From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life

Wyndy Carr's review  

Goodreads Apr 25, The Berkeley Times, May 30, 2021

Whatta Gal! "It’s amazing how much one can learn from reading. You see how other people do something, whether right or wrong. Either way. It’s a fantastic thing. You can’t live without books.”
 

Margot Smith’s Mother, Ethel Liebman Wiesinger, (1890-1984) boldly narrates her own story in From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life. It’s something between Elie Weisel’s Night, War and Peace, People Magazine c. 1938-49 at the Beverly Hills Hotel, a Studs Terkel interview, City Lights and Gone with the Wind. 

 

Like the intrepid Margot, who earned a doctorate in Public Health from Cal in 1977 and raised awareness on California healthcare through research, videos/films and advocacy as well as four children in Berkeley since she moved here in 1967; her Mom fit definitely in my “Whatta Gal!” category. Of “another era,” quaint and embarrassing here and there, but chock full of smarts and chutzpah* as well, albeit hard won.
 

And what a life! World War I, the international enclave in Shanghai, weeks on ocean liners across the Pacific discussing Schiller with fellows 20 years older, The Boxer Rebellion and her analysis of the insurgence of Chinese communism: “the situation was so desperate that anyone with guts could rule…the ancient tradition of graft, protégés; not able men but favored men were getting the good jobs…”  

 

With additional material from her daughters about their lives in Shanghai, San Francisco, Hamburg and Los Angeles; I found her story frank, observant and astutely educational, especially in the "forgotten history" department. (Women's history, especially as entrepreneurs, Germany and Germans between the World Wars, the Austro-Hungarian empire, Jewish immigrants in America and international trade communities, Eastern Europe, Asia, the Opium Wars, European Imperialism....)

 

Born as a “surprise” last child of 11 in a well-off Jewish family in what is now Ukraine when her parents were in their 40s, Ethel Liebman Wiesinger says she was a “very pampered child … I was left alone…I was the toy of my parents…”  

 

However, “Every Saturday (the Sabbath) we had men from all stations in life come into our house…They were the most interesting nights because they would sit and talk…I was partly listening, partly inside and partly outside, and I was serving them with tea. I listened to the conversation from the time I was four or five years old up to the time that we left Austria (when she was 21)…”  

 

This ability to listen and really hear and consider what was going on in adult conversations gave her a lifelong advantage.

“I read books, which my mother did not do…. It was a house with reading and literature and art and music, and all these things were part of life…Education counted more than money…You considered education, you considered patronage; it was considered more glory than being rich. And I think the people were happier, too.”

I just love her voice. A real raconteur, looking back at every part of her life. "China was an exciting place. I was the only girl. I went to lots of parties and everyone wanted to dance with me. And I was so stupid to show off what I knew because I didn't know anything else to show off. I used to sit and recite poetry...There was a piano. And I could sing...all the German songs we sang in school...they were lonesome for them...I was the queen of Shanghai...how I impressed them was incredible."

 

Life in New York, being ostracized from her family for marrying a Christian, the Great Depression, loss, bankruptcy -- building her and her children’s lives back up again and again. A line on the back cover blurb says Czernowitz to China “tells of being married to a German entrepreneur in pre-revolutionary China and how politics affected her life” is only a shadow of her story, reflected in and reflecting the “world outside.”

 

Marital battles with Otto “lasted about three years" in earnest. Like Martin Niemoller and many Germans, “(he) …hailed Adolf Hitler for beginning a "national revival." But Ethel "packed up my clothes and went ....”  which was very daring for a woman with two children in 1933. She went from San Francisco to Los Angeles, he went back to Germany in 1938. 

 

She began running a gift shop where movie stars like Walt Disney, Fred Astaire, Al Jolson and Charlie Chaplin dropped in. “…they sat down and they talked and they laughed and they smoked cigarettes and it was fun. I was so interested…my place, where he (Disney, Shostakovich, Chaplin…) could be a plain human being.” In Beverly Hills and Hollywood, they did and did not pretend that war and suffering were a million miles away. They knew.

Naive, trusting, cultivated, privileged, but a gutsy gal who learned, loved and charmed friends, too: “you still have your own intellect; how you use your education and if you use it at all” she said in 1980. 

Wise words for survivors, recent graduates and rule-breakers in another disaster year, another rough world, for finding the rays of light. 

 

Whatta gal! 

 

Find From Czernowitz to China and Beyond: A 20th Century Life at Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore in Elmwood in Berkeley or through Regent Press. 

*“A Yiddish term meaning audacity, courage, or nerve.”

Lucille Lang Day: Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place

I wish there were 1/2 stars for the Goodreads ratings, because this poetry collection has only what I'd call technical or editing flaws, so it deserves a 4 1/2.

(15 April, 2021 The Berkeley Times, "Too Cold, Too Hot, Just Right:") After a long, hard week of reading other poets' difficult and abrasive poetry, Lucille Lang Day’s Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place relieved my double headache. She writes with the confidence that knows she deserves it, because she’s hiked in, worked hard, sweated for decades and knows every step of what she wants to write, and how.

What I’d call a star of the Poetry Flash Watershed and other Bay Area and California readings, Mastermind of Scarlet Tanager Press, Lang Day’s talent’s taken for granted by her editors and publishers. They let a subject and verb disagreeing slip by in the first poem and let her put the newer travelogueish poems (not as good?) in the front, but these are minor "errors," not poetic power.

I almost thought it was too easy for her Painting Passionate Love for the World in All Her Magnificence with Words in the first chapter until the fifth poem, the one about her daughter’s death, a Mother’s impossible hope. A deep and immortal human truth...

Perfect. Spare. Real. Succinct. Her pain clutched around and choked my heart like a glove. We ALL feel a lot like that right now, looking at our Mother Earth...

Maybe she wasn't talking about that, just talking about her daughter, and her own dream, a dream of her daughter she'd had, and hope. But...

"I held / her hand and told her, over and over, / Hang onto hope, Liana. You can still / get better, as though my love could / scratch a diamond or hold back the night."

Sheer description and heart-work serves her better than exotic descriptions of flowers and birds, but at her best she is IN the world of nature, not talking about it from a distance, though her "science brain" serves her well.

She balances that brain with guts and heart. No distance, no bravado, HER REAL VOICE, no posturing to “I Have The Truth” nor taking-any-truth-that-happens-to-come-along-and-blowing-it-up-if-she-thinks-it’s-clever/going-to-sell.

I felt calm. Not dumb, not sold, not intimidated but calm. Right here. I’m in good hands…

Confirmed. Inspired.

I write about her too much, too often; but, you know what?  

She deserves every word.

“I close

my eyes; the sea rocks me to sleep.”

 

Blue Light Press, 1st World Publishing, PO Box 2211, Fairfield, IA, 52556. www.bluelightpress.com
"Blue Light Press is dedicated to the publication of poetry, fiction and flash fiction that is imagistic, inventive, emotionally honest, and pushes the language to a deeper level of insight. We are all poets and artists based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and our books are artistically designed."