From: Rosanne Parry <rosanneparry_at_comcast.net>
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:37:58 -0800

I was naive enough to tell myself that teachers simply did not have time to cover that period. However, after high school, that reasoning turned into doubt. It was doubt that the teachers and the educational system were deliberately avoiding to teach the truth about that painful part of own nation's history.

I think this topic is absolutely relevant to the conversation as it gets at the thorny issue of who can tell the "truest" story about a historical event.

Conventional wisdom would have it that the insider to the experience and particularly a first person account from a victim of a historical event is the truest story. And yet just as there is a tendency for the aggressor to deny evil doing, there is a tendency for the victim culture to excuse themselves from all responsibility and not consider other more productive avenues that might have been taken. A complete outsider to the historical event, may have a broader and more objective view than is available to someone from the participating cultures. Of course we should take first person accounts seriously and value them as both literature or history if they are carefully researched and well written. But we should be wary of thinking of them as objective when what they really are is intimate.

I also think in your experience, Keiko, your teachers were grappling not just with a tendency to deny past evils but also with the evergreen issue of what to tell children about the world's atrocities. Sparing children horror is a reasonable goal so long as guilt is not denied and the truth is addressed at some point in a young adult's education.

I struggle with this myself. How much should I say about the brutality of the Soviet Union in a MG novel? One of my characters in Second Fiddle was a Soviet soldier from the Baltic Republics. I knew from my research that toward the end of the Cold War, Soviet enlisted men were not given their pay. Many of them were forced to steal from civilians and give the money to their officers. Corporal punishment was common. Gang rape was also common. It was used to socially and culturally and racially isolate soldiers from the republics from Russian born soldiers. So a solider from one of the 15 republics would be conscripted, sent far from home, separated from his countrymen, and brutally and repeatedly raped on entry to his military unit. Afterwards he would be tagged and tormented as a homosexual. Suicide was shockingly common among the republican soldiers. And AIDS was rampant in the Soviet army, though they denied its existence behind the Iron Curtain. So, do I tell the truth about all of it? I decided to stick w ith corporal punishment, theft of pay and extortion. Not because I'm interested in denying the brutality of the Soviet Union, far from it. But many of my readers are as young as eight, and gang rape is more information than I can reasonably ask them to bear. The trick is to give them a manageable mouthful of the truth and not so much that they choke.

When I was seven I must have read Marie McSwigan's Snow Treasure a dozen times. It's a great adventure story which treads rather lightly over Nazi atrocities. What the book gave me was an appealing introduction to a historical era. It peaked my curiosity so that later when I was able to cope with the darker elements of the Second World War, I was interested in reading more.

Perhaps, Keiko, your teacher who enjoyed acting out the figures of ancient Japanese history was hoping you would come to love history enough to seek out the truth for yourself in your adult life. I would hope so, and it seems that at least in your case, he succeeded.

Rosanne Parry WRITTEN IN STONE, 2013 SECOND FIDDLE, 2011 HEART OF A SHEPHERD, 2009 www.rosanneparry.com
Received on Tue 13 Nov 2012 10:37:58 AM CST