Skip to main content

Review - Writing Home: Immigrants in Brazil and the United States, 1890-1891

No cover image for this one, because there wasn't one on Goodreads and the library copy I had was just a plain blue cover. 

I first encountered this book while working for a Polish American nonprofit in 2016/2017, and was at the time told the story of the "Kula letters." A collection of correspondence seized by the tsarist censor in Warsaw, it had been kept in an archive--but that archive was destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944. The only surviving letters, a collection of those from 1890 and 1891, were those that Witold Kula and his students had been using for research. The rest--thousands of letters--were lost.

I found the subject matter interesting, and the story even more so--but merely put the book on my to-read list to request from interlibrary loan at some future date. I left my job at the nonprofit in 2018; the person who recommended this book to me passed away that same year. And yet finally I checked a copy of this book out of the library and read it, and it feels like a conversation with the past.

This really is a neat collection of letters, and worth looking through for anyone with an interest in late 19th century immigration into the US and Brazil from Poland. The majority of the letters are written by Catholic Poles, but there is a solid sampling of letters whose authors were Jewish as well, and a handful of letters translated from German.

Some of the translation choices are a little odd to me (given names are almost always anglicized), but the letters are certainly readable and the extensive endnotes help with some of the less obvious pieces. Partly because all of these are letters that were stopped by the Russian censor in Warsaw and never reached their destination, many cover very similar themes--instructions on how to emigrate, promises of steamship tickets, packing lists. Others are more personal and emotional in nature, and it's really interesting to read through them. I doubt most people would be inclined to sit down and read it cover-to-cover, though.

The introduction of the book discusses the context of the letters, both at the time they were written and details on why it specifically letters sent to a limited geographical area in 1890 and 1891 that survive to find their way into this volume.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Challenges for 2021

 I usually do set a numerical goal on the Goodreads reading challenges each year, and find them to be a great way to feel some sense of accomplishment in reading [x] number of books in a given year. Since I also started reviewing some digital ARCs through NetGalley last year, I've been writing more reviews in general (though the non-ARC books I read I may or may not review). I've toyed with the idea of doing some additional challenges before, but haven't--so I'm going to try for it this year! Because this is my first time doing this, I tried to choose challenges that mesh pretty well with what I already tend to read. This means, basically, that they're challenges I could have done okay on with books I read naturally over the course of a year. Yeah, that might not quite be in the "move out of your comfort zone" spirit of many challenges, but it seems like a way to ease into it. So, without further ado, I'm going to be trying the following:   Rose City R...
6 comments
Read more

Review: Collected Poems of Federico García Lorca, revised bilingual edition

I finished reading this anthology a few weeks ago, and apparently forgot to ever post a review. While García Lorca is one of the best-known Spanish poets, I was actually quite unfamiliar with his work before picking up this collection. Perhaps starting with an anthology of this size was jumping in off the deep end, but it was an enjoyable experience. Because this edition uses several different translators, there's a lot of variation even beyond what's inherent in the poems. Despite a very limited knowledge of Spanish, I found I enjoyed it being a dual language book--especially for sections where I didn't like some of the stylistic choices of the translations much and could then compare with the original. All in all, a very enjoyable collection of poetry.
Post a Comment
Read more

Review - Dreamers: When the Writers Took Power, Germany 1918

I received an electronic copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This is an interesting book of German pop history in English translation, looking at a fairly brief revolutionary interlude in Munich's history in 1918/1919. It's easy to forget, especially from an American perspective, how many changes in power and short-lived revolutions occurred in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and this one is perhaps especially eclipsed by subsequent history. The book provides an easy-to-read account, and in addition to discussing the roles of the writers and other intellectuals who were directly involved, touches on the responses of various prominent figures of the German literary world. The book's very conversational style makes it a rather quick read, though the blending of past and present tense makes for a somewhat odd reading experience (in my opinion, anyway). I don't know whether this is the result of the translation, th...
Post a Comment
Read more