'Voices From Chornobyl' at Caltech

I've already blogged about the upcoming 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster, but I wanted to point out a commemorative event happening at our Loyal Readers stomping grounds at Caltech. On Wednesday, April 27th at 8:00 PM in Baxter Hall there will be a staged reading of "Voices from Chornobyl" a play inspired by Svetlana Alexievich's oral histories collected in Voices from Chernobyl, which we read a few years ago. Additional performances are scheduled at other dates and locations if you can't make it to this one. Find out more at this blog or this Facebook page.

Steve Julian interviews playwright Cindy Marie Jenkins,

What role does theatre play in the 25th anniversary of Chornobyl? 

It just felt like a natural progression to me. A journalist publishes interviews of people who historically have no voice and theatre artists expand the audience with their creative reactions, spreading these people’s stories. I didn’t really have a long-term plan when I started adapting it, but once we added an audience, I saw how powerful these people’s words were. Audience members left the theater and immediately wanted a copy of the book.

Here's are excerpts from a 2009 performance at Deaf West Theatre:

After the Quake

This month we are reading Greg Mortenson's Stones into Schools: Promoting Peace with Education in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I envisioned our discussion focusing largely on the question of the U.S. role in Afghanistan. But after a week of observing the devastation in Japan, I'm thinking there will be heightened interest in the aspect of the book that deals with rebuilding after the Kashmir earthquake. The New York Times has assembled a collection of opinions on the question of appropriate aid to Japan and Takashi Inoguchi, president of the University of Niigata Prefecture and professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo, has a response that I think "Dr. Greg" would heartily approve of, urging us to find ways to help the young people of Japan who have lost relatives and friends and face an uncertain future,

Those youngsters will be handicapped financially and psychologically, yet they will also shoulder Japan's reconstruction. The international community can encourage them by setting up opportunities to study abroad and educational programs and scholarships for acquiring foreign language and other important skills. This will help give Japan's young people the hope and courage to move on amid sorrow and despair.

Whether the disaster is war or an earthquake, the sensible solution does always seem to be to look to the future and prioritize the needs of our children, no?  And they will lead the way. Greg Mortenson points us to an account of Hazara children rallying in sympathy for the children of Japan.

The other book we have read that most closely relates to this catastrophe is Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster.  If you need a refresher, n+1 is running an excerpt from Voices.  The twenty-fifth anniversary of the event is next month and news organizations are revisiting the site. Here's NPR's Talk of the Nation talking to reporter Henry Shukman from Outside magazine, or read his article here. News reports emphasize how the Japanese nuclear reactor crisis has not reached Chernobyl levels of catastrophe. See this article from TPM and ProPublica for both the technological and sociopolitical reasons this current accident is different. As human rights activists, we can be happy that, although there are some complaints about lack of information from Japanese authorities in this crisis, the level of transparency far exceeds that of Soviet-era Ukraine.  Worth thinking about as we move forward in thinking about the use of nuclear power around the world, which governments can we trust with a similar level of disclosure?

Also worth noting, Rob Gifford (China Road) is reporting for NPR from the earthquake region, adding just the kind of details (such as finding a woman sort her recycling) that make the monstrous scale of the tsunami and earthquake more human.

Finally, here's a good place to start if you want to help, or maybe one of the best things you can do, especially if you live in a fault zone, is be prepared.

Rights Readers Map of Europe

The Rights Readers map of settings for our European fiction and nonfiction books is now complete! You can visit it here. Featured sites include Chernobyl, Guernica and Terezin. If that sounds grim, you can visit the site of this month's novel, Kensington or zoom in and count tulips outside the International Criminal Court. See the sidebar for links to our previous maps of North and South America.

Banned Books Miscellany

Closing out Banned Books Week, a more traditional approach to the subject can be found at the American Library Association's site. All your questions answered about the most notorious books. For fun, you can order a banned books bracelet. (I found myself thinking about which Rights Readers books would look good around my wrist!)

Or here's one I think our Loyal Readers would surely enjoy: donate a banned book for a free empanada and coffee at the Banned Books Cafe.
Not only do we have a number of banned books on hand (the recently discussed banned-in-Belarus Voices from Chernobyl comes to mind), many of us have fond memories of meetings with homemade empanadas, made by a Cherished Former Reader. Too bad this deal can only be had in San Antonio.

Finally, for inspiration, The Nation offers profiles in courageous librarians.

Tags: banned books

Chernobyl: What You Can Do...

Just to end our exploration of Voices from Chernobyl on an up note, I want to point to a couple of charity sites Chernobyl - 20 and Chernobyl Children's Project International.
Children from CCPI were featured in the Academy Award-winning documentary short, Chernobyl Heart.  Unfortunately, the film does not appear to be available on DVD at this time.

Tags: Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, environment

Chernobyl: Another Voice

More Voices from Chernobyl:

Just adding one more first person account from a blogger who served in the military at Chernobyl.  Some of our more linguistically talented Loyal Readers will enjoy the challenge of the original post  (the pictures accompanying the  post are worth a look), while others will want to take a peek at the Global Voices translation.


Tags: Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, environment

Chernobyl Tour

Here are some visuals to accompany our reading of Voices from Chernobyl:

This photo exhibit contains very striking images, but the presentation is almost too dramatic.  I really enjoyed this straightforward account of a visit to the "Zone" in springtime and accompanying photos. It helped me understand why some people choose to live there despite the danger.

Magnum's "Chernobyl Legacy" multimedia package on this page is difficult viewing (but check out the map feature showing radiation distribution).

Background on Chernobyl

Continuing our exploration of Voices from Chernobyl, NPR has archived its coverage of the 20th anniversary of the disaster here, while the Nation's review of the book by Andrew Meier contains a good background summary of the event and some interesting information about the author.  A bit of insight into her other books,

Throughout her work, she has sought to bring to light the hidden stories of the Soviet era. One of her first books, U voiny--ne zhenskoe litso ("War's Unwomanly Face"), an oral history of Soviet soldiers in World War II, which broke with the heroic narratives of official history, was suppressed for two years before Gorbachev allowed it to be published in 1985. That book and its follow-up, Poslednie svideteli (1985), a collection of 100 "children's stories" of war, sold millions of copies in the former Soviet Union and made Alexievich a glasnost celebrity. Her career hit its peak with Zinky Boys (1992), an unflinching look at the Soviet war in Afghanistan ("zinky" alludes to the zinc coffins in which more than 15,000 Soviet soldiers returned home).

Finally for all those unanswered questions, the UN-sponsored Chernobyl - Tschernobyl - Information site is worth exploring.

Tags: Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, environment

Our July Author: Svetlana Alexievich

Let's start off our supplemental reading for Voices from Chernobyl with a couple of excellent interviews with author Svetlana Alexievich. Sign and Sight, reprints a Suddeutsche Zeitung interview. On the political fallout,

Two catastrophes have taken place in Belarus: the catastrophe of capitalism and the cosmic catastrophe. People can understand the former - poverty, misery, the new way of life - but they cannot grasp the cosmic catastrophe. Ukraine and Belarus are a sort of laboratory, you could collect the evidence, evaluate it and share it with humanity. But the Belarussian government is committing an assault on its own people and on humanity at large. One scientist who proved that even low doses of radiation can lead to illness was thrown into prison and only released after international protests. Instead there is much talk of optimism. Belarus is a closed-off, abject country. My book has appeared in 21 states but is banned in Belarussian. Otherwise people would ask: Where is the medicine? Where are the church masses? Where are the uncontaminated provisions? A totalitarian regime saves itself first.

Center for Book Culture offers another interview. Here's a bit about the oral history form and the writing process,

It occurred to me that life offers so many versions and interpretations of the same events that neither fiction nor document alone can keep up with its variety; I felt compelled to find a different narrative strategy. I decided to collect the voices from the street, the material lying about around me. Each person offers a text of his or her own. And realized I could make a book out of them. Life moves on much too fast—only collectively can we create a single, many-sided picture...From each person’s 100-page story, not more than five pages are left and sometimes maybe just half a page. I ask many questions, I select episodes, and, thus, I participate in the creation of each book. My role is not just that of an ear eavesdropping in the street, but also that of an observer and thinker. To an outsider it may seem a simple process: people just told me their stories. But it’s not really so simple. It’s important what you ask and how you ask it and what you hear and what you select from the interview. I think you can’t really reflect life’s broad scope without the documentation, without the human evidence. The picture will not be complete.

And because translators never get their due, how about an interview (from Maud Newton) with translator Keith Gessen,

...what I think the book does cumulatively with this randomness is suggest that, well, splitting up with your wife is more important than Chernobyl. These major events organize experience, they form a backdrop to experience, but they do not constitute experience as such. I’m not sure how much leeway I had as the translator, in this regard, but, functionally, the book is framed by these two devastating monologues by women whose husbands received very heavy doses of radiation and then just literally fell apart in front of their eyes, and these are just horrible — but in between there’s a lot of funny stuff, or random stuff is more like it, that fills in the background to those stories.

All three interviews have great insights, check them out!

Technorati Tags: Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, environmental justice, Belarus

Reading the World

Reading the World is a collaboration of booksellers and publishers to promote international titles, just the kind of books that Rights Readers love to read.  In fact, as part of this promotion, the online journal of literature in translation, Words Without Borders, is sponsoring online discussions of several of the highlighted books, including Rights Readers summer selections, Voices from Chernobyl and The Noodle Maker!  Making a note to check on these discussions once they are underway...

For July: Voices from Chernobyl

For July we have selected Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, recent winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.