Diary of the Late Republic, #24
There are hundreds and millions of people whose highest desire is for everything to remain as it is, who only long to be left in peace. They are part of that great and uninterested mass—the silent, despairing majority for which history is a remote and incomprehensible enigma which has done, is doing, and will continue to do another of its cruel and unpredictable twists and turns; and as if it were a force of nature, it has suddenly burst into everyday life, and whether directly or step-by-step, changed or destroyed it, in spite of people’s hopes that it won’t be that bad or that it will blow over or that it will mainly afflict others.
—Peter Englund, November 1942
One of the reasons why I wanted to start this little record of our time comes from a desire to capture the foreboding feeling that we are living in the calm before a storm. Whether or not this is true—sooner or later there will be a storm, though perhaps not imminently or one I experience myself—it is nevertheless true that one of our great privileges as Americans is that many of us have had the luxury of unthinkingly believing that we are somehow outside history, that the society-wide violence and upheaval that is currently affecting Palestinians or Ukrainians, for example, is remote in every sense of the term. Obviously, there are any number of people who are suffering right now, whether those sorrows are personal or the product of broad structural forces like racism, sexism, or class bias (and indeed those sorrows can feel all the more painful when experienced as a form of isolation from the main currents of contemporary life). But the notion that everyday necessities such as food and water would be impossibly dear for more than a day or two on a mass basis, or that pervasive brutality would loom outside suburban windows, seems almost unimaginable. As would the effect of such experiences on our prevailing notions of common sense: what would cease to be important, what would loom large, and how social conventions might change as a result.
It’s not like this has never been true in American life—we have Mary Rowlandson’s account of her captivity in King Philip’s War, for example; Joseph Plumb Martin’s narrative of his service in the Revolutionary War, or Mary Chestnut’s diary of her life in seceded South Carolina during the Civil War. But it has been well over a century since such upheavals truly came home to the continental United States.
Peter Englund’s November 1942, which was published late last year, is an ingeniously imaginative work of history. The framework for book is this: when November 1942 began, it looked like the Axis powers were going to win World War II. By the time the month was over—amid Allied advances in Guadalcanal, North Africa, and Stalingad—the balance of the conflict had tipped. But rather than providing a traditional narrative account of that inflection point, Englund weaves a tapestry of personal accounts of 39 people who recorded what their life was like in those days, whether a Korean comfort woman enslaved by the Japanese, a German sailor on a U-Boat, or an American housewife on Long Island.
The passage quoted above prefaces our introduction to Elena Skrjabina, a 36-year-old refugee who in November of 1942 had fled Leningrad for the Caucasus Mountains. But as Englund notes, “there is scarcely a single major tremor that Skrjabina hasn’t seen or experienced close up: the First World War, when every family and acquaintance in her neighborhood lost someone at the front; the [Russian] civil war, with its chaos, lawlessness, famine and mass death; the Stalin period with its terror surveillance, claustrophobia and disappearances—even though she has taken care to remain apolitical, she belongs to a family that, for historical reasons, has been labeled as class enemies.” When the Second World War broke out, she was in Leningrad—a city besieged. “Could there be a worse time or place to be born than that city in the first part of the twentieth century?” Englund asks. As it turns out Skrjabina proves to be an amazingly resourceful—and lucky—woman. There are those, at home and abroad, who assert Americans are soft, cossetted as they’ve been from such experiences, and they are certainly right. Though I have no doubt that at least some would rise to the occasion when faced with such challenges.
My point here is not to warn or chastise my fellow Americans, but rather to savor—and invite you to savor—a precious normality that can be too easy to take for granted. I currently sit in a Starbucks, where my coffee arrived at the cash register even before I did. The lights are on; there is (slightly too loud) music playing. An older couple who are here all the time have paused from their newspapers and phones to converse; two teen girls have just departed. To my left is an Israeli expat engineer with whom I’ve spoken before; he’s an expert on New York City’s underground sewage grid. Sometimes the quotidian is miraculous.