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Thank you to Mary McNamara for her column about bullying in Hollywood [“Hey Hollywood, Stop the Bully Act,” April 13]. Bullies also exist in families, schools, neighborhoods, the military, the police and other workplaces.
As a victim of bullies as a youngster and teenager, I have felt their power. Walking from school one day, an absolute stranger walking across the street called me a name. For reasons I cannot explain, I intuitively found it humorous that this stranger felt that I was a threat to his sense of self. And suddenly my stomach pain disappeared and I stood tall, realizing that this bully, and all bullies, are cowards, and the perceived weak trigger their own insecurities.
In
My Parents, Aleksandar Hemon tells the story of his parents immigration to Canada of the lives that were upended by the war in Bosnia and siege of Sarajevo and the new lives his parents were forced to build. As ever with his work, he portrays both the perfect, intimate details (his mother s lonely upbringing, his father s fanatical beekeeping) and a sweeping, heartbreaking history of his native country. It is a story full of many Hemons, of course his parents, sister, uncles, cousins and also of German occupying forces, Yugoslav partisans, royalist Serb collaborators, singing Ukrainians, and a few befuddled Canadians.
My Parents is Hemon at his very best, grounded in stories lovingly polished by retelling, but making them exhilarating and fresh in writing, summoning unexpected laughs in the midst of the heartbreaking narratives.
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Book World: Words of wisdom or wishful thinking? The problem with new books that aim to heal us.
Mark Athitakis, The Washington Post
April 14, 2021
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Edited by James Crews
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The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski, who died March 21, wasn t a household name. But there s a decent chance you know one of his poems. And if you lived through 2020, you have a bone-deep understanding of the mood it evoked.
In Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Zagajewski summoned the urge to sound a note of positivity amid death and chaos: you ve seen the refugees going nowhere, / you ve heard the executioners sing joyfully. / You should praise the mutilated world. The bittersweet poem circulated widely after 9/11. The New Yorker printed it on the back page of its first issue after the attacks, where it sat, alone, somber as a tombstone but surrounded by enough white space to feel something like hope.