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Concerning Norway and World War II

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Gunnar Sønsteby. Photo credit: Arnephoto.

I was planning to post something about Occupied Norway today anyway (you’ll find it below), but it happens that one of Norway’s last living Resistance heroes died today. He was named Gunnar Sønsteby, and he was the most decorated man in Norwegian history. If you followed my advice and watched the movie, “Max Manus,” Sønsteby was one of the characters portrayed in it. But he could have carried a movie all on his own.

OK, here’s a strange story.

A while back, I posted a piece I called Survival Story. It concerned a strange character I discovered in a Norwegian-language book I read about my ancestral community, Kvalavåg, in Norway. During World War II, one of the German occupation officers who served there was a Jew named Konrad Grünbaum, who ended up in the Wehrmacht due to a clerical error.

One of the commenters on that post was an actual descendent of Grünbaum’s. He contacted me through Facebook and asked if I had any further information. I didn’t, but promised to check with my relatives over there.

And they came through, past all hope. As it happened, an article on Grünbaum had been published in the Haugesunds Avis newspaper back in 1986. The article was illustrated by a photo of part of Kvalavåg which Grünbaum took during the war. Because of that, my relatives kept a couple copies, and they were happy to send one to me. I have forwarded it to my correspondent, and it’s on its way to him by mail.

My translation of the article can be read below:

THE GERMAN IN KVALAVÅG

By Ida Nydstrøm (July 23, 1986)

Konrad Grünbaum, a Jew by birth, is now 70 years old and a retired city council member in Fürth. He lived in that city before the war as well. He was a metal worker in a factory, and an active member of the SAJ: The Socialist Labor Youth. Continue reading Concerning Norway and World War II →

Fiction, Reviews

Killer Swell, by Jeff Shelby

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First of all, I’ll just start by saying thumbs up on this one. Killer Swell isn’t the greatest private eye story I’ve ever read, but it drew me in and kept my interest. The characters were well-drawn and realistically layered, for the most part.

In this first novel of an ongoing series, Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer/private eye, is approached by the mother of his former girlfriend. The girlfriend, whom he had deeply loved, broke up with him years ago under pressure from her parents, when she went off to college. But now she’s gone missing, and they’re desperate enough to come to Noah for help.

And he, of course, can’t resist the appeal, even coming from them. But things get messy very quickly, and soon he’s forced to delve deeply into his lost love’s personal life, discovering things he’d much rather have never learned.

I’ve often written about the archetype of the American private eye. Particularly the fact that he’s often a figure of male fantasy. What guy, in his heart, doesn’t sometimes dream of living unfettered, setting his own hours, having uncommitted sex with a series of dangerous dames, and being the Spillaneian Jury?

Noah Braddock seems like a prime example of this paradigm. He combines two occupations that appeal to every guy’s inner Peter Pan—the P.I. and the surf bum.

And yet, Noah is an oddly responsible man. I thought his strength of character, oddly, a weakness in his character, if “character” is understood in its purely literary sense. It seemed odd to me that a guy this mature would choose a lifestyle that might as well have a sign reading “Perpetual Adolescent” taped to it. He seemed to me more suited to conventional police work (though he tells the reader he tried that and got bored) and a traditional marriage.

But that’s just my quibble. Others may disagree. I enjoyed Killer Swell, and will probably return to the Noah Braddock series.

The usual cautions for language and adult themes apply.

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In the Spirit of Free Thinking, We Will Fire the Critic

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Naomi Riley blogging (on a team of bloggers) for The Chronicle on Higher Education has criticized dissertations written by students in the Black Studies department. She argued in bold words that the ideas kicked around in Black Studies dissertations were vapid, hunting for racism in every tiny microcosm of America culture. Many Chronicle readers were outraged. Riley responded in part by writing:

I find the idea that there is something particularly heinous in criticizing graduate students or dissertations to be laughable at best. Just because they are still called students doesn’t mean they’re not grown-ups. When someone in their 30s (me) criticizes the dissertation topic of someone in their 20s, that’s “bullying“?

Feel free to entertain yourself by reading the posts and comments, but to cut to the chase, Alan Jacobs lays it all out. In short, he explains how hard it must be for the Chronicle to hire a blogger for the sake of diverse, atypical thinking, and then have to fire her for diverse, atypical thinking. Gotta hate it.

Poetry

Bad Percy

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At The Smart Set, Paula Marantz Cohen ponders what is laughingly known as the “character” of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley:

The exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything you didn’t already know about this poet’s short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty [expletive deleted] people.

I’ve always had it in for Shelley, Byron, and that whole set. There’s something about them that, for me, encapsulates the most obvious hypocrisy within (I won’t say of) liberalism—the kind of persons who justify lives of complete selfishness through the loud proclamation of principles which [they insist] promote the improvement of society as a whole. It’s the moral equivalent of “I gave at the office.”

I’m not saying that all, or even most, liberals are like this. I know there are many liberals who deny themselves in order to live consistently with their principles. It’s just that when conservatives get caught in this kind of behavior (and heaven knows they do) they tend to be discredited and to lose their jobs. Liberals get a slap on the wrist at most, and go on to write bestselling books, star in movies, or have long, powerful political careers.

Or [and] they get memorialized, like Shelley, as secular saints.

Tip: The American Culture

Non-fiction, Reviews

The Viking Highlands: The Norse Age in the Highlands, by D. Rognvald Kelday

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“This then is the speculative political history of the Viking Highlands,” says author Kelday in his Introduction.

The story of the Vikings in Scotland—and in the Celtic areas of Britain and Ireland in general—has intrigued me for a long time. If D. Rognvald Kelday’s formidable book The Viking Highlands – The Norse Age in the Highlands raises awareness of that story, it will have done us a service, in spite of some flaws.

It’s true enough, as most of us know, that the Norse dispossessed many native people, robbed churches and strongholds, and took many slaves. But it’s also true (as Kelday stresses) that the places where Celtic culture and traditions survived, after the Celtic kingdom of Alba was transformed into the Anglicized kingdom of Scotland, were those parts that remained longest under Norse rule. The clans Gunn (Gunnar), McAuliffe (Olaf), McManus (Magnus), McLeod (Ljot) and McDonald (descended from Somerled, a Celto-Norse lord with a Viking name, Somerlidi) all look back to the days of the Norse jarls who ruled under something like the Scandinavian republican system.

But it’s not only Scots who’ll find material of interest here. Continue reading The Viking Highlands: The Norse Age in the Highlands, by D. Rognvald Kelday →

Authors

Maurice Sendak on His Father’s Stories

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Author and artist Maurice Sendak, who narrates his own book in the video below, died today at age 83. In this interview from 2006, he recalls his father telling stories.

[Sendak] says he was greatly influenced by his father, who told the sickly child stories when he was bedridden. They weren’t pretty stories — they were real-life and vividly imagined tales from his father’s life as a boy living in a little Jewish shtetl in Poland. “What I liked about his stories … they were real and true, and he could tell us them without cleaning them up.”

Sendak says he closely identified with children who died in the holocaust, because if his parents hadn’t immigrated to the United States from Poland, he would have been one of those children. “‘I always felt it was a total miracle that I had been born here.” All of his father’s relatives were killed in the Holocaust, Sendak says, and many cousins his own age did not survive,” writes Frank Rizzo of The Courant.

“Most of my important books are threaded with the Holocaust. I try not to make it obvious and bang the drum, but it’s there. My whole life was the Holocaust, unfortunately. And Brundibar seems to be maybe the place where I can stop and bring peace to myself and the subject. It’s the perfect subject: of children who lived through the worst things, who were tough, who sang and then were sent to Auschwitz to die.”

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Survivor’s report

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I don’t know exactly why it is that the Festival of Nations—four days in nearby St. Paul—somehow manages to be perceptually more exhausting than Høstfest, five days all the way off in Minot. But so it does. I have my theories.

Mostly I blame the venue. Our Viking group is always situated in basement space in the River Centre, all concrete and low of ceiling. It echoes, not only the clamor of voices, but the bellow of the vuvuzela and the shrill chirp of the warble whistle.

(Although I must concede that they moved us to a new spot, far nicer than the one we’ve had for the last few years. Close to the Men’s room, the water fountain, and the food court. Better traffic. I sold a satisfying number of books, except for on Sunday, which always seems to be slow. Perhaps the visitors are observing the Sabbath.)

I have also discovered, since getting home last night, that part of my exhaustion was due to the fact that I was coming down with something nasty. I dragged myself through work today, but I’m not sure about tomorrow.

There were pleasant happenings, however, for me to report. There was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met, who brought her two little boys to my table and eagerly asked all kinds of questions, clearly delighting in opening the world to her sons.

There was the man who introduced himself as a native of Jämteland in Sweden, a region that was part of Norway for many centuries. He said his family traced their genealogy back to the kings of Man, which gave me the opportunity to talk about the book about the Vikings in Scotland I was reading.

And the tall, red-haired high school girl who wanted to know about the kings of Denmark, giving me an opportunity to discuss my theories about the centrality of Denmark to all Viking history. Turned out she was an exchange student from Denmark (couldn’t tell from her accent), and descended from the Danish kings.

So I won’t say I didn’t have some fun.

I’ll just say I feel about a decade older.

And now I shall go boil a mustard plaster for my chest.

Poetry

Like a Sparrow’s Swift Flight

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It seems to me this present life, oh king,

compared to all the time we cannot see

is like a sparrow’s swift flight through a hall

where you are seated, feasting with your men

around a fire of a winter’s night:

the wind roars, snow and rain come down outside.

Flying in one door then out another

the sparrow will be safe from the foul weather

for the brief interval it is inside

but in an instant it is gone from sight

into the snow and darkness once again.

The longest human life is brief withal.

As to what comes before or after, we

cannot, with certitude, know anything.

Taken from “Exercises,” a poem by Bill Coyle

Read the whole thing on The New Criterion

Fiction, Reviews

Troll Valley reviewed at Land of Caleb

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Caleb Land at Land of Caleb reviews Troll Valley.

Simply put, we need many, many more e-books like this one. Walker writes from a distinctly Christian worldview, but is able to avoid so much of the sentimentalist and moralistic errors of the majority of Christian fiction. This is a novel about the law and about grace. This is a novel about forgiveness and justification by faith, and about unmerited favor. That Walker is able to accomplish these things without being preachy and actually telling a compelling story is a testament to his growth as a writer and storyteller.

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Why Do Some Stories Work?

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Pete Peterson writes about the shape of good stories. “So what makes a story work? … Transformers—didn’t work. District 9—did work. Star Wars—worked. Battle Beyond the Stars—didn’t work. Interview with a Vampire—worked. Twilight—well…I say it didn’t work. It’s harder to play this game with books because books that don’t work quickly fade into obscurity and we never even hear of them, but trust me, for every Gilead there’s another diary-based memoir out there that’s an interminable bore.”

I wasted a couple hours of my life watching Battle Beyond the Stars. I’m sure I saw an edited for TV version, because looking back on it, it looks much worse than the slock I remember. On the other side of the spectrum, I stopped reading Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, because the pacing is just too slow. Don’t look at me that way. I know I’m losing my English major street cred. I’m not happy about it.