'Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad'' by M.T. Anderson

Anderson, M.T. Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad. Somerville, MA, Candlewick Press, 2015. Print.

Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes.  Sometimes, the truth is so bizarre, so out in left field, so deliciously weird that even Muldar and Scully would have to investigate.

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Our tale begins with a spy-worthy journey, as a mysterious microfilm makes its way from Soviet Russia to Tehran, then on to Cairo, through northern Africa, where it crossed the Atlantic Ocean, landing in Recife, Brazil, where it was picked up by a U.S. Navy plane and flown to Florida, finally landing in Washington, D.C.  What is on this mysterious microfilm?  Battle plans?  Spy reports?  Wait, what?  A symphony?  All that for a symphony? You bet!

The following pages present a multi-layered biography, not just of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, but also of the establishment of the Soviet Union and its often bloody and terrifying history under Joseph Stalin.  A dual biography is important for context here.  It's impossible to understand Shostakovich and his works unless you understand the circumstances under which he composed.  For this particular book, M.T. Anderson uses Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony -- the Leningrad Symphony -- as the lens through which he views not only Shostakovich, but the Soviet Union.  One of the most remarkable things about the Seventh Symphony is that Shostakovich composed most of it while living in Leningrad during the brutal Nazi siege (September 1941-January 1944) in World War II.  The Seventh Symphony became synonymous with the Soviet war effort during World War II, and was key in gaining material support from Western allies.  The symphony humanized the Soviets to Western audiences and was often played as part of fundraising efforts on behalf of Soviet civilians.

Anderson presents a well-researched book about one of the most well-known 20th century composers, who wrote music under unimaginable circumstances (the Russian Revolution, the purges under Stalin, the off-and-on repudiation of Shostakovich by people he considered friends, the middle of a siege). He also refuses to condescend to his intended audience, and never sugarcoats the torture under the Stalin regime or the privations in Leningrad under the siege.  Anderson doesn't dwell on it, either, but he offers more than enough detail to get the point across without gratuitous lingering over some of more gruesome aspects. (The torture of the theatre director Vsevolod Meyerhold during one of the Purges in 1938 stands out in particular.) Anderson is also mindful of his subject.  The Soviet Union was not a place where one could necessarily freely exchange ideas.  Every so often, Anderson reminds his readers that quotes attributed to Shostakovich might genuinely be Shostakovich's ideas, but there is a good chance Shostakovich spoke under duress.  After all, it wasn't uncommon for the Soviet government to allow artists to travel outside the Soviet Union, but keep their family home as "insurance" that the artist in question would not only toe the party line, but return home.  Anderson uses Shostakovich as a sort of shorthand to illustrate the raging paranoia that infiltrated every aspect of a person's life under Stalin, to the point where an artist of Shostakovich's caliber can be praised to the heavens by the critics on Tuesday, but then end up vilified and shunned on Thursday.

Anderson provides several photographs of Shostakovich, Leningrad during the siege, and production photos from the Soviet performing arts scene of the 1920s. In several photographs, Anderson's captions offer more information about the arts in the 1920s and 1930s or a little more background on a person in the photograph.  He also helpfully provides maps that outline the Nazi siege of Leningrad, delineating German and Soviet held territory.  Anderson also includes his extensive bibliography of works he consulted while he wrote the book.  There's also a table of contents and an index.  Anderson also sprinkles in a few footnotes to clarify certain topics, like the difference between "Bolshevik," "Communist," and "Socialist."

This book would be a great resource if you're studying World War II, and would like a different perspective.  To be honest (and I was a history teacher for many years before I earned my library degree), the Soviet side of things is somewhat forgotten in the larger narrative of World War II.  It would be also a good idea to track down some of Shostakovich's recordings and listen to them after you've read the book.  Google "Shostakovich Seventh Symphony," and you ought to find several recordings on YouTube.  You don't have to watch the video, just listen.  Shostakovich's symphonies really are as Anderson describes them: film scores without the film.  After reading Symphony for the City of the Dead, you don't really need a film to appreciate Shostakovich's music.

M. T. Anderson is the author of the award-winning books Feed and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing.  Symphony for the City of the Dead  was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award and was also a finalist for the YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction.  Symphony for the City of the Dead has also been awarded a Horn Book Honor for 2016 in nonfiction.  NPR's program Here & Now interviewed Anderson about the book.  It's worth a listen.

*On a side note, if you look on a map of Russia today, you won't find a city called Leningrad.  You will find St. Petersburg, and Anderson traces how St. Petersburg became Petrograd, then Leningrad under Soviet rule.  It wasn't unusual for cities to have their names changed under Soviet rule, and they sometimes changed when almost as soon as a new leader came to power.  If you'd like, to look into things like this more in depth, you can research ways that new leaders of the Soviet Union tried to change historical records to remove people who had been executed during one of the Purges, especially other Party leaders who had fallen out of favor.  One of Stalin's methods was to remove former colleagues from photographs -- pre-digital Photoshop, if you will.

'The Hired Girl' by Laura Amy Schlitz

Schlitz, Laura Amy. The Hired Girl. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press, 2015. Print.

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I was familiar with Laura Amy Schlitz after reading her Newbery winning verse novel Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices From a Medieval Village, which I liked, but wasn't sure how much it would truly appeal to a middle grade reader outside a classroom situation where they were studying the Middle Ages.  The Hired Girl is another example of Schlitz's dedication to research, to depict the era honestly, without varnishing it under a romanticized patina.

The heroine of her novel is Joan Skraggs, a fourteen year-old girl, living on a Pennsylvania farm with her father and three brothers.  Her mother died several years before the beginning of the novel, but Joan cherishes her memory and zealously guards the escape hatch -- nearly thirty dollars -- her mother hid in her ragdoll's dress.  Joan's father has declared she is not to attend school anymore, something Joan loves more than almost anything.  She's bound and determined to be more than a farmer's wife, especially if it means she'll end up like her mother and work herself to death. Joan owns a grand total of three books: Ivanhoe, Jane Eyre, and Dombey and Son.  After Joan stands up to her father's intransigent behavior, he burns her precious books in retaliation, and Joan runs away from home with the idea that if she's going to do housework, she might as well get paid to do it, getting as far as Baltimore.  An encounter with a man she met on the train nearly ends in disaster for Joan, but she's soon rescued by Solomon Rosenbach.

Solomon is the younger son of Moritz Rosenbach, who owns a successful department store and Freyda Rosenbach.  Solomon also has two sisters -- Anna and Miriam -- and a younger brother, David, studying to be an artist.  As it turns out, the family needs a new maid, as their longtime maid, Malka, is getting older and needs help.  Mrs. Rosenbach agrees to take on Joan, who has reinvented herself as "Janet Lovelace," age eighteen.  Conflict ensues.  You see, the Rosenbachs are Jewish and Joan is Catholic.  Not only does Joan have to learn the intricacies of keeping kashrut (kosher), but her attempts to bring the Rosenbachs into the Catholic faith earn her the ire of Mrs. Rosenbach.  She also begins a friendship of sorts with the youngest Rosenbach child, Miriam, who's only twelve, but much more worldly than Joan, and more than a bit spoiled.  Joan is fortunate that Mr. Rosenbach believes it's his duty to educate all members of his household, so he gives the highly intelligent and thirsty for knowledge Joan free run of his library after the family has gone to bed.

Joan also has the opportunity to attend Mass regularly, and receive instruction in the Catholic faith, but to the surprise of the parish priest, she doesn't take Catholic teachings at face value and challenges them, using her own experiences with the Rosenbachs as evidence that not everything the priest has told her is completely true.

The action of the book comes to a head when Joan develops an intense crush on David, who is more than a bit of a flirt, and she's caught in his bedroom in the middle of the night.  Mr. Rosenbach must then decide if Joan is to stay in their house or leave without a reference.

The novel is presented as Joan's diary written over the course of four months. Schlitz does a great job of creating Joan's world, describing the amount of work that goes into cleaning a house in 1911. One scene that stands out is when Joan describes what it takes to clean the carpets to Mr. Rosenbach, while trying to persuade him to purchase an electric vacuum cleaner.  It will make you vow to never take your Hoover, Dyson, or Dirt Devil for granted ever again.  Schlitz doesn't dwell on the housework too much, but really, she doesn't have to.  It would get dull if she did, to be honest.  Housecleaning was a never-ending drudge in those days.  Schlitz only has to describe the effort it takes for Joan to iron one of Miriam's dresses or the amount of work to scrub the kitchen floors a few times to get the point across.  She does, in the voice of Joan, go into a lot of detail of the interpersonal relationships within the Rosenbach family and her relationships with them.  A lot of time is devoted to Joan's attempts to win over Malka, who comes across as quite cranky and stubborn.  Schlitz is also very good here at peeling back the layers of her characters.  Joan learns that her initial impressions aren't always the correct ones.  The most notable example lies with Mrs. Rosenbach, who is refined and elegant, just what Joan strives to become and admires.  However, Mrs. Rosenbach has her judgmental side, that she displays to Joan with just enough frequency to disillusion Joan about outward appearances.

Schlitz writes Joan as a blank canvas, who slowly gains more knowledge of the world and the other people in it as she integrates herself in life outside her father's farm.  Therefore, Joan is as innocent as a baby when it comes to some of the nastier elements of society, like anti-Semitism and religious persecution.  Joan is such a babe in the woods that she doesn't recognize that David's flirting with her is just empty flirting.  There are things that Joan says or does out of a place of ignorance, the most glaring example being her attempts to convert the Rosenbachs, which she only ceases to pursue when Mr. Rosenbach gently, and in a way that allows Joan to come to the conclusion herself, informs her why they consider it insulting, to say the least.  While this technique allows the audience to see the level of Joan's considerable growth over the course of the novel, it left her open to charges of cultural insensitivity.  There are much better and far more experienced librarians than me who have debated this issue, particularly over at Elizabeth Bird's blog for School Library Journal "A Fuse 8 Production."  I do understand why people are upset over Joan's statements about Aboriginal people, but in the world of 1911, would it ring true for Joan to make the kind of enlightened statements we expect of ourselves in 2016?  If Joan had charged in, wearing full armor on a white horse, so to speak, brandishing equality for all like a sword, would it ring true to readers or throw them out of Schlitz's carefully crafted world?  Can we trust readers to see that Joan is coming from a horribly ignorant and limited situation?

I do wonder if some of the outrage over Joan and The Hired Girl in general is because people think of Schlitz as a writer primarily for children, and think that a librarian will just hand The Hired Girl to the average 10 year old, with no thought to providing context.  It would have to be an exceptional 10 year old for me to recommend it to someone searching for books in the juvenile stacks.  Really, it's firmly in the Young Adult category.  As much as I enjoyed The Hired Girl, I'm not sure how much of an audience it will have outside historical fiction enthusiasts.  It would have to be one heck of a booktalk to make it appeal to readers who don't usually reach for historical fiction.  The rich detail Schiltz provides and the conflicts of so many disparate personalities under one roof should help appeal to readers who enjoy a good story.  In many ways, The Hired Girl reminds me of Downton Abbey: a soap opera elevated by its time period, but still, a soap opera nonetheless.  

For those of you who keep score of such things, The Hired Girl received the 2016 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.  It's also been given a Horn Book Award Honor for fiction in 2016.