Neglected children.
I was being excited
about reading Ms. Rapscott's School for Girls and
my co-worker Beth said, "Nope." She said she cannot handle
books about neglected children, like I cannot stand whatever it was I
hate about mystery novels. I said, "Murder treated lightly for
entertainment?" We agreed that I am opposed to fun murder and
she cannot bear child neglect, even when they are the neglected
children of the rich and busy, as in Ms. Rapscott's Girls,
written by Elise Primavera of
Auntie Claus. (We
just won't tell Beth about the other books I've been reading.) Ms.
Rapscott's Girls is uproariously
boarding school, with Lemony Snickett-style anachronism, and a little
Mary Poppins in Ms.
Rapscott's inexplicable insistence that the girls' first adventure
down Less Travelled Road never happened. The girls are the daughters
of Busy Parents, too busy even to apply to the school; Miss Rapscott
simply sends out postage paid boxes that the parents may pack their
daughters into, because they are so busy. Mildred, Bea, Fay, and
Annabelle land safely at the school, but Dahlia Thistle's parents
forgot to close the self-sticking tape on her box and she fell out.
Mildred, Bea, Fay, and Annabelle receive academic instruction on How
to be Lost, well-supplied with such things as rain bonnets, mittens,
and paper on which to write thank-you notes, and learn to Find Their
Way, thus culminating on a mission to find Dahlia at an indoor
dream-state iteration of the Alps. Meanwhile, I was also
reading Inside the Rainbow: Russian Children's Literature
1920-1935: Beautiful Books, Terrible Times because
somebody left it on my hold shelf and I am prone to reading things
people leave on my hold shelf. Stunning children's book
reproductions scattered with text introduce Western adult art snobs
about the colorfully modernist art of a new society, storybooks that
throw off the bourgeois shackles of tsars and princesses, witches and
fairies. This is socialist literature for socialist children and
society grinds joyfully like a well-oiled machine, but with plenty of
fun because "play is the work of children." Also, if you
were anybody in Russian literature at the time, you were apparently
writing for children and not mentioning it so much, but it's where
the paychecks were coming from. I've read plenty about poets like
Mayakovsky and Mandelstam and not a word about their vast bodies of
work for young people. Not to mention Kornei Chukovsky, the Dr.
Seuss/Roald Dahl/Edward Lear of Russian children's literature began
writing around the time of the revolution, and several of his poems
are printed in full here. Inside the Rainbow excerpts
stories in English, or includes them in the reproduction of book art.
There's a fantastic hodgepodge of stuff, from fiction about Civil War child
soldiers to poems to photo montages to Lenin's gripings to memoirs of
Soviet childhoods. The trouble is when funnest of books are not
reproduced in full, like the fantastic rhyming story of a letter
mailed from Leningrad to London and delivered by that most efficient
of Soviet workers, the postman. Will the letter be delivered? Will
Maksim Maksimovich write a letter back? Why are postmen so cheerful? I'll never know. But
I can substitute my lack of closure in a children's story for
knowledge of the plight of millions of Soviet homeless children, the
ones whom nobody was buying Revolutionary children's books for.
Inside the Rainbow had
And Now My Soul is Hardened: Abandoned Children in Soviet
Russia: 1918-1930 by Alan M.
Ball in its index and I wildly ordered it from the library, as I am
wont to do. I'd come across mentions of Soviet Russia's homeless
child problem before, but the reality is so much more appalling than
any occasional mention, and Ball doesn't even get to the generations
of homeless children after 1930. Tsarist Russia had street children
too, meaning for the first few years after the revolution the
problem could be regarded as a relic of the old regime, but the Volga
famine hit in 1922, after years of Civil War, and the population of
street children soared into the millions. And Now My Soul
is Hardened spends half its time
on street children and their attempts at living and the other half on
policy reactions, not because Soviet policy on homeless children
could affect more than a fraction of them, underfunded and unstaffed
as it was, but early policy on an immediate domestic crisis is an
interesting facet of Soviet history and its attempts to deal with a
real problem while staying in bounds of revolutionary idealism, and
Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment, comes off as more
human in his response to street children than he does elsewhere in
history. Plenty of children passed through children's homes and
other institutions, but not many made it out and into productive
careers as model Soviet citizens. In Gladkov's boring Cement
(which I'm never going to get
around to finishing) his daughter is placed in the children's home in
a wave of kibbutz-style enthusiasm for children's collective
upbringing that swept revolutionary backers in the early days and she
ends up starving; the few children who were placed in children's
homes for ideology's sake were quickly outnumbered by war orphans and
famine victims as the children's homes went without government
funding ample to provide amenities like shoes, clothes and food.
Plenty of children died in children's homes, and others ran back to
the streets where they could at least steal edibles and everything
else they could manage. Ball's research here is amazing. There is a
sort of Dickensian charm to kids climbing into train engines and
summering in Crimean resort towns, organizing into boy gangs, and
begging charmingly. But charm evaporates on any close scrutiny about
the unspeakable conditions children lived in around the train
stations where they were often abandoned, in markets, basements,
haystacks, and anywhere else warm enough. More experienced children
formed gangs and divided resources and fought bloody battles with
other gangs, older boys and adult criminals threw their weight around
and assaulted smaller and outcast boys; drinking, gambling, murdering
other children for serviceable clothes, rampant STDs, and boy rape.
Most girls were raped too and almost a hundred percent had worked as
prostitutes. By the late 1920s, the problem of street children
diminished by attrition and aging into the adult criminal population,
some were rescued, and Ball is only able to hint at the coming waves
of orphans from the collectivization of the 1930s and another world
war, whose childhoods would be as chilling as those of their
predecessors. But it doesn't stop there, because next I read The
Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine which
continues to be Russian, involve children, and end nowhere good.
Damn you, Europa Editions, with your beautiful bindings and your
promises of erudite international fiction. This was the first Europa
Edition I've actually got through, and that's because Alina Bronsky
tricked me into enjoying the first few chapters of her unreliable
narrator, Rosa Achmetowna, orchestrating her pregnant daughter's life
in the late Soviet Union and throwing her over for love of her
smarter granddaugter, whom she tries to raise in her own image.
Rosa, for love of her granddaughter and her own ambitions, is the
cunning of a Soviet woman who had to stand in line for hours
to find a bag of oranges in a shop or find a pair of black-market
pantyhose exaggerated and alarmingly cold, and she's funny, but her insistence that her daughter
marry anybody, hopefully foreign, to get them and especially herself
out of the crumbling USSR, and attempting suicide because she can't go
to Israel, bartering her granddaughter to a man who might be a
pedophile, crushing people around her like bugs or trying to, and
being completely self-assured regardless, it's a disturbing
stereotype of Russian immigrants combined with dark comedy that's too
dark to be funny, and then, because modern novels can't leave off
insta-celebrity, Germany's American Idol wraps
everything up in an ambiguous package, leaving me feeling dirty
again, because there's enough evil in the world without celebrating
it in fiction. Next we will read about Science.
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