Slovak Novels in English #19: The End of Freddy

July 10, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This is the third and final installment in Rivers of Babylon trilogy, so named for its first novel and continuing in its second book, The Wooden Village. As I’ve remarked before, Pišťanek’s principal goal seems to be to explode the myth that Slovakia is the land of peaceable beekeepers, trodding their way silently through history, hoping that the surrounding exploiters will just leave them be.

If Pišťanek’s telling is at all accurate, then Slovakia can supply plenty of exploiters on its own, thank you very much…

Slovak Novels in English #18: Fleeting Snow

June 26, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

In previous reviews I’ve been pretty hard on literary novels lacking action and only following in the vaguest and most unsatisfying way the meandering thoughts of the protagonist. So I’m especially happy to report that Pavel Vilikovský’s Fleeting Snow has singlehandedly redeemed the literary novel for me.

First up for praise is the language: this short novel is beautifully but also vividly and playfully written. Much credit should be given to the translators for their excellent work, not least of all in the sections where the characters discuss rare and evocative Slovak words—not the easiest thing to pull off in a second language! The story is told in the first person, granting us intimacy with the narrator’s thoughts as they range from matters philosophical to historical to painfully personal—and yet always expressed light-heartedly. It’s not an easy juxtaposition to pull off…

Lutheran Saints #4: Onesimos Nesib and Aster Ganno

June 12, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

The Oromo people of western Ethiopia received the gospel from freed slaves.

It wasn’t like foreign missionaries hadn’t been trying. They had, for years. One setback after another prevented them from reaching the enormous tribe whose language is the second-largest indigenous one in use in Africa. And it certainly didn’t help that the Amhara emperors and their vassal kings were in the process of conquering Oromia at the very same time.

But just as Joseph’s sale into slavery ultimately meant the salvation of his people (Genesis 37), so did the enslavement of many Oromos. One particular Oromo boy named Hika, whose name prophetically meant “translator,” lost his father and therefore his protection at the age of four, whereupon he was kidnapped by a slaver. Over the next dozen years, he was stolen twice and sold four times, though one master was kind enough that the boy willingly took the man’s surname Nesib as his own.

His horrific existence ended in 1870 when a Swiss explorer and diplomat named Werner Münzinger bought him and turned him over to the care of the Swedish Evangelical Mission, run by Pastor Bengt Peter Lundahl in Massawa on the Red Sea coast in present-day Eritrea. No longer a slave but a student, he threw himself wholeheartedly into his studies and the faith of his liberators. At his baptism on Easter day in 1872, he took the Christian name Onesimos, after the runaway slave that St. Paul had liberated and sent home free to be reconciled to his master Philemon.

Onesimos found his new community among not only the Swedish missionaries in Massawa but also many other freed Oromo slaves. Despite having left his homeland at such an early age, his one passion was to return and share the gospel with his own people…

Slovak Novels in English #17: Away! Away!

May 29, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

How do you review a book that was not written for you?

This is the second novel by Jana Beňová I’ve read, and I was not a fan of the first, Seeing People Off. While I enjoyed Away! Away! marginally more, it was not something I would have read past the first two pages had I not made the (admittedly arbitrary) commitment to read every Slovak novel in English I could find.

But this time, it doesn’t seem quite fair to complain that the book has no plot to speak of, nor characters and emotions that compel me in the slightest. It is not meant to be that kind of book, so it’s a trifle unjust to charge it with failure. This time I’m trying to meet it where it’s at…

Slovak Novels in English #16: The Wooden Village

May 15, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

This book is the sequel to Rivers of Babylon, which as I noted in my review was the perfect antidote to the uplifting, wholesome, and charming portrait of Slovakia in my forthcoming memoir. True to its predecessor, The Wooden Village recounts in lurid detail the squalor of Slovakia’s seamy underside.

The title refers to the frequently seen stations of wooden booths throughout Slovakia offering toilets, beer, and in this particular novel, prostitution. Several of the characters, who have continued on from the last story, find themselves slowly squeezed out of their meagerly paid positions in the wooden village as the transitions to the new post-communist economy move faster than they can adapt to.

After a brief uptick in income due to a disenchanted wealthy girl’s brief tenure as a hooker, Eržika, Feri, and Freddy Piggybank find themselves destitute again, briefly opting for the horrifying if hilarious job of luring kids on expensive bikes with ice cream, only to rob them of their valuable vehicles. Not very talented criminals any of them, it’s a short-lived enterprise…

Lutheran Saints #3: Elisabeth Cruciger (1500–1535)

May 1, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Elisabeth Cruciger’s hymn in the Erfurter Enchiridion.

Third in a series on Lutheran saints. Here we meet Elisabeth Cruciger and see how, when the gospel breaks through, “your daughters shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17). Proposed date of commemoration: May 2.

Elisabeth was born to the noble family von Meseritz around the turn of the sixteenth century. In her early life she was educated and eventually took vows as a canoness at the Mariensbusch abbey in the city of Treptow in the German region of Pomerania (today’s Poland). Marienbusch followed the Premonstratensian order, which had its own liturgical rite and placed great emphasis on the paschal suffering of Christ.

Like Katharina von Bora and many other nuns, Elisabeth fled her abbey in early 1522. Knowledge of Reformation ideas had arrived via Johannes Bugenhagen, who was at that time the rector of Treptow’s city school. She made her way to Wittenberg, where she lodged with the Bugenhagen family until in 1524 she married Caspar Cruciger, a reformer, teacher at the school in Magdeburg, and friend of Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon.

Elisabeth and Caspar had two children: a daughter named Elisabeth who eventually married Luther’s son Hans, and a son named Caspar. The elder Caspar was later suspected of holding unacceptable ideas during intra-Lutheran disputes; the younger Caspar was actually imprisoned in Wittenberg and then exiled under suspicion of holding “crypto-Calvinist” ideas on the Lord’s Supper. Elisabeth herself died quite young in May of 1535, long before these accusations were leveled against her family members. Nothing else is known of her life other than her one long-standing contribution to Reformation music, the hymn “Lord Christ, the Only Son of God” (Herr Christ der einig Gotts Sohn)…

Flatbreads & Flavors & Fandom

April 17, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

Years ago when Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything was my Bible, I studied every page like a good little novice, and approximately 882 pages later I came across the no doubt often overlooked section, “Fifty Cookbooks I’d Rather Not Live Without.” This led to many happy finds but none so happy as Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, which in due course upended HtCE as All-Time-Favorite-Cookbook.

Is this the point at which I mention that I hung out last week with Naomi Duguid? No, that’s spoiling the surprise too soon.

Anyway…

So I got my copy of F&F in 2005 and away I went. You see, for years already then (and still now) I’d been haunted with guilt because the first time I attempted to make bread from scratch I forgot to add the yeast. It was only once I had a supple dough in hand that I realized my mistake and—close your eyes, here it comes—thinking there was nothing more to be done about it, I threw it out.

I sometimes feel that when I face Judgment Day, that wasted bread dough will be dangled in front of my nose, an outrageous combination of wastefulness and ignorance…

Lutheran Saints #2: Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–1694)

April 3, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

No one has loved the Most High God’s descent to the tiny form of the fetus more than Catherina Regina von Greiffenberg.

Catharina was consecrated to theology long before she had any say in the matter. She relays “the vow of my mother who, when I still lay in her womb (during a dangerous illness, when she despaired of the possibility of keeping me), offered me up and promised me to Thy service and glory, should I be born alive.”

Hannah in the Old Testament had done much the same as Catharina’s mother, Eva Maria, in promising God her firstborn—who turned out to be the prophet Samuel. Eva Maria, of course, had no idea that the child in utero was a girl instead of the more usual boy starring in such accounts.

It would be natural to assume that being a female theologian was Catharina’s biggest difficulty. In fact, it was not; by far the bigger problem was being a Lutheran theologian. For Catharina lived in a time and place where the sheer existence of Lutherans remained very much under question…

The Cookbook I Moved to Japan For

March 15, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

If I can’t travel, I cook. I’ve never been to Mexico, and used to think I hated the cheesy-beany glop that claims to be its cuisine, but that all changed when I found Rick Bayless’s first, Authentic Mexican. I’ve never been to Thailand, but back when I was so new to cooking that I’d never even baked bread or knew what to do with most of the vegetables in the produce section I scouted out lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, and turmeric root (before it was trendy) to make everything I could from Vatcharin Bhumichitr’s Vatch’s Thai Cookbook. French, Italian, Chinese, you name it.

Unless you named Japanese. Then I was stumped. Raw-fish sushi was a nonstarter and back then the only ramen I knew about was the hangover-cure with a toxic flavor packet you got in college. Despite its name, Shizuo Tsuji’s Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art was encyclopedic and forbidding.

Then, one happy day, I came across a reference to Elizabeth Andoh’s Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen, and in keeping with the frugal habits of grad school poverty I checked it out of the library…

Slovak Novels in English #15: St. Elizabeth’s Square

March 1, 2019 Sarah Hinlicky Wilson

I ordered this book as a matter of course, simply because it’s another Slovak novel in English. But as soon as it arrived, I became even more intrigued by the circumstances of its publication than its plot. Because this novel, which first came out in 1958 in Slovak, was translated and printed in English in 1964 by a publisher in Prague. In other words, during the severe censorship of the immediate post-Stalinist era, this book was selected not only for public consumption in Czechoslovakia but to send a message to the hostile outside capitalist world of English speakers. How and why did this happen?

My suspicions, of course, were that author Rudolf Jašík must have been a true believer in the Communist cause, and from what I can find out about him, my suspicions were correct. After five months imprisoned by the Nazis for distributing Communist leaflets in 1940, Jašík came out more convinced than ever of the evils of fascism and the righteousness of the Reds. He fought in the Slovak puppet state’s army on the side of the Axis but sabotaged his own regiment, for which he was again imprisoned. Jašík didn’t waste either bout in prison but worked on his Russian and even tried to join the Soviet army at one point. After his second release from jail, he joined the partisans in the Slovak National Uprising. This most revered moment in Slovak national history actually failed, but it put Jašík in good stead with the regime change of 1948. He held prominent jobs in industry and the arts, organized study groups in Marxist-Leninist thought, and was allowed to publish his handful of novels and poetry.

I came to this, his most famous novel, expecting a work of pious and overt propaganda. In fact, it is considerably more subtle than that…