Word: tanguy
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...unproclaimed text from the New Testament: "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones ... it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea." The offense against Author del Castillo (who calls himself Tanguy in this autobiographical novel) began with the Spanish Civil War. At the age of three he saw corpses in the streets of Madrid, an omen of the dread commonplaces that would haunt his boyhood. Though his mother was a militant left-wing journalist, the Communists shortly clapped her into jail...
...Tanguy and his mother spent 18 months in a concentration camp in South France before she arranged to escape via a kind of underground railway. "Please, please don't leave me behind, Mama," begged Tanguy, and as he watched her go, he felt that "an iron hand was squeezing him inside" and that he would die of misery. ("He had not yet learned that no one ever dies of misery.") The plan was for Tanguy to follow his mother a few days later, on his ninth birthday, but the Nazis closed the escape hatch...
Mistakes Will Happen. Tanguy was herded into a sealed cattle car with a group of Jewish children bound for a German concentration camp. For 3½ days, under a broiling August sun. the railroad car remained unopened while the children wept, sickened, and gradually lost control of their natural functions. Tanguy kept up his courage by believing that it was all a "mistake," and that once the authorities found out that he was not Jewish they would send him back to his mother. The word "mistake" recurs through Del Castillo's book and picks up the same rhetorical power...
What happened to Tanguy at the Nazi camp adds little to the all too familiar living-death literature. What gives it a special horror in this book is that it all happens to a little boy. Tanguy would surely have died but for a German friend named Gunther who mothered him, fired his flagging will to live, and, before his own death, left the boy a matchless maxim: "Leave hate to those who are too weak to love...
Fresh May Wine. During the two years (1886-88) the three painters saw each other, they were unknown outside their own small circle of artists. Their favorite Paris haunts were the bars of Montmartre, the paint shop of Père Tanguy, and the mezzanine of Goupil's Gallery, which modest Dutch Art Dealer Theo van Gogh had turned into a boisterous rendezvous for the despised impressionists. There congregated the unbought painters, including Toulouse-Lautrec, then 23, and swashbuckling Paul Gauguin, 39, the onetime stockbroker who was now a full-fiedged painter just back from Panama and Martinique, roaring...