{"id":17538,"date":"2018-12-12T09:04:23","date_gmt":"2018-12-12T17:04:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/?p=17538"},"modified":"2018-12-12T09:04:25","modified_gmt":"2018-12-12T17:04:25","slug":"gone-to-soldiers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2018\/12\/12\/gone-to-soldiers\/","title":{"rendered":"Gone to Soldiers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Marge Piercy\u2019s 800-page non-sf WWII novel <cite>Gone to Soldiers<\/cite> (published in 1987) has been sitting unread on my bookcase for some time. I don\u2019t recall when I bought it, but I\u2019m pretty sure the only reason I did is that I very much liked Piercy\u2019s <cite>Woman on the Edge of Time<\/cite>. But anything over about 400 pages long tends to feel like kind of a slog to me, and I don\u2019t read much non-sf, and so it\u2019s been languishing on the shelf.<\/p>\n<p>Recently, my random-unread-book-picker picked it, and I started reading it, and it didn\u2019t immediately grab me, and I figured I would probably skim it. But I put it down for a week or two while reading other things, and when I picked it up again I immediately hit a section that I liked a lot.<\/p>\n<p>It was the first chapter from the viewpoint of Jacqueline, a teenage Jewish girl in Paris in 1939\u20131940. It seems to me to do a great job of capturing a particular kind of teenage voice: utterly sure that she understands the world far better than anyone else, and yet very vulnerable. (I of course have never been a teenage Jewish girl in Paris in 1939\u20131940, nor any other sort of teenage girl, so I may be wrong about how true-to-life this portrayal is, but it felt very real to me.) In this particular case, her rejection of her Jewish heritage and her certainty that the war isn\u2019t a big deal add to the poignancy for me.<\/p>\n<p>And then the next section is the first chapter from the POV of Abra, a 23-year-old sexually liberated goyish woman from Maine, living in NYC. Which I\u2019m also enjoying a great deal. Sample quote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[Abra] was compared [by her family] to one Abigail of dreaded memory who had been a bluestocking and an impassioned abolitionist and who had once actually made a public speech, bringing shame on the family by this wanton act\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So I\u2019m now thinking that I may read the whole book after all. We\u2019ll see. (I\u2019m still only 27 pages in.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marge Piercy\u2019s 800-page non-sf WWII novel Gone to Soldiers (published in 1987) has been sitting unread on my bookcase for some time. I don\u2019t recall when I bought it, but I\u2019m pretty sure the only reason I did is that I very much liked Piercy\u2019s Woman on the Edge of Time. But anything over about [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17538","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17538","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17538"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17538\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17540,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17538\/revisions\/17540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17538"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17538"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17538"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}