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Time for God and me...just us...together...sometimes, it's planned and arranged...sometimes it's spontaneous...sometimes it's quiet and calm...sometimes wondrous and gloriously overt!

I'm thankful to Colleen, my wonderful blogging friend, who brings others closer to Jesus through her joy, her writing, and her way of life. Join her by clicking the sidebar link to her blog and adding your own entry to this meme today.

My Sabbath Moments this week:

* WIND! We are getting cool winds from the skirts of Hurricane Earl. Sitting at the football field, with leaves falling all around, soaring winds bending the tree limbs and tossing our papers about...and a very quick rain spurt ....all of these things made me have that same feeling that you get when you've been away and haven't seen someone you love for a long time...like they are waiting for you at the gate of an airport...and your eyes meet across the crowd...and you can't hold it in anymore...so you RUN into their arms! That's how I felt...like I was running into God's arms after not having seen Him for a while. (It's been a busy, stressful week)...I'm so glad that He was able to get my attention.


* Coffee on my deck this morning. A decade of the rosary. (That's all I could get through before my Saturday morning buddies came bursting outside to join us ...God and me, that is.)


* Spending a morning weeding in the garden. Although God and I were not quite alone, the kids were with me (IN THEIR PAJAMAS, ha ha!)...it was still so nice to greet the new day, giving thanks to our Father for providing our family with good, nutritious food from the ground. Terence said...

TheraP, as you guessed, the book has not yet been published - but it is clearly based on an earlier paper of the same name. Last year she discussed her paper in a symposium, and there is a useful discussion by "Magistra" of that paper at
http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/06/13/sybarite-sarabaites-monastic-pairs-in-byzantium-6293991/

She doesn't really say much about Rapp's actual thesis though, except that here interest is mostly in the rite's origins in Eastern monasticism.

More interesting is a separate post by Magistra, "Gay monk fantasies", at

http://magistraetmater.blog.co.uk/2009/05/16/gay-monk-fantasies-6125043/

in which she discusses several commentaries by different scholar's on Boswell's work. She thinks the sexual aspect of these relationships is overrated by Boswell and others - but the comments are lively and useful.

At a first glance, Magistra's full blog looks worth exploring for a deeper understanding of gender religion and sexuality in the Middle Ages - if I can keep up with the level of scholarship.

14 August 2010 02:21

To the Editors:

In the many warm tributes to Barbara Zimmerman Epstein [NYR, August 10] no mention is made of one of her earliest great contributions: in 1951, the twenty-four-year-old Barbara Zimmerman, then at Doubleday, was asked to edit The Diary of Anne Frank.

Publication in England and the United States had been a long time coming. The book first appeared in the Netherlands in 1947 with the title Het Achterhuis, meaning “The House Behind.” It was later published in France and Germany, but finding a British or American publisher had not been easy. Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, received numerous rejections. Carol Ann Lee, author of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, tells us that Frank Price acquired the manuscript for Doubleday, but he had to read it twice before becoming enthusiastic.

Ms. Zimmerman was the same age Anne would have been were she alive. This must have been a contributing factor in the close relationship that developed between her and Mr. Frank. When he told her that he would like Eleanor Roosevelt to write the introduction, Ms. Zimmerman followed up.

The introduction to the Diary reads in part:

Written by a young girl—and the young are not afraid of telling the truth—it is one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read. Anne Frank’s account of the changes wrought upon eight people hiding out from the Nazis for two years during the occupation of Holland, living in constant fear and isolation, imprisoned not only by the terrible outward circumstances of war but inwardly by themselves, made me intimately and shockingly aware of war’s greatest evil—the degradation of the human spirit. At the same time, Anne’s diary makes poignantly clear the ultimate shining nobility of that spirit.

Carol Ann Lee believes it was Ms. Zimmerman who wrote the introduction to which Mrs. Roosevelt gave her name. I find the tone of the introduction slightly more formal than the casual, conversational tone Mrs. Roosevelt adopted in her “My Day” column and her other writing. Still the sensibility and the thoughts expressed in the introduction must have been shared by both Ms. Zimmerman and Mrs. Roosevelt.

Ms. Zimmerman appreciated whatever part Mrs. Roosevelt played. In thanking her, she wrote, “We are extremely grateful to you for the support which you have given the book and we feel sure that your introduction will be of enormous value in bringing the book to the attention of the wide audience which we feel it deserves.” After receiving Ms. Zimmerman’s note, Mrs. Roosevelt wrote about Anne Frank’s Diary in her “My Day” column (April 22, 1952):

I think it is well for us who have forgotten so much of that period to read about it now, just to remind ourselves that we never want to go through such things again if possible. Her story ended tragically. She died in the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. This diary should teach us all the wisdom of preventing any kind of totalitarianism that could lead to oppression and suffering of this kind.

The publication of the Diary was set for June 12, 1952, Anne Frank’s birthday. On that day Ms. Zimmerman wrote to Mr. Frank, “It is extremely gratifying for me to work on the book because I believe so strongly in it. Besides my great feeling for it, I believe it to be one of the very important Diaries of all time, as a psychological, historical, and a literary document.” She congratulated him on several good reviews in The New York Times, The New York Herald Tribune, and Time. Omnibook was going to serialize the Diary and would pay $1,000, of which $500 would go to Mr. Frank. “All this news promises that ANNE FRANK will receive a wonderful reception in America!”

In the years following publication, Mr. Frank received 30,000 letters from readers. The Diary was translated into sixty-seven languages and more than 31 million copies have been sold. It is a book that has touched many hearts; let us pay tribute to wise choices and graceful editing.

Kem Knapp Sawyer

Washington, D.C.

This book left me devastated. After reading the last page I still felt the book around me and could not leave it. So I did a cyber flick-back through the book to see my highlights, and was surprised to see that I could see not only what I had highlighted, but the highlights of other the other Kindle readers as well. And not only was I surprised at this discovery, but at the fact that what I had highlighted had been highlighted by the others.

“They turned into wolves and devastated cemeteries at night. But however much they tried to appear like wolves, they were not animals. It was not just a question of what they did and said, but also of what they had to keep silent about.”

- Thoughts of the protagonist after spending an evening with young Nazis.

In “The Death of the Adversary” the “adversary” and his followers are not named. The adversary is merely referred to as “B”, and his followers as his followers. Similarly the central character is not labeled by himself as Jewish. Merely as “other”.

And so when we read of him being outcast by the other children when he was very young, and about how his mother takes him by the hand to lead him back to the children to ask them to please play with him, the effect is even sadder than it would have been, had its circumstance been explicit. ‘There,’ my mother said, and tried to loosen her stern, serious face into a smile. ‘He’s a child like you. You are all children, play with one another.”

For some reason, perhaps because I had never completely comprehended the real horror of it before – the effect of the persecution of the Jewish children in Germany, Poland, Czech …., I was struck by this scene, where the child feels only humiliation and anxiety when the children turn reluctantly to play with him. His short time with them is filled with his anxiety and their cruelty.

“My former pleasure in playing games was dampened by the constant fear that I might be excluded.”

Sadder even than when “they took the old people away.

My father carried his rucksack on his shoulders.

My mother wept.

I shall never see them again.”

Yes, I’ve read The Diary of Anne Frank, and seen “The Pawnbroker”. I’ve read and seen countless other novels and films set in Nazi-occupied Europe. But for some reason I’d never looked upon the particular tragedy of the effects of persecution on children.

Anne Frank was a child. Only ever a child. But Anne retained her sense of joy and hope. The child Keilson describes is a sad little boy and one’s heart goes out to him, but it goes to him without hope.

In Wikipedia I read that Keilson, ” is a Jewish German/Dutch novelist, poet, psychoanalyst, and child psychologist who wrote about traumas relating to what happened in Europe during WWII. In particular, he worked with traumatized orphans.”

What else can one say? Oh yes, there’s this -

Hans Keilson is a 100-year-old Holocaust survivor. “The Death of the Adversary” is autobiographical.

Read it!
Rating: 5 / 5