wednesday books have a depressing setting

[landofnowhere]

Nettle and Bone, T. Kingfisher. I found this dark fairy tale satisfying and atmospheric, but didn't super stick with me. Some really great worldbuilding elements, though.

The Counterfeit Countess: The Jewish Woman Who Rescued Thousands of Poles During the Holocaust, Elizabeth B. White and Joanna Sliwa. So a colleague caught my attention by say "I got a book about a woman mathematician at Costco". Which is accurate -- Josephine Mehlberg's mathematical career, in Poland before WWII and in the US afterwards would have been interesting enough to me -- but the book focuses on what she did during the war years, while living under false papers as "Countess Janina Suchodolska", which is truly fascinating. Having decided that saving her own life and her husband's was not enough, "Janina" decided, rather than wait out the war as a Jew in hiding, to brazen it out and not only joined a resistance movement, but also a took a major role in a social welfare organization and helped maneuver it into a position to provide food and other aid to the prisoners in the Majdanek concentration camp, and then use that aid as a cover for smuggling and passing messages for the resistance. (Officially they were only allowed to aid the non-Jewish Polish prisoners, though Janina tried and hoped to aid all in the camp, including the Jews.)

The book is substantially based on Janina's unpublished memoir, but the authors did an impressive research job of corroborating the memoir and fleshing out the story using other sources. They generally do a good job of providing the often depressing historical context, which I didn't know as much as I'd like -- it wasn't a good time to be anyone in Poland during WWII, but especially not to be a Jew. I do wish it had provided more context as to what the social status of countesses was at the time. Janina's masquerade as a countess is a bit less stunning given that she had a childhood as landed gentry before her father lost his life and lands during WWI, and then went on to live among the intellectual elite in the interwar period (though her career prospects were limited as a woman and Jew).

There are some extremely dramatic sequences (often taken from Janina's memoir), though other parts drag a bit more, I would say due to the "banality of good" -- Janina rescued many people by convincing the Nazis to let her organization take those prisoners unfit for labor off their hands, but this isn't something she even mentions in her memoir. The authors remark that Janina "displayed no heroic tendencies before the war", which I find in some respects true and inspiring, that she could go from being an ordinary intellectual in her thirties to saving thousands of lives -- but I also want to question what "heroic tendencies" are and whether she really displayed none of them. (I also wonder whether being a high school math teacher is better preparation for being a humanitarian countess than one might think?)

Recomended if you can handle the depressingness of the setting and want to read about an amazingly competent woman doing good in very dark times.

Comments

'Heroic tendencies'

[oursin]

They may, I think, be well under-estimating what it must have taken, still, to a) study mathematics (presumably she went to university?) and then b) have a career, as a woman mathematician at the period?! limited as the prospects were. Emmy Noether's career and the barriers and constraints she experienced are suggestive.

Re: 'Heroic tendencies'

[landofnowhere]

That too! Though the emphasis on Emmy Noether and the difficulties she faced (despite being the daughter of a prominent mathematician!) can sometimes erase the fact that there were other women mathematicans out there in the first half of the 20th century! Comparatively, it wasn't as hard to study mathematics at university as a woman if one was content in a role as a high school teacher or an academic's wife, the difficulty was if one wanted a *career* as a mathematician. (I've written about Hel Braun before, who is an interesting example of a woman who successfully launched a mathematical career in Germany around the time of WWII but who, while she didn't like the Nazis, didn't perform any particularly heroic acts of resistance during the war.)

Josephine Mehlberg managed it in part by getting her Ph.D. in philosophy rather than mathematics, where she was able to find a less sexist advisor -- but still, after spending a year at the Sorbonne post Ph.D., she found her career in Poland blocked and settled down by marrying one of her advisors' other students and teaching high school math.

The more interesting thing is how she resumed her mathematical career post-WWII, having emigrated to North America -- which it itself is quite a story, because at that point she had established herself as "Janina Suchodolska", social worker, while her husband wanted to resume his career as "Henry Mehlberg", and so they had to pretend not to be married for several years so as not to blow her cover until Janina could pull the strings to allow Henry to escape the Soviet Union and take a job at the University of Toronto. That accomplished, "Janina" resumed her role as Josephine and Henry's wife, and was able to find employment as a mathematician -- for which it helped that she represented herself as 10 years younger than she was, and as having obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1938 rather than a Ph.D. in philosophy in 1928. But having got her foot in the door, she had a successful career, aided by the post-Sputnik demand for mathematicians -- first at the University of Toronto, then doing classified work for the US Air Force, and ultimately becoming a professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where she supervised two Ph.D. students.

Re: 'Heroic tendencies'

[oursin]

That's fascinating - that whole 'marry man in the field &/or teach schoolgirls' was very pervasive (probably across a range of academic disciplines). Yes, the whole thing about actually wanting a career was crucial, and often meant a lot of dodging about and seizing random opportunities.

[sorcyress]

(I also wonder whether being a high school math teacher is better preparation for being a humanitarian countess than one might think?)

My protest sign, at the relevant kind of protest, reads "Just because I would take a bullet for your kids, doesn't mean I should have to" and I pretty much stand by it. I don't know if that makes me heroic or a fatalist, but I can't look at these students all day every day and not fall in love with their humanity and struggles and existence.

~Sor

[landofnowhere]

Thank you! Yes, I was thinking of you while writing that.

[crystalpyramid]

The memoir sounds really cool!