. It was positively soothing to grade error-riddled student essays when the alternative was bullet-riddled women’s bodies.

Nowadays, with hundreds of cable and satellite TV channels to choose among, one doesn’t have to wait until 9 pm; guaranteed, one can find a screaming woman on air at any time of day or night. Now that’s progress.

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200. Roots, Rock, Reggae

My first encounter with Reggae music was with Jimmy Cliff’s Wonderful World, Beautiful People in 1969, during lunch-hour at the all-girls Parliament Hill School in London. It was an incongruous setting: in a school community polarized between hippies and skinheads (with the hippie girls wearing long hair and black tights and the skinhead girls wearing very short hair and white tights), it was the skinheads who played the Reggae, while the hippies were playing the newly discovered Led Zeppelin. I was an outsider to both groups since I attended that school for only a few months, though if I had belonged to any group it would have been the hippies. The skinhead philosophy (if you can call it that) was a racist one, so it was odd that they liked Jimmy Cliff. Gangs of skinheads would lie in wait for Asians (“Pakis,” they called them all) and beat them up, kicking them with their Doc Martens, which they called bovver boots. According to their racial stereotypes, Asians were weak and passive, while the Afro-Caribbeans were masculine and liable to  fight back. Hence they left them alone, gave them grudging respect, and listened to their music.

While my sympathies were with the hippies, I thought that Jimmy Cliff’s was unquestionably the better sound; Led Zeppelin left me cold. The previous year, when I had first arrived in England, Desmond Dekker topped the charts with his hit single, Israelites, and I loved that too.

After moving to the United States I lost touch with Reggae music for a couple of years, but when Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come (1972) came to the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge (for what was to be a ten-year run) I fell in love with it all over again. I can’t tell you how many times I watched that movie and, of course, played the album many times more, over and over again, as was our wont in those days. Every song on it was a winner, from the hard-hitting title track to the achingly sweet Many Rivers to Cross and Sitting in Limbo.

It wasn’t until the mid-1970’s that I discovered the Wailers, but when I did, I became a complete and total fan of Reggae, which seemed to combine the best of rhythm & blues, Third World politics, a voice for the working poor and the dispossessed, and messianic liberation theology with Caribbean syncopation, positive vibrations, and a truly global vision. It was slower and less frenetic than rock-n-roll; it had the beat, but it also had soul. We went to see Bob Marley & the Wailers three times, in 1976 at the Music Hall in Boston, 1978 at the Music Inn outdoors in Lenox, Western Massachusetts, and in 1979 at the Harvard Stadium. In 1979 we saw Peter Tosh in Sanders Theatre at Harvard on his first solo tour. It was around that time, too, that we first got to see Toots and the Maytals, and I accompanied my friend Geno backstage to interview Toots after the show.

When Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, only thirty-six years old, it felt like the end of an era. Peter Tosh was killed a few short years afterwards, in 1987, at age forty-two. The harsh realities of the unequal, war-torn world he sang of in songs like Equal Rights and Rumors of War caught up to him in his own home. We were entering the Reagan era, and we needed all the inspiration, the Redemption Songs, we could get, but we had lost our prophets and bards. Listening to Bob Marley singing Three Little Birds, we sang along:

Baby don’t worry,
’bout a thing

Cos every little thing’s
Gonna be all right

And tried to believe it.

To this day, I far prefer a reggae version of just about any song to the original. If you want proof of the truth of this, listen to Toots and the Maytals sing Country Roads and follow it up with the John Denver original. I guarantee that thereafter the latter will be insipid by comparison.

Listen: Roots, Rock, Reggae: this a reggae music.

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198. The Post Office

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
 —inscripton on the General Post Office, New York City, 8^th Avenue and 33^rd Street

Next to the public library, the post office is probably the public institution dearest to my heart.  Not only do I value the increasingly rare practice of letter-writing, but I think that postal workers, whether they are letter carriers, counter clerks, or mail room personnel, are the life-blood of the community; I hate to think that their days may be numbered. Two of my maternal uncles and my mother worked for the Post Office in England and one of my cousins was a post office employee in India. The cutbacks to the postal services in both Britain and the United States in recent years are sucking the life-blood out of an institution that in my opinion is one of the pillars of a functioning society. (I wonder: is that why British postboxes are shaped like pillars and named accordingly?)

Pillar-Box  (photographer: Oxfordian Kissuth, wikimedia commons)

postman with bicycle, 1940s (postalheritage.wordpress.com)

My Uncles Len and Ted started out as postmen in London, delivering the Royal Mail door to door on push bikes. Mum told me that when my dear cousin Lesley was born prematurely, Uncle Len raced back and forth on his bike between home and hospital delivering milk for his tiny baby girl. He went on to work at the Mornington Crescent Post Office while Uncle Ted went to work for the telephone and telegraph division of the Post Office (which, in 1969, became Post Office Telecommunications; in 1981, under Margaret Thatcher, was made independent of the Post Office as British Telecom; and, in 1984, privatized).

Hoddeson Post Office (photo by jelm6 on omnilexica.com)

In 1969, while my mother, my sister Sally, and I were living in Hertfordshire with my Uncle Ted while waiting for our U.S. immigration visas, Mum decided to apply for a position in the Post Office like her brothers before her. She was sent to London for six weeks of training, and then started as a  counter clerk at the Hoddesdon Post Office on the town’s high street. In those days the Post Office was the hub of the community. Everyone came in there for one reason or the other, and posting letters and parcels was only one of its functions. The elderly picked up their pensions there, mothers their family allowances and, at a time when most Britons didn’t have bank accounts, many maintained Post Office Savings accounts. As a result, Mum’s job was vital and varied, and she was soon familiar with the multigenerational cast of characters who came in on a regular basis.

Having lived far from both sides of our extended family for most of our lives, we’ve always looked forward eagerly to the daily delivery of the mail. Nowadays, though, instead of my heart lifting and fluttering in anticipation as I approach the mailbox, it sinks with dull resignation in the knowledge of the slew of bills and junk mail that will have to be sorted, shredded, and recycled. Letters, on the other hand, I treasure and keep, every last one of them. But it is a rare treat nowadays to receive a hand-written letter by “snail mail.“

photo by Roger Hutchings/Corbis
(guardian.co.uk)

It wasn’t always snail mail. In Victorian Britain there were six to twelve mail deliveries per day, so that two people could engage in several exchanges of letters in the course of a single day. In my childhood, there were still two deliveries a day in Greater London, so that a letter put in the morning post would reach its destination that same afternoon. Due to anticipated public opposition, the Royal Mail has not yet been privatized, but it has been restructured so that it could happen any day now.

When I worked as a feature writer for The Winchendon Courier in north-central Massachusetts, I learned that a hundred years earlier that sleepy, isolated town had been a thriving railway junction. As the New York-bound train came through every afternoon it would slow down and slide out an automated arm to receive the mail, which would be delivered in the City the following morning. This was amazing to me, since in the 1980s it could take a letter posted in Winchendon up to a week to reach New York City.

The process of defunding the U.S. Post Office has continued apace. Now the closing of small branch offices and sorting stations is looming, so that our mail would have to leave the state to be sorted and could no longer achieve next-day delivery to Boston. Though public protest is staving it off, the next service slated for the chopping block is Saturday delivery. The elimination of these services could be the death knell of the post office, leaving us with only private mail companies, and it seems to me that that is the very intent of the cuts.

minuscule mailbox outside Royalston, MA Post Office
(nomadwillie on waymarking.com)

When we fail to support and sustain a noble public institution like the post office, we impoverish our civic society as a whole. I cannot imagine a society where such an institution did not exist, and I hope I never have to live in one.

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197. O, Oh, and the Wonderful O

Illustration by Ronald Searle (1962 Puffin Books edition)

Years ago, while I was just starting my graduate studies, I attended a talk by the eminent scholar Christopher Ricks. I freely confess that I was able to take away very little from the lecture, but for one thing: the difference between O and Oh. He illustrated this difference with instances of each of their use in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

According to the Grammarist, O is used as a poetic form of address (poetic apostrophe) and always precedes the name of the person being invoked (or the pronoun referring to that person). “O Beloved Guru,” one’s ideal student might say, “O Wise and Wonderful One, vouchsafe to us thy blessing as we go forth into the wide world.”

“Oh” is used much more commonly today. It is an “interjection used to express a range of emotions, including pain, sorrow, hesitation, and recognition. . .usually set off from its surrounding sentence by commas.” Take, for example, the opening lines from Browning’s Home Thoughts from Abroad:

Oh, to be in England
Now that April’s there. . .

Or—to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous—Sybil’s “Oh, I know” in Fawlty Towers.

But what O and Oh have in common is O itself, without which neither of them could even be uttered. James Thurber’s 1958 story, The Wonderful O imagines, brilliantly, what it would be like to have to live without that most fulsome of vowels. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t yet come across this little gem, but suffice it to say that the benighted Island of Ooroo was reduced to a shadow of its former self, lovers could no longer spoon under the moon, and the unfortunate Otto Ott was reduced to a stutter. O was worth fighting for, and when it was recovered, the islanders learned to value their most precious treasure, previously taken for granted.

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194. London, My London

(from http://www.kentishtowner.co.uk)

I was born in London, a London of the 1950s just emerging from the ravages of the Second World War and the era of British colonialism, a new London with more educational opportunities and better health care and social services for the poor and working classes, greater cultural diversity as immigrants from South Asia, Africa, and the West Indies came to find work in the “Mother Country,” a London where my Indian father and English mother met and married. Although I have actually lived in the city of my birth for only 5-6 years in total, they include periods in my infancy, in my nursery, elementary, and secondary school years, and while I was a university student. London, birthplace of my mother, will always be dear to me and, as cities go, is perhaps the only one where I could imagine myself feeling completely at home.

London from Parliament Hill (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

the Heath in Autumn (hampsteadheath.org.uk)

But my London is not the home of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace—in fact, after all these years I have yet to visit the Tower of London. “My” London is a city of neighborhoods, and specifically, of the neighborhoods of North London where my mother grew up, where my father lived as a student, where I was born, and where in turn I lived as a student—Kentish Town, Belsize Park, Hampstead, and Camden Town. When I return, I go straight to my family, infinitely more important to me than any monument. When my mother returns, she and her sister Bette head straight out to Castle’s pie and mash shop (not my cup of tea—I’m squeamish about eels) and then for a ramble over Hampstead Heath, ending up at Kenwood House for tea and a bite to eat.

Queen’s Crescent market (kentishtowner.co.uk)

“My” London is plaice, haddock, or cod-‘n-chips in newspaper, the thick, soggy chips salted and liberally doused with malt vinegar; crowded street markets with stalls where half the goods seem to have fallen off the back of  a lorry; corner shops run by British Asians selling fresh coriander and green chillies along with English sweets and tabloids; bakeries full of fresh crusty  loaves and squashy jam doughnuts; the Tube, double-decker busses, and black cabs (my Uncle Bill drove one–see Get Me To the Church on Time); and, of course, pubs, which can still be found on just about every street corner.

The Flask, Hampstead (tigergrowl.files.wordpress.com)

In my London, Cockney accents emerge quite naturally from the mouths of British Asian youth whose grandparents immigrated there from the former Empire—after the sun set on it. (See Gurinder Chadha’s I’m British But…) Visiting a friend in Hackney back in the 1980s, I found the adult education booklet carrying night-class listings in eight languages, including Bengali, Punjabi, Greek, and Turkish.

My London is the London of Brick Lane and Southall, of the Royal Free Hospital and aging public housing estates; of pub food that features samosas as well as Cornish pasties and traditional English Sunday dinners; of the Bank Holiday fairs on Hampstead Heath and the Caribbean Notting Hill Carnival every August Bank Holiday weekend (by the way, given the importance of Notting Hill to Britain’s history of race relations, it infuriated me that they managed to make the movie Notting Hill without a single black character in it).

Notting Hill Carnival (demotix.com)

My mother married for love and had to leave her beloved city for most of the rest of her life; yet it has never left her heart and therefore it can never leave mine. Every seven years, when I watch the latest edition of  Michael Apted’s 7 Up series (Here’s the late Roger Ebert interviewing Apted in 2006), I wonder fleetingly what my life might have been like had my parents decided to stay there. But if they had, I wouldn’t be who I am now.

I leave you with the British Asian band Cornershop’s 1990’s hit, Brimful of Asha, and a rendition of Hubert Gregg’s sentimental 1940’s favorite, Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner.

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188. Finn Family Moonmintroll

photo by Oliver Weiss (from oweiss.com)

Tove Jansson (1914-2001) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish writer, painter, illustrator, and comic-strip artist who is best known and beloved worldwide for having created the Moomin (Mumintroll in Swedish) books. They started off as comic strips and then developed into novels, nine of them. As a girl I read only three, Finn Family Moomintroll (in the Puffin edition above), Comet in Moominland, and Moominsummer Madness, but they were enough to induct me into Moominland for life.

Moomin Valley is a whole world, with a loving, closeknit family at its center, but also a long list of other characters, creatures who are not biologically related but are nonetheless welcomed into the family. Besides the home-loving Moomins—our quiet hero Moomintroll, Moominmamma, Moominpappa, the vain and rather empty-headed Snork Maiden—his kind-of sort-of girlfriend (not)—and her brother the Snork—there is the troubled Mymble’s daughter and her devilish sister Little My, the officious but doleful Hemulen, the electric-eel-like Hattifatteners, Sniff, Emma the eccentric and misanthropic rat and the terrifying but terribly lonely Groke. Whomper, the Muskrat, Misabel (as miserable as her name), the Fillyjonk, and Thingummy and Bob also make appearances at various times.

And then there is Snufkin: Snufkin the wanderer, Moomintroll’s best friend of all time. Snufkin is almost always away and Moomintroll misses him terribly, but he knows that his friend would not be happy if he were not able to leave the Valley whenever the road calls to him.

Writers like Tove Jansson who create worlds always embed values in them, and the values the young readers imbibe with the Moomin books are the very best, delivered with a light touch, but deeply humane. Just to list two that stay with me: the Moomins never take one another for granted, thanking Moominmamma sincerely after every meal. And they are never exclusive: they take in any creature who comes to their door, whether or not that creature is trustworthy or even likeable.

Little My (lechaudronfele.blogspot.com)

If you want to learn more about the creator of the Moomins,  visit Tove Jansson : virtual museum and life story, an imaginatively conceived and designed website not to be missed, and Brian Sibley’s illustrated account of his correspondence with her. It is a delight to scroll though Oliver Weiss’s design blog, where he has scanned the covers of his large collection of Moomin editions in several languages. Above all, if you haven’t encountered them already, find a copy of Finn Family Moomintroll and read it aloud to your children or grandchildren. Better still, read it yourself, no matter how old you are.

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187. Emil and the Detectives

As a child, one of my favorite books was Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives. I read the Puffin edition which was a new English translation published in 1959. However, it had been originally published in German back in 1929, and the first English edition had followed just two years later.

I had been introduced to Puffins as an eight-year-old in the early 60′s, and have loved them ever since. When we lived in Athens my parents would let me collect the family’s small change, and when the lepta coins added up to 60 drachma, I could string them together and go out to the English bookstore to buy a Puffin book. Later, in India, I was allowed to choose several Puffins regularly from the latest catalogue, and when they arrived a few weeks later in a paper parcel, I would disappear into other worlds for weeks on end. Somehow through all our moves I managed to save all my old Puffins, and collected still more in the United States after my son was born. When I read all my old favorites to him, many of them became his as well, among them Swallows and Amazons, The Family from One End Street, The Children Who lived in a Barn, Stig of the Dump, The Railway Children (in fact, all the E. Nesbits), Friday’s Tunnel (an all-time favorite), The Silver Sword, and of course, Emil and the Detectives.

It seems to me that too many children’s writers talk down to their readers, something that Puffin authors never did (especially under the editorship of Kaye Webb, from 1961-1979). Erich Kästner dealt with subjects that might have seemed inappropriate for children, and his young readers so appreciated this. In Emil and the Detectives, Emil Tischbein is the only son of a widowed mother who works hard to support them and whom Erich adores fiercely, protectively, despite how much she fusses over him. As the novel begins, Mrs. Tischbein is preparing to send her beloved son to Berlin for a holiday to stay with his aunt, uncle, and Grandma and entrusts him with an envelope of her carefully-saved money to carry along with him. Kästner speaks directly to his young readers about why such a small amount of money means so much to Emi and his mother, and why Emil tries so hard to help his mother even though he certainly isn’t a goody-goody. Similarly, in his Lottie and Lisa (Das doppelte Lottchen in German, later made into the film The Parent Trap, starring Hayley Mills) he speaks frankly to his readers about divorce and how it affects children.

To me, the most terrifying scene was the one where Emil falls asleep alone in the train carriage with a strange—and ominously friendly—man and wakes up to find the precious envelope gone. Because it is unacceptable to him that he should lose his mother’s hard-earned money, he, his cousin Pony, and a gang of boys fan out into the streets of Berlin with a brilliant plan to catch the thief and recover the money, coming into contact with various  shady characters along the way. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happens, but Kästner is a brilliant storyteller and knows how to capture a child’s imagination.

It was only as an adult that I read about Kästner’s own life. Emil was the most popular of his novels and the only one to have escaped censorship by the Nazis. Kästner was a pacifist and opposed to the Nazis, who burned his books in 1933, labeling them “contrary to the German sprit.” Like Emil, he was very close to his mother—in fact, it is thought that she was the main reason why he didn’t leave Germany after the Nazis’ rise to power.

Emil and the Detectives is still in print and has been written up as The Guardian’s Classic of the Month.

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