Word: abell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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American readers know Rezzori mainly for two richly convoluted memory novels of Europe before and after World War II, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite (1981) and The Death of My Brother Abel (1985). The Snows of Yesteryear looks back before their time frame, to the childhood and, implicitly, the formation of a writer. It leads into a world now irretrievably lost, its values blown away by World War I and its fortunes wrecked by the inflationary '20s -- "For the class to which my parents belonged . . . a fall into chaos, into impotence and deprivation...
...fears that proposed oil development on the coastal plain would interfere with caribou migration and calving, the Gwich'in nation last June convened its first gathering in many generations, and passed a tribal resolution calling upon the Government to prohibit oil exploration or development in the refuge. Says Abel Tritt, a Gwich'in elder: "We don't worry about ourselves but about the herds, and the animals that depend on the herds. If the herd goes, they go, and then...
...with a social contract in which, as Soviets cynically joke, "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work." The probability, nevertheless, is that Gorbachev will become more, not less, impatient. "Shortages exist because we are moving too slowly, halting and stepping off the road too often," says Abel Aganbegyan, an economist who helped shape Gorbachev's ideas...
...grandparents were poor and powerless, but they were rich in the hope that life in America would be better for their children. "My daddy believed in us helping in the cotton fields, but he didn't want us to be what he was," says the elder Abel. "He wanted something more for us." That wish came true. Abel and Mary Louise provide four sons with the comforts and opportunities of a middle-class upbringing. But they worry about the hurdles their third son must now clear, barriers that seem even higher than when Abel and Xavi were in school...
Commodes and cotton fields were powerful motivators. But there was more. When John David's parents were growing up, society passed along the message that there was reward for striving. And many people, like Abel and Mary Louise Gutierrez, did succeed. These days the message needed to motivate kids seems more confused and tougher to deliver...