In her memoir The Endless Steppe (1968), Esther Rudomin (later Hautzig), a young Jewish girl, describes how her whole comfortable, middle-class family was rounded up by the authorities in 1941, then forced to starve and shiver in filthy cattle boxcars for weeks, before arriving in the bleakest of concentration camps. Many died along the way.
Those who survived became forced laborers with the absolute minimum of nourishment and shelter. They became slaves of the Soviet Communists, who needed workers to develop the Siberian frontier for the greater national good. A classified ad would have attracted few takers.
Esther easily fitted the first two definitions of slave in the online dictionary: “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them” and “a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something.”
The final definition actually grounds the word slave in the larger natural order: “an ant captured in its pupal state by an ant of another species, for which it becomes a worker.” The origin of the word for people, however, comes from “the Slavonic peoples [who] had been reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th century.”
This latter definition is consistent throughout history and just about everywhere in the world. Just ask the Greeks, Romans, Vikings, American plantation owners, and Third World peoples everywhere. Slaves were needed not just as domestics and menial laborers, but to drive forward the economic machineries of states and empires. Many of those captured were intellectually and technically superior. It is highly probable that most of us had a slave past long ago.
Even so, The Guardian reports that The Endless Steppe goes well beyond the familiar White Guilt playbook now dominating both media and academe. In fact, Esther Hautzig turns the tables on orthodox historical formulas by portraying her ordeal in terms of both mental and physical survival that today’s mothers and fathers would welcome: “Yet throughout, Esther’s hopeful nature and, at times, naïve optimism makes the tale an ultimately uplifting one of survival and the strength of family.
“It is also made more appealing by the universal feeling Esther has of still being a typical teenager at heart, even when her upbringing is so far removed from normality. She has whiny and determined moods, wants to fit in at school, dreams of winning a drama competition and even has her first crush on a boy, all of which made me feel oddly connected to a young girl whose experiences I could never imagine living through.”*
In the narrative, Hautzig seems to put to shame our self-indulgent liberalism in terms of feeding the poor, homelessness, and all other social and racial interpretations of poverty. She summoned an inner spirit and gumption that is unacknowledged in our society.
*Note from the source: “The Guardian is editorially independent—our journalism is free from the influence of billionaire owners or politicians. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion.”
Dear readers, if anyone knows why rogue white spaces appear especially in quoted sections of the published version, but not in the draft or edit version, as follows, please respond:
In her memoir The Endless Steppe (1968), Esther Rudomin (later Hautzig), a young Jewish girl, describes how her whole comfortable, middle-class family was rounded up by the authorities in 1941, then forced to starve and shiver in filthy cattle boxcars for weeks, before arriving in the bleakest of concentration camps. Many died along the way.
Those who survived became forced laborers with the absolute minimum of nourishment and shelter. They became slaves of the Soviet Communists, who needed workers to develop the Siberian frontier for the greater national good. A classified ad would have attracted few takers.
Esther easily fitted the first two definitions of slave in the online dictionary: “a person who is the legal property of another and is forced to obey them” and “a person who is excessively dependent upon or controlled by something.”
The final definition actually grounds the word slave in the larger natural order: “an ant captured in its pupal state by an ant of another species, for which it becomes a worker.” The origin of the word for people, however, comes from “the Slavonic peoples [who] had been reduced to a servile state by conquest in the 9th century.”
This latter definition is consistent throughout history and just about everywhere in the world. Just ask the Greeks, Romans, Vikings, American plantation owners, and Third World peoples everywhere. Slaves were needed not just as domestics and menial laborers, but to drive forward the economic machineries of states and empires. Many of those captured were intellectually and technically superior. It is highly probable that most of us had a slave past long ago.
Even so, The Guardian reports that The Endless Steppe goes well beyond the familiar White Guilt playbook now dominating both media and academe. In fact, Esther Hautzig turns the tables on orthodox historical formulas by portraying her ordeal in terms of both mental and physical survival that today’s mothers and fathers would welcome: “Yet throughout, Esther’s hopeful nature and, at times, naïve optimism makes the tale an ultimately uplifting one of survival and the strength of family.
“It is also made more appealing by the universal feeling Esther has of still being a typical teenager at heart, even when her upbringing is so far removed from normality. She has whiny and determined moods, wants to fit in at school, dreams of winning a drama competition and even has her first crush on a boy, all of which made me feel oddly connected to a young girl whose experiences I could never imagine living through.”*
In the narrative, Hautzig seems to put to shame our self-indulgent liberalism in terms of feeding the poor, homelessness, and all other social and racial interpretations of poverty. She summoned an inner spirit and gumption that is unacknowledged in our society.
*Note from the source: “The Guardian is editorially independent—our journalism is free the influence of billionaire owners or politicians. No one edits our editor. No one steers our opinion.”