Of all the genres of the past century of children’s literature, one of the most important is what Polonius in “Hamlet,” per his famous parodic list, might have called the pastoral-idyllical-tragical. In it, kids, or their stand-ins, inhabit a lovingly described paradise, or near paradise, somewhere out beyond the city, until their happiness is marred by a threat from the outer, grown-up world. This is the matter of “Charlotte’s Web,” of the Babar books and of such seeming outliers as T.H. White’s “Mistress Masham’s Repose,” where the pastoral setting is an English orphan girl’s stately home, ruined by her evil guardians.
It is also the matter of Alki Zei’s Greek children’s classic “The Wildcat Behind Glass” — set in the 1930s, published in the 1960s but little known in America, and now available in a new translation by Karen Emmerich.
An Aegean island retreat is threatened in this case not by the butcher’s ax but by the rise of a semi-fascist dictatorship — as though the climax of “Charlotte’s Web” involved Charlotte spelling out, high above Wilbur, not “Some Pig!” but “It Can Happen Here!”
The credibility of such books depends on the tangibility of the pastoral idylls they evoke. Here, in her depiction of the island she calls Lamagari, based on Samos, where she grew up, Zei does not disappoint:
I don’t think there’s a sea in the world more beautiful than the one in Lamagari. Sometimes it’s shaded by the pine trees that grow right next to the water, and then it’s as green as a grape leaf, and sometimes when the sun is shining straight down it’s as blue as the sky. There are patches of soft sand on the bottom, and little colorful pebbles, too, and the water makes the colors look so bright and cheerful, like they’ve just been painted.
The novel is narrated by a young girl named Melia, who summers there with her slightly older sister, Myrto, under the tutelage of their beloved grandfather, with frequent visits from their much-admired story-weaving cousin, Nikos. The wildcat of the title is the pet ornament of the grandfather’s run-down but expansive house — a stuffed cat around which Nikos constructs wild tales of adventure, insisting that it breaks out of its glass case and roams the island when night falls.
In a manner more than a little reminiscent of Genzaburo Yoshino’s Japanese classic “How Do You Live?,” also set in the ’30s, the back and forth between a wise elder and eager-to-learn kids is the backbone of the book: Grandfather teaches the girls about the “ancients,” the classic Greek literature of myth and philosophy.
The sisters banter, barter and squabble while remaining true to each other and their common family. Then slowly, insidiously, the politics of Greece at the time invade the island — via rumors, changing school curriculums, worries about speaking freely, and finally, most memorably, a book burning.
Though it’s never stated explicitly, the novel is set just after the appointment of Ioannis Metaxas as prime minister of Greece. Along with António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, he brought the virus of authoritarian nationalism to southern Europe.
Melia is able to resist the propaganda; Myrto, drawn to the incantations of the new order, is not. As a result of Myrto’s unintentional “tattling,” Metaxas’ constables, in the novel’s tragic climax, brutally eviscerate the wildcat and break its spell.
The actual meaning of dictatorship — a word the girls had previously heard uttered only as an abstraction — hits home for them in the frightening book-burning scene when they discover one of their grandfather’s “ancients” in the fire: “Plato, with an omega for the ‘o,’” Melia laments. “When I first learned the alphabet, omega was my favorite letter, and I was jealous that Myrto had one in her name.”
The beauty of the novel, its evocation of the island aside, lies in the way it allows the sinister political developments around Melia to land in her mind not as slogans and pieties but as confusing signals. They register in her grandfather’s sudden self-silencing more than in unequivocal acts of censorship or suppression.
Zei, who was exiled within Greece during the Greek Civil War of the ’40s, then fled to Moscow for a decade, indicates political despair not by party argument but by the death of imagination — through fear and the physical destruction of the house’s talisman.
The “lesson” or “moral” of the book is obvious, and relevant in a democracy that seems more threatened right now than the Hellenic one. Such disasters arrive not all at once, like a tidal wave, but insensibly, like the tide. They creep up on us over a happy summer. We hardly know they have happened until they already have. And life, disconcertingly, goes on, often pleasantly, while they are taking place.
Though she offers it quietly, Zei’s message is clear. The central illusion of childhood — that there is a safe place — must always be surrendered. When bad men come to power, magic ends, and even the best places begin to be ruined. It is a simple and sobering, if unpastoral, point.
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