Apollo’s Angels : A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans- 2010- 1103 Pages

Apollo’s Angels : A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans- 2010- 1103 Pages

Last month I read Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans. Here are a portion of my thoughts-

This book is a masterpiece. If you have been into ballet all your life you will treasure it, if like me, you have never seen a ballet you will be overwhelmed by the extreme cultural depth of the world Jennifer Homans has presented. The cast of characters is immense, fascinating. The story begins in pre-revoluntunary Russia,suffers through the fall of the Tsar,with young George eating rats, lingers for a while then proceeds to Paris, travels in Weimer Germany, spends a bit of time in London then settles in New York City with some interludes in Hollywood.

If I had know what a great historian Jennifer Homans was I would have first read her 2010 work, Appolo's Angels: A History of Ballet.

Just as a history of American literature must include an account of the society so a history of Ballet requires the incorporating of European history since the birth of Ballet in 16th century France up to the social conditions that Homans convincingly specifies that what she sees as the causes of the precipitous decline in contemporary ballet.

From the Enlightenment and the story-ballet, she takes us to the late-1700s and the French Revolution.At the Paris Opéra, was born the first modern corps de ballet, a group of maidens in white, the colour of revolutionary purity and virtue.

 "When king Henri II wedded the Florentine Catherine de Medici in 1533, French and Italian culture came into close and formal alliance, and it is here that the history of ballet begins. The French court had long reveled in tournaments, jousting, and masquerades, masquerades, but even these impressive and lavish entertainments fell short of those traditionally mounted by the princes and nobility of Milan, Venice, and Florence: flaming torch dances, elaborate horse ballets with hundreds of mounted cavaliers arranged in symbolic formations, and masked interludes with heroic, allegorical, and exotic themes." From Apollo’s Angels

Just as in the French Court, everyone had a rigidly defined place, ballet very much mirrored this. Elaborate dance Preformances were for the enjoyment of the elite. There were no Ballets in the Australia Bush or in the American frontier days.

Homans shows us how The French Revolution impacted ballet-

"Was was a perfect artifact of seventeenth-century French aristocratic culture: an amalgam of the rules and regulations of court life, of chivalry and etiquette, codes of noblesse, le merveilleux, and baroque spectacle. All of these things were written into its steps and practices. Moreover, if ballet seemed—as the Ancients claimed—to cleave to baroque flattery, decepdeception, and bombast, or to be locked in the straitjacket of court ritual and artifice, we should remember that it also articulated high ideals and formal principles. Because the etiquette elaborated at Louis’s court strove for symmetry and order, and drew from deep currents of Renaissance and Classical thinking, ballet was imbued with an anatomical geometry and clear physical logic that also had transcendent implications. As an art, it was pulled between the strong poles of classical and baroque style. It was a vision and defense of nobility—not as a social class but as an aesthetic and way of life." - Appolo's Angels

In one of the most fascinating to me aspects of the book she goes into marvellous detail about the history of ballet in Russia. (She also covers the History of Ballet in Denmark, England, and elsewhere in Europe.) She begins with Peter the Greats efforts to throw off old Russian ways.

 Before Peter the Great there was no ballet at all in Russia. Indeed, it is worth recalling just how isolatedand culturally impoverished the country was before Peter came to power in 1689. For centuries, church and state had been inseparable: the Russian tsar was an Orthodox prince and Moscow was cast as a “third Rome.” Western Europe went through the Reformation, the Renaissance, and the scientific revolution, but Russia remained cut off and bound up in the timeless liturgies of the Orthodox faith. It had no universities and no secular literary tradition; its art and its music were almost exclusively confined to icons and sacred songs. Musical instruments were considered sinful, and dance was something peasants did. Court ballet did not exist." - Appolo's Angels

Homans takes us from the Bolshoi Ballets, where ballerinas often were mistresses of Granddukes, where the Tsar had a private box (think Anna Karenina) up through the revolution to Nakita Krushev bragging that Russian Ballet was far superior to American to George Balanchine’s immigration. (I smiled when I learned he used to cook his own meals in kitchen of The Russian Tea Room in New York City.)

Homans details the history of Ballet in America. American ballet was dominated by Russian emigrants.

There is a delightful collection of photographs and an extensive bibliography.

"When I first began work on this book, I imagined it would end on a positive note. But in recent years I have found going to the ballet increasingly dispiriting. With depressingly few exceptions, performances are dull and lack vitality; theaters feel haunted and audiences seem blasé. After years of trying to convince myself otherwise, I now feel sure that ballet is dying. The occasional glimmer of a good performance or a fine dancer is not a ray of future hope but the last glow of a dying ember...Honor and decorum, civility and taste would have to make a comeback. We would have to admire ballet again, not only as an impressive athletic display but as a set of ethical principles. Our contemporary infatuation with instability and fragmentation, with false pomp and sentiment, would have to give way to more confident beliefs ..But Beauty is not only about sleep and awakening, the court and classical ballet; it also tells of fragility and breaks in tradition—of sleep that may not wake. Over the past two decades ballet has come to resemble a dying language: Apollo and his angels are understood and appreciated by a shrinking circle of old believers"- Appolo's Angels

Written 12 years ago, in the current state of American culture I am completely convinced of this. In a very affluent American community where I have family ties Ballets are sponsored by the extremely rich, with expensive tickets.  

JENNIFER HOMANS was a professional dancer. She was trained at the North Carolina School for the Arts and The School of American Ballet and performed with the Chicago Lyric Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Currently the dance critic for The New Republic, she has written for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The New York Review of Books, and The Australian. She earned her B.A. at Columbia University and her Ph.D. in modern European history at New York University. She is currently a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University.

Mel Ulm

 

The Betrothed: a Seventeenth-Century Milanese Story Discovered and Rewritten / by Alessandro Manzoni- first published in the Italian in three volumes from 1825 to 1827 - translated by Michael F. Moore- preface by Jhumpa Lahiri.- 2022- 665 Pages

The Betrothed: a Seventeenth-Century Milanese Story Discovered and Rewritten / by Alessandro Manzoni- first published in the Italian in three volumes from 1825 to 

1827 - translated by Michael F. Moore- preface by Jhumpa Lahiri.- 2022- 665 Pages

Alessandro Manzoni-1785 to 1873 - Milan

"I look forward to Manzoni’s The Betrothed reaching and conquering new readers in the English language and to teaching Manzoni to my students again. The timing is ideal. More than ever, we need the grand, reassuring architecture of a novel from the 1800s—which in its own time shed light on the early 1600s—to give us perspective on some of the most tumultuous, troubling, and pressing matters that still pertain to our twenty-first-century world: plague, those who deny scientific evidence of the plague, migration, refugee crises, hunger, foreign occupation, religious hypocrisy, tyranny, corruption, mob mentality, existential anguish, class warfare, incarceration, 1600s—to give us perspective on some of the most tumultuous, troubling, and pressing matters that still pertain to our twenty-first-century world: plague, those who deny scientific evidence of the plague, migration, refugee crises, hunger, foreign occupation, religious hypocrisy, tyranny, corruption, mob mentality, existential anguish, class warfare, incarceration, identity politics, privacy violations, the abduction and silencing of women, and the rights of two people who love each other to be married under the law. Manzoni’s novel—both emotionally gripping and coolly objective, both extremely spirited and deadly serious—will enthrall you and sober you in turns." From The Preface by Jhumpa Lahiri 

Jhumpa Lahiri, as I knew she would, has elegantly accounted for the reasons we should be grateful to Michael F. Moore for opening up Manzoni's masterwork to Anglophone readers. This should be high on serious readers of the 19th Century European novel to be read list.

The unifying theme of The Betrothed is the relationship between Renzo and Lucia, two young lovers whose desire to marry is thwarted by a rich and powerful noble man who wants Lucia as a concubine. They are unable to find a Catholic priest willing to marry them out of fear of reprisal. The clergy, especially Capuchins, play a big part. Lucia is placed in a nunnery from which she escapes.

Milan, the capital of Lombardy in 1628 , is transformed into a necropolis, the dead pile up in the streets, food is very hard to get. (The novel takes place in 1628–30. During this period, the Duchy of Milan—whichencompassed large parts of what is today the Lombardy region—was under Spanish rule, and occupied a key geopolitical position within that empire. Its neighbor, the Republic of Venice, was a sovereign state, extending as far west as Bergamo,about thirty miles from Milan The Duchy was therefore under the Spanish king, Philip IV-from the Historical Background End Notes)

Anyone who is able leaves. Renzo is a skilled silk industry worker and is able to find work. The plague brings out the best in some, the worst in others.

The Betrothed very much follows the history of the period. Moore has included very extensive footnotes as well as an appendix detailing historical figures in the novel.

Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) is Italy’s most celebrated writer. His masterpiece, The Betrothed (I promessi sposi), created the modern Italian language and has influenced generations of the country’scountry’s writers and readers. In addition to this novel—written over a thirty-year period and in three distinct versions—he was a poet, playwright, and prolific essayist, writing on subjects ranging from history to language, literary theory, and religion. - from the book

Michael F. Moore’s published translations range from twentieth-century classics—Agostino by Alberto Moravia and The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi—to contemporary novels, most recently Live Bait by Fabio Genovesi and Lost Words by Nicola Gardini. Moore is the former chair of the Advisory Board for the PEN/Heim Translation Fund. For many years he was also an interpreter at the United Nations, and a full-time staff member of the Permanent Mission of Italy to the UN.

Mel Ulm

All The Frequent Troubles of Our Days-The True Story of the American Woman at the Heart of German Resistance to Hitler by Rebecca Donner - 2021 - 577 Pages

 Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography 

Finalist for the Plutarch Award

A New York Times Notable Book for 2021 

Oprah Daily Best New Books of August

A New York Public Library Book of the Week

 

In this stunning literary achievement, Donner chronicles the extraordinary life and brutal death of her great-great-aunt Mildred Harnack, the American leader of one of the largest underground resistance groups in Germany during the Nazi Years.

Born and raised in Milwaukee, Mildred Harnack was twenty-six when she enrolled in a PhD program in Germany and witnessed the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. In 1932, she began holding secret meetings in her apartment—a small band of political activists that by 1940 had grown into the largest underground resistance group in Berlin. She recruited working-class Germans into the resistance, helped Jews escape, plotted acts of sabotage, and collaborated in writing leaflets that denounced Hitler and called for revolution. Her coconspirators circulated through Berlin under the cover of night, slipping the leaflets into mailboxes, public restrooms, phone booths. When the first shots of the Second World War were fired, she became a spy, couriering top-secret intelligence to the Allies. On the eve of her escape to Sweden, she was ambushed by the Gestapo. At a Nazi military court, a panel of five judges sentenced her to six years at a prison camp, but Hitler overruled the decision and ordered her execution. On February 16, 1943, she was strapped to a guillotine and beheaded.

Historians identify Mildred Harnack as the only American in the leadership of the German resistance, yet her remarkable story has remained almost unknown until now.

Harnack’s great-great-niece Rebecca Donner draws on her extensive archival research in Germany, Russia, England, and the U.S. as well as newly uncovered documents in her family archive to produce this astonishing work of narrative nonfiction. Fusing elements of biography, real-life political thriller, and scholarly detective story, Donner brilliantly interweaves letters, diary entries, notes smuggled out of a Berlin prison, survivors’ testimony, and a trove of declassified intelligence documents into a powerful, epic story, reconstructing the moral courage of an enigmatic woman nearly erased history.

As I read this marvelous work, I hoped so much Mildred Harnack's romances, her marriage and her career plans would not be destroyed by the Nazis. In her work as an anti-Nazi agent it was very hard to trust anyone. A neighbor might be a gestapo agent, a collaborator might, and one in fact turned in Mildred and many others, turn you in under fear of torture.  

Some in her circle did make it out of Germany.

We get a clear view of the increasing cruelty of life in Germany.

"Rebecca Donner is the author of the instant New York Times bestseller All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days, published by Little, Brown. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days won the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the 2022 PEN /Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, the 2022 Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Plutarch Award, and the Governor General’s Literary Award. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days was also selected as a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021, a New York Times Notable Book, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and was named one of the Best Books of 2021 by the Wall Street Journal, TIME Magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, and The Economist. 

Rebecca Donner is currently a Visiting Scholar at Oxford. In 2023-2024, she will be a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute." From rebeccadonner.com

Mel u

A Cat at Dachau - A Short Story by Elyse Hoffman - 2022- 47 Pages

 A Cat at Dachau - A Short Story by Elyse Hoffman - 2022- 47 Pages

Dachau, located in Upper Bavaria in Southern Germany was one of the first concentration camps established by the Nazis (March 22, 1933). Initially it housed political opponents but later it housed Jews and Roma. Prisoners were subjected to brutal treatment for minor violations of camp rules. Many of the guards were teenage boys. An estimated 40,000 died in Dachau. The camp was liberated on April 22, 1945 by forces from the American Army.

"Of course, SS training was effectively about making the cadets into loyal dogs that would bite and maul without hesitation or question. The aloof cat, ever watchful, ever independent, was anathema to the spirit of the Nazi movement. An SS man who acted like a cat, who carefully observed and escaped if things weren’t good, was a failure of an SS man."

Max, a teenage guard at Dachau,has no qualms about beating Jews, participating in mass tortures, he worships Hitler. He likes drinking after work with his buddies, misses his family and he loves cats.

One day a small, dirty starving cat wanders into Dacau. He is wearing a collar, he was once a pet. Max takes him to a veterinarian, paying for his care. 

He sees the cat has no fear or hatred of Jews. Max begins to think, what if the cat was loved by a Jew, cared for and pampered. Max wonders how could a Jew be kind and unselfish, this is against everything he has been taught.

In the story we get a feeling of what it was like to be a teenage guard. The cat wanders all over the camp, searching for someone.

This is a very moving story. I don't want to give away too much of the plot but I loved the ending.

"A Cat in Dachau" is a delightful story. Cat lovers will be enthralled by this story.

Elyse Hoffman is an award-winning author who strives to tell historical tales with new twists. She loves to meld WWII and Jewish history with fantasy, folklore, and the paranormal. She has written six works of Holocaust historical fiction: The Barracks of the Holocaust five-book series and The Book of Uriel. Elyse’s books are the way to go if you love history and want to read some unique stories." From ElyseHoffman.com

Mel Ulm

:Vilna, The End of the Road

Vilna, The End of the Road by Sarah Shimonovitz -2021- 158 Pages

The original manuscript of the book was written by the author in Yiddish and portions were published in newspaper in 1963. The Hebrew edition of the book was published in 1989. Edited and translated by Nathan Livneh from the Yiddish manuscript. This book is a translation of the Hebrew edition.

'Vilna, the End of the Road" is the story of the survival of a mother and daughter from a large Jewish family firmly established in Vilna, who, with the rest of the family, were also destined to be murdered and thrown into the pits at Ponar. The path of suffering began with the deportation of the Jews from their homes to the ghetto, and from there to the killing forest and the death camps. In the dead of the night, the writer boldly and with determination, jumps from the death train into the unknown, into the surrounding horror." From the Website of Jews from Vilna in Israel

From there, she started her long and tedious journey, often surrounded by deadly enemies. But she was determined to survive and reunite with her son and daughter. Time after time, she risked her life searching the forests for her beloved son, the lost partisan; thus, until the eve of the victory over Hitler, when she returns to Vilna, her city, in hope of finding her children. On her way back, alongside many armed Red Army convoys, she passed by Ponar, and remembers her loved ones, and the beloved martyrs of Vilna, sinking into melancholic reflections on the past.

This is not just the end of her personal journey. It is also the end of Jewish Vilna, the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," whose reputation had spread among the Jews the world over."

Vilna was in the years before Germany invaded called the Jerusalem of Lithuania, renowned for its high scholarship. (The military occupation of Lithuania by Nazi Germany lasted from the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 to the end of the Battle of Memel on January 28, 1945.)
One of the lessons quickly learned by even casual students of the Holocaust is that the Christian citizens of countries conquered by the Germans joined in the killing of Jews with great joy and enthusiasm. In this memoir Christian Lithuanians saw getting Jews out of Vilna would give them an opportunity to steal their property and was also a way of sucking up to the Germans, who they greatly feared. There a few good Christian Lithuanians portrayed in Vilna, the End of the Road but very few. Many just liked killing Jews to whom they felt, rightly, inferior.

"For the Jews of Vilnius, the Germans brought with them the inferno itself, in all kinds of strange and different forms. And they deluged us every day, and in increasing quantities. All at once, we became completely defenseless people, or more precisely: mice in a trap. And if the Germans weren’t enough, auxiliary forces,gangs of murderers rose up, who thoroughly enjoyed serving as the “weapon bearers” of their German masters in the murdering of Jews. First in line, in the light of day, were the Lithuanian shooters. They called themselves the Ypatingas (Ypatingasis būrys; the special squad). They wanted to be more Nazi than the Nazis, and started catching Jews and shooting them on the street. Then they began to remove the Jews from their homes. They surrounded entire neighborhoods and quarters, and removed all of the men, supposedly to work, except that they were led to Ponary. “And none ever returned"
We see the level of fear rising rapidly. The Jews of Vilna knew the ultimate goal of the Germans was to kill all the Jews in the country.  The memoir does a marvellous job of letting us feel the horror.
Soon the author, a wife and mother from a well off family, is separated from her family and put on a train on the way to the camp. We know from so many memoirs the horror of the train. The author makes a daring and dangerous leap from the train. The portrayal of her efforts to survive we very exciting. She explains that she was able to pass as Christian. She pretended to be Russian. Some of the people who helped her talked about how glad they were the Germans were getting rid of the Jews.
She was elated when the Russians began to invade Lithuania.
The memoir closes with her return to Vilna where ultimately she is reunited with her daughter and she learns her son, who fought with the Partisans against the
Germans and her husband are both dead.
Christians who she had given her property before she left lie to her in a venal fashion when she asks for her property.

"We arrived in Israel in 1949 and the moment we had pretty much settled in, my mother began writing her memories. To this day, I can still remember her sitting day and night, writing and erasing and typing again, steadfastly and devotedly. What she wrote did not get published for decades. One copy went to Yad Vashem and portions were published in a Yiddish newspaper abroad. After her death, I decided to publish my mother’s memories. In honor of her extraordinary and regal personality. Her tragedy and the tragedy of the Jewish people from a personal standpoint – as they occurred. She wrote them down for her and for her family and for the next generations. It is also in memory of the Jewish Vilna that was destroyed and will never be the same again. Zuta Averbach-Shimonovitz Written by the author’s daughter in the Hebrew edition which she published in 1989."

Vilna, The End of the Road is included in The Kindle Unlimited Program

Mel Ulm

Bacchae by Euripides- first preformed 405B.C.E. -translated by Emily Wilson - included with The Greek plays: sixteen plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides / new translations edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm. - 2016

 Bacchae by Euripides- first preformed 405B.C.E. -translated by Emily Wilson - included with The Greek plays: sixteen plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides / new translations edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm. - 2016

Ancient Reads Project Work

 Euripides- 480 to 406 BCE- Athens -wrote 95 plays- 18 are extant

So far I have posted on

Medea

Trojan Women

Hippolytus 

Electra

The collection I am reading from also contains Alcestis and Helen- my long term Ancient read goal is to read all his plays

CAST OF CHARACTERS (IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE) DIONYSUS, a god (son of Zeus by the mortal woman Semele), in disguise as a mortal; his alternative name is Bacchus, so his followers are known as Bacchants 

PENTHEUS, king of Thebes

 AGAVE, mother of PentheusCADMUS, father of Agave;

 previous king and founder of Thebes TIRESIAS, 

old prophet SERVANT 

MESSENGER 

SECOND MESSENGER 

CHORUS of maenads, * female worshippers of Dionysus, or Bacchus, who have accompanied him from the East; also known as Bacchants or, in Latin, Bacchae— hence the play’s title

Setting: The play takes place at Thebes, in front of the palace of Cadmus, by the river Dirce. There is an ever-smoldering tomb marking the place where Dionysus’ mother, Semele, died from Zeus’ lightning bolt.

Wikipedia has a decent summery of the plot as well as historical information so I will just make a few comments on things that struck 

 me as I read.

Men dress as women in the play. I wondered if American teachers could assign Bacchae to their students without being in fear of termination should a parent complain. Could the play be legally preformed with minors in the audience in Florida, now in the grips of anti-drag hysteria?

One of my favourite series is True Blood, in several episodes the creators drew from the this play. A maenad takes over the town. People go into a frenzy of unrestrained sex, seemingly hypnotically tranced,a giant bull come heavily into play. Conventional morality is forgotten.

"At the heart of the play stands the tense, psychologically complex duel between Dionysus and Pentheus, cousins and agemates —both around twenty years old, to the extent that gods can be said to have ages— now locked in a struggle for control of Thebes. Throughout this contest, Dionysus operates in disguise, pretending to be only a priest of the newly imported cult rather than the deity it serves. He knows, and the audience knows, that he can make a mockery of all Pentheus’ blusters, threats, and armed guards. When he is finally imprisoned in the palace strongholds, an earthquake levels the walls and an unruffled Dionysus steps into freedom." From the introduction

The cult of Dionysus comes from Asia, meaning the area of the Persian Empire.

Just like in America and much of Europe, their is a deeply rooted fear of foreigners, especially Chinese. The misogynistic attitudes of "pro-life" Americans (what an absurd moniker) is seen in the reaction to the Bacchae.

Dionysus played a far different role in Greek religious practice than did Zeus and his other children. His worship had broader social reach, including especially women and the poor, in part. But this populist appeal, together with his perceived foreignness and legendary late arrival among the Hellenes, made Dionysus anomalous , perhaps even dangerous, within the hierarchies of the Greek world.

I am currently reading Appolo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans. She uses the Appolian versus Dionysus dictomy in her account of the Origins of Ballet. Nietsche deals with this in his The Birth of Tradgedy.

The collection in which this work appears would be an excellent start in Greek Drama

EMILY WILSON is Associate Professor in Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work includes Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton; The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint; Seneca: A Life; Seneca: Six Tragedies; and a new translation of the Odyssey.

I have read some of her translations of Seneca's plays and hope to read her translation of the Odyssey soon.

Mel Ulm

The Reading Life Review - April 2023- Future Plans

 Blog Stats for April 2023

As of today our posts have been viewed 6,977,810 times

There are currently 4196 posts online

The ten most viewed posts for the month are all upon short stories 

The most frequent home countries of blog visitors are:

1. USA

2. PHILLIPPINES 

3. India

4. Israel

5. Canada

6. Singapore 

7. UK

8. Germany

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12. Sweden

13. Iran

Works by six women and seven men were featured. Six April authors are deceased. Seven were featured for the first time in April

We posted on four works of non-fiction (I recommend all of these highly, my favourite was Mr. B: George Balanchine’s 20th Century by Jennifer Homans), four novels, five short stories, one Memoir by Vladimir Nabokov and a play by Euripides.

Future Plans

April was a very good reading life month for me.  

In May I hope to read Appolo's Angels: A History of Ballet by Jennifer Homans, plays by Euripides and Racine, several more short stories, including works by Ivan Bunin and Teffi.

We will continue to read works focusing on the Holocaust and Yiddish Literature 

We wish all of our readers well. 

Mel Ulm

Ambrosia Bousweau

Oleander Bousweau