Spinach is unmistakable; radishes are cute. This picture also reveals a serious deficiency in my spacing.
Other than that, all I have is volunteer cilantro and a little horseradish starting to green up. But I haven't been out to check since Sunday--to do so would mean checking in the dark with a flashlight and I'm not that far gone.
#17 on the 100-book challenge
I have to review The Pianist by Wladyslaw Szpilmannow but I don't want to. It's an important book but not exactly riveting reading. Told in first person by a survivor of the Holocaust, it spans the years from 1939 to 1945, taking place in Warsaw, then the Warsaw ghetto, then Warsaw again as he was assigned to a work crew and eventually made contact with an old friend who agreed to hide him. He drifted from place to place without discovery until, near the end, he is found by a German officer. When the officer asks him what he does, he replies that he is a pianist. The officer has him play--Nocturne in C-sharp minor--and offers to help his escape to the country. But he can't do that--being Jewish, there is no escape.
The book isn't a novel and so it doesn't read like one. The deaths--the so many deaths and suicides and cruel torture--just roll off your brain like statistics. They die like farm animals and their deaths mean nothing because we know nothing of their lives, The book leaves it to our imagination to turn each death into a life. But I won't complain--he was a pianist not a writer and he told the story as history, shortly after the experience.
My own surprise in the reading was learning how many Polish people were killed along with the Jews. Germans firing into crowds, destroying homes, arresting and torturing people for unspecified offenses. Then came Hitler's order to destroy Warsaw--destroy an entire city! How many people died in the rubble?
Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote,
Warsaw has just now been destroyed. No one will ever see the Warsaw I knew. Let me just write about it. Let this Warsaw not not disappear forever.
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