As I have mentioned in a previous post, I have been studying World War II again. I have actually been studying it all my life as I was born in 1945 and my father being both an intellectual curious man and a former sailor, veteran of the North Atlantic and the South Pacific, we were all raised on Victory at Sea and EVERY war movie on vhs and then dvd. My father had sets upon sets of these and when we visited him in West Va. after he and our mother retired and built a house there, we all watched them again, together in the darkened living room, held by a magnetic to the horror.
Needless to say the war was the central historic event to my father's life just as the Vietnam War was to my brother's life and the Women's Revolution was to mine. But I shared theirs totally and they shared mine inadvertently and by the pull of time and events rather than by choice or study or film.
So, at one point, my passion for history moved from the big and epic to the personal and I began to collect and read personal diaries of people caught up in these events. I became obsessed with the stories of the little people, the artisans, the farmers, the widows, the storekeepers, the school teachers, those who were swept over by war the way all of us are swept over by hurricanes. First I began with the survivors, such as the survivors of the Russian Revolution, Osip Mandelstam and Nadezhda Mandelstam, who were sent into "eternal exile" by Stalin. What I always wanted to know was How did they survive? As it happens there are a great many diaries of survivors of the Revolution in Russia as a great many poets and writers were sent into exile, not the least of which was, of course, Solzhenitsyn, the Gulag Archipelago.
I was drawn to the Russians because of both my interest in the novelists, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and by the wonderful film Dr. Zhivago. But after the Revolution and in reaction to a literature class insult, I began to focus my search more on the forgotten people, the WOMEN of history.
My World War II research began with a new release of THE WOMEN WHO WROTE THE WAR by Sorel. Fortunately as a result of women forcing the doors of colleges open a great number of women's history researchers were created and more and more books available on the hidden history of women in the world.
The book on women war correspondents led to Martha Gellhorn and two new movies: Gellhorn - brilliantly done! and Hemingway and Gellhorn, a pandering and trashy version fully of steamy sex and rear end ogling from Clive Owens to Nicole Kidman. I know, I know the studios have to make money the best they can. Anyhow, Hemingway and Gellhorn were only married for 5 years until she defied his orders and took off for the Normandy Invasion, but she continued to write for an additional 40 years after their divorce, from the front lines of battlefields in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and anywhere there were "voiceless people" who needed someone to speak out for them. Hemingway wasn't that big a portion of her life but patriarchal history has still tried to make her a footnote to his career.
To be perfectly honest, in my youth, I read everything Hemingway wrote and everything written about him, but when I re-visited later in life with a feminist perspective, as well as an educated one (two bachelor degrees under my belt and a post grad degree on the way) I took a more dim view of his talent and value and his preeminent place in American letters. I have only just discovered Martha Gellhorn but I have enjoyed her biography which I will review in another blog post. I ordered what many call her most significant book especially to speak to our current political situation, A Stricken Field. I also bought her Depression era book The Trouble I've Seen. I will let you know what I think. And as always, I would love to hear what you think wrightj45@yahoo.com
Happy Trails
Jo Ann
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