[New post] Stories of the People with Golden Hands; #ALongLongTimeAgoAndEssentiallyTrue #BrigidPasulka
JDC posted: " It was beginning to look doubtful whether there would be a book review post this week, not because of a reading slump, books were getting read, but I wasn't feeling terribly motivated to write about them. But then this story about The Pigeon, Anielica, a" Gallimaufry Book Studio
It was beginning to look doubtful whether there would be a book review post this week, not because of a reading slump, books were getting read, but I wasn't feeling terribly motivated to write about them. But then this story about The Pigeon, Anielica, and a young woman nicknamed Baba Yaga caught my attention. It's set in Poland starting in the late 1930s and stretches into post-Communist years, and from a mountain hamlet called Half-Village to cosmopolitan Krakow.
'The Light of the World' by Kiki Smith; cyanotype
The story of an extended family starts when a young man named Czesław who everyone calls The Pigeon, catches sight of the beautiful daughter of Pan Hetmański, Anielica. Living on a slope of the Tatra mountains two hills and three valleys away from Half-Village, the next day he dons his Sunday best and goes to call on Pan Hetmański and offers to make improvements to the Hetmański home and so begins his courtship of Anielica. Her brother Władysław Jagiołło immediately takes to The Pigeon and joins him in all the work being done, from building an outside wall to a hidden cellar.
And Pan Hetmański agreed to make it the first project because, after suffering so many invasions from the Russians, Tatars, Ottomans, Turks, Cossacks, Prussians, and good God, even the Swedes, it is a primal instinct of all Poles everywhere to fence and wall in what belongs to us: our house, our sheep barns, our communal garden plots, even our graves.
Rumors fly over the summer about a potential German invasion and the approximately thirty villagers start to prepare 'just in case'. There is one last memorable village celebration that summer, thereafter 'referred to as The Best Celebration Anyone in Half-Village Could Remember', then their lives change irrevocably.
The book shifts between two story strands, The Pigeon and Anielica's story, and one Baba Yaga tells about her life in the more recent past when she is staying with Irena and her daughter Magda in Krakow after her grandmother's death. The author slowly reveals the myriad connections among the characters, which I really enjoyed, so won't be spoiling that for anyone else.
Irena takes in visitors when it's tourist season, chivies Magda and Baba Yaga, is cynical about almost everything and eloquent with it, which poorly hides her deep love for much. She drops intriguing hints about a very different life she lived before she gave it up for Magda's sake.
Irena's hands are wide and sturdy, the veins like hard roots breaking through the soil. I watch them from a stool wedged between the door and the old Singer sewing machine as she makes a plum cake.
This quote goes on with a wonderful, extended description of Irena's specific manifestation of what the Poles here call their Golden Hands - a talent for making:
It's said that all Poles have them, and that this is how you know your place in life, by the ease of your hands, that whether you are born to make cakes or butcher animals, cuddle children or paint pictures, drive nails or play jazz, your hands know it before you do.
Baba Yaga is doubtful she has such a thing or if she does that she will ever find out what it is, and is drifting, a little lost in the city and without her grandmother. For now she's Pani Bożena's help, companion, and audience during the day and works as a bar girl at night. Pani Bożena was a former minor singer and actress who was married to a corrupt local Communist official and knew absolutely everybody remotely connected to the arts and seems to have helped them all at some point. The one thing that anchors Baba Yaga is a love of films that she shared with her grandmother and she finds it a relief to disappear into that world.
The two story strands alternate chapters in the novel. Both are equally strong, and as the strands lengthen, the picture of how they fit into a pattern grows clearer. The book is character-driven, but there is plenty that happens and it moves at a good clip. However, it is the characters with their foibles and surprises that drew me into their lives and even characters who may appear infrequently have memorable appearances.
The earlier story strand, though terrible events do take place and the characters are right in the middle of them, has a slightly film-like feel to it and it wasn't until I finished the book that I realized why—we might be hearing it through the voice of Baba Yaga's grandmother who doesn't like telling her granddaughter stories with sad endings. But they are still bittersweet.
The humor that is also woven through the book is something else I really enjoyed, this quote describes a rock formation that is near Half-Village:
The Napping Knight was the optimists' name for the Sleeping Knight, a rock formation and legend that is believed to wake in times of trouble to help the Polish people. After being thoroughly tuckered out by the Tatars, Ottomans, Turks, Cossacks, Russians, Prussians, and Swedes, however, it hadn't risen in some time, and would in the years of Nazi occupation, also come to be known as the Oversleeping Knight, and later, during the Soviets, the Blasted Malingering Knight.
There are so many quotes from the book I wrote down, and am convinced that Pasulka must have grown up in a family of storytellers. She's a teacher in Chicago and is a descendant of Polish and Ukrainian immigrants, and has lived in Poland, Russia, Germany, and Italy.
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