Helen Korngold Diary: February 10-16, 1919

Helen Korngold, December 1919, New York City

This year I am sharing the 1919 diary of Helen Korngold of St. Louis, MO.

February

Monday 10
Wellston. Rotten lesson. Class. Munillo [?] sitting. Home. Answers to all my questions with long newspaper clippings & a letter from Ruth. She’s so clever. Beautiful folder from J. Koloditsky of Ashville, N.C.

Tuesday 11
Wellston—good lesson. Class. Practiced basket ball. Home—beautiful cards & a letter from J.K. Lecture—Joe Raskas & Summer came up. Home to bed.

Wednesday 12
Wellston—good lesson. Class. Practice Basket Ball. Pledged to Pi Omicron Pi—blue & pink. I don’t know what it is. Home.  Fair proofs from Munillo. Study.

Thursday 13
Wellston—Wells came out—he said I made a successful teacher, said I understood children. I should worry. Class—Dr. Usher said I did well in class work. Teased Pauline. Home—wrote a playlet for Junior Council.

Friday 14
Wellston—Valentines from kids. Class—started Macbeth in Dr. Mackenzie’s class. Hear Max Rosen play violin at symphony concert. Aunt Beryl & I met him. He’s a sweet chap—lovely character—blue eyes—pink cheeks & plays to sweetly—has a finished style & is very musical. Met Gussikoff—don’t like him.

Saturday 15
Class—Dr. McCourt absent. Junior Council Board meeting 2:30-6 p.m. Had a delightful time with the girls & Mrs. Halpern. Home.

Sunday 16
Helped all morning. At 11:30 Ellenburg called up. I thought he was squelched. He’s too much for me. I insisted that I won’t see him. At 2 PM I got a box of candy from him. Will have to return it this evening by Charles. Gee, its such good stuff, but I can’t keep it.

*****

Notes:

February 12

Pi Omicron was a national educational sorority.

February 14

Helen heard an all Tschaikowsky program at the Odeon including the Pathetique. The St. Louis Dispatch critic called Rosen a 'good looking, wholesome' boy able to 'play the notes' without much interpretation.

Max Rosen was born in Romania and came to the United States as a child. His father was a Rumanian Army bandmaster who gave him a violin when a child. Max was discovered by a social worker while at the Music Settlement School and found him patrons for his education.  He studied abroad until 1917 and played Carnegie Hall in 1918 and returned in 1919. 

Max Rosen

http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft838nb58v;chunk.id=d0e9408;doc.view=print) 

Music News Article on the concert: Max Rosen is still another wonder child is a rosy-cheeked bright-eyed boy of 19. There is no question as to his maturity as artist. Not only did he perform all the difficulties terrific concerto presents with ease and aplomb but he showed in every phrase that he what he was about from a musical standpoint. His tone is clear and penetrating with a scratch even in the most strenuous. The audience raved over him. He scored and with good reason. The boy is virtuoso right and will make a place for St Louis Times Symphony Concert BY WEGMAN Critic of The St Louis Times. 

1918 Opera News article: MAX ROSEN ARRIVES FROM EUROPE OTHER MUSICAL ITEMS ARRIVING in New York from Christiania on the day after Christmas. Max Rosen the newest young violin genius to come from the great Professor Auer is making his first visit to his native land since his departure for Europe five years ago. In that period this remarkable boy, who is now only 17 years old, and who went to Europe as a student, has become one of the most famous violinists of the present day winning the most extravagant praise from all the European critics. His American debut which will take place with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra at Carnegie Hall on Saturday evening, January 12, has already aroused intense interest and will be notable for the fact that an absolute exception is made to the general rules of having a soloist play but once on the program. Mr Rosen is being accorded the unusual distinction of not only playing the Goldmark concerto with orchestra but will also be heard in a group of pieces for violin and piano as well. 

Michel Guskioff

Michel Gusikoff (born in 1893) was a violinist who became Concertmaster of the St Louis Symphony under Max Zach. In 1925 he left to become Concertmaster of the Philadelphia Orchestra, joining his brothers Benjamin, Charles, and Isadore who were all orchestra musicians. He did not find favor with Stokowski and left the following year for the New York Symphony. 

Here he performs To A Wild Rose: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaSMprIdngw

Here is a link for information on the Gusikoff brother's careers with the Philadelphia Orchestra: http://www.stokowski.org/Philadelphia_Orchestra_Musicians_List.htm#G

Here is an article where Gusikoff stood in for an ailing Fritz Reiner as director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1129&dat=19390204&id=_7hRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=f2kDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2335,2731599

The Cassandra by Sharma Shields

Sharma Shield's novel The Cassandra was a very dark read. The protagonist Mildred Groves' gift of prophecy alienates her from her family and the larger society. She struggles with a desire to fit in while visions reveal horrifying inevitabilities and men's true natures.

Mildred ceases the chance to escape her suffocating home and needy mother, thrilled to find work at a WWII government research facility in a remote part of Washington on the Columbia River. The "project" will shorten the war, she is told. Mildred becomes an esteemed worker, makes her first best friend, and even gains an admirer. She revels in the freedom.

But night finds her sleepwalking and experiencing gruesome dreams of the project's dire consequences for humanity.

Shields vividly describes the historical Hanford Project research facility, part of the Manhatten Project--the wind and dust, the subjugation of minorities and women, the ignorance of the workers and the willingness of the researchers to risk environmental degradation to win the arms race.

Mildred's abuse and violent acts in response to her inability to change events around her are disturbing. More disturbing is humanity's blind determination in believing that the ultimate weapon will save the world.

I received a free book from the publisher through LibraryThing.

The Cassandra
Shama Shields
Henry Holt and Co.
Publication 02/12/2019
$28 hardcover
ISBN: 9781250197412

Nothing But the Night by John Wiliams

Arthur Maxley wakes in his room, which he thinks is like his soul--dirty and disarranged. Shrugging off that thought, he slaps cold water on his face and determines to go for a walk. But he never gets to his destination, sidetracked to a cafe. His egg makes him think of an evil eye and depressed by the little cafe and ends up back home, the windows in his building seeming to leer at him. Maxley's nerves are disturbed by memories. Everything he encounters is magnified in grotesque ways, like circus sideshow mirrors, reflecting his inner world.

Every word in John Williams' novel Nothing Like the Night reveals Maxley's claustrophobic and overwrought psyche, the story culminating in the revelation of the horror Maxley witnessed and his irrational acting out of his trauma.

Is this book by the same man who created William Stoner in Stoner, the novel so constrained and elegant, austere and yet moving? Both novels are dark, but Stoner's resolution is comforting in his final acceptance of his life. Night leaves the protagonist still lost in the dark. Violence becomes his speech and there is no health in him.

Nothing But the Night was Williams' first novel, written during the war when he flew supplies "over the hump" and saw his fellow soldiers die. Only a mentor with a small press believed in him enough to publish this novel. Williams learned from his mistakes and went on to write "the perfect novel" Stoner and the National Book Award winner Augustus.

It was fascinating to read this early novel, at once a failure and yet showing Williams ability with words and insight into human nature. The story is disturbing and memorable, a psychological noir more suited for 2018 than 1948.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

from the publisher:

Stoner author John Williams’s first novel is a searing look at a man’s relationship with his absent father, and how early trauma manifests throughout one’s life

John Williams’s first novel is a brooding psychological noir. Arthur Maxley is a young man at the end of his emotional rope. Having dropped out of college, he’s holed up in a big-city hotel, living off an allowance from his family, feeling nothing but alone and doing nothing but drinking to forget it. What’s brought him to this point? Something is troubling him, something is haunting him, something he cannot bring himself either to face or to turn away from. And now his father has come to town, a hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy. They’ve been estranged for years, and yet Arthur wants to meet—and so he does, reeling away from the encounter for a night of drinking and dancing and a final reckoning with the traumatizing past that readers will not soon forget.

Nothing But the Night includes an interview with Nancy Williams, John Williams’s widow.

Publication History: 1st pub 1948; OP since 1990

Nothing But the Night
by John Williams
NYRB Classics
On Sale Date: February 12, 2019
9781681373072, 1681373076
$14.95 USD, $19.95 CAD

Learn more about John Williams--

My review of The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel by Charles J. Shields can be found at
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-man-who-wrote-perfect-novel-john.html

Read my review of Stoner by John Williams at
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2018/02/favorite-new-classics-stoner-by-john.html

Read my review of Augustus by John Williams at
https://theliteratequilter.blogspot.com/2016/03/pax-romana-and-ephemeral-power-augustus.html

Helen Korngold Diary: February 3 - 9, 1919

Helen Korngold, December 1919, New York City

February, 1919

Monday 3
Wellston—Class. Made 2nd Basket Ball team. That’s pretty good. All the other girls have been playing for 4 years. I just started. Home—practiced.

Tuesday 4
Wellston. Class as usually. Nothing startling. Lecture—Dr. Hudson of Mizzoo [Missouri State University] a philosopher & a good one too.

Wednesday 5
Wellston—class—Practiced basket ball. Letter from papa. Home.

Thursday 6
Wellston—Class. Luncheon & a senior party in the evening. We had one swell time. Came home with Willis Bliss, nephew to General Bliss who is sitting in the Peace Conference. Home at 12 bells.

Friday 7
Wellston—Class-Dancing—it’s so refreshing.

Saturday 8
Class. Dr. McCourt certainly does quiz one. Dr. Usher was so sweet today. Downtown—Party is off. I’m not sorry.

Sunday 9
Fooled around—studied & took a lesson. I’ve been good this week. Special delivery letter from J. Koloditsky. He’s discharged. I haven’t even answered his last letters. Papa came home. I’m thrilled to death! Ruth thinks I’m a fool but Arthur doesn’t - Why worry.

*****

Notes:

February 4

Dr. Nellie Hudson taught education at Missouri State University (Mizzoo)

Dr. Nellie Hudson

http://semo.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/Sagamores/id/1829

February 6

Wyllis King Bliss was in the 1916 Washington University Freshman class. He was born in St. Louis and later studied at the University of Illinois. He graduated from Washington University in 1920 with a B.S. in Commerce. His WWI draft registration shows he was of medium height, slightly built, with blue eyes.

Wyllis was the son of Malcolm Andrews Bliss (1863-1934), an important physician specializing in mental health who campaigned for zoning laws to restrict congested slum neighborhoods, the noise and crowding of which he saw as destructive to St. Louisan's nervous systems. He organized the Malcolm Bliss Psychiatric Institute and dedicated his life to helping the poor. He was also an Instructor in the Washington University School of Medicine.

http://www.historyhappenshere.org/sites/default/files/250%20Master%20People%20List.pdf

http://collections.mohistory.org/archive/ARC:A0137 

General Tasker Howard Bliss (born in Lewisburg, PA in 1853 and died in Washington, D.C. in 1930) was U.S. Army Chief of Staff during WWI. He accompanied President Wilson’s adviser Colonel House to London in 1917 and was appointed U.S. representative to the Allied Supreme War Council at the Paris Peace Conference. He supported lenient treatment of Germany and Austria-Hungary and lobbied for U.S. involvement in the League of Nations. General Bliss’s assignment concluded in December 1919. He dedicated the last years of his life to eliminating war which he considered a “primitive response” to national issues.

http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/thbliss.htm

The Peace Conferences began on January 18, 1919. World War I had not yet ended, although the fighting had stopped. Diplomats from over two dozen countries gathered to seek a way to end the war. The Treaty of Versailles was signed, and the League of Nations was formed out of this conference. 

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin is the moving story of the family bonds that both save us and tear us asunder. 

''...this is a story about the failures of love, and the Pause was the first." from The Last Romantics by Tara Conklin

Fiona Skinner, 102 years old and a renowned poet, returns to the podium for the first time in twenty-five years. A girl arises from the audience with a question: Who was Luna?

The Luna of Fiona's most famous poetry inspired women to name their daughters Luna. And this girl, named Luna, asks for her mother the question--who was Luna?

Fiona wrote the poem "a lifetime ago," "back when I was a romantic," she responds. The girl presses. And for the first time ever Fiona reveals the story of her family and the secret she has held in her heart for so long.

"Once upon a time," she begins, "there was a father and a mother and four children...and for a time they were happy."

And like Fiona's audience, enrapt, I was carried away by her story of the ways love carries us and fails us and how we turn from each other and how we carry each other. Her story of love's truth, it's bitterness and how it is the only thing that makes life endurable, and our deeply held illogical hope, which experience tells us is fantasy, that love can and will save us.

And that is all I am going to tell you. I still feel the warm heartache, the fullness and pressure in my chest, the awful truth I encountered in this fiction. 

Look around at your beloved family, the people you have given yourselves to, the people who cut the deepest and brought the fullest healing, who made you strong and brought you to your knees. The people you endeavor to protect and save, the people you have lost and haunt you. And tell me--what is love? 

I received an ARC from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Last Romantics

by Tara Conklin

William Morrow

publication February 5, 2019

$26.99 hardcover

ISBN: 9780062358202

ISBN 10: 0062358200

This is Not a Love Song, Stories by Brendan Mathews

Last year I enjoyed reading Brendan Mathew's first novel The World of Tomorrow. Reading his first collection of stories This is Not a Love Song brought me a new appreciation of Mathews. If World was a fun romp into the past with an action ending, the short stories are an examination of the human experience on a deeper level. I was moved, I related, and I was entertained.

There are stories about we believe we know--about love and family and life--but discover aren't true. Stories about coming to terms with life, or not coming to terms. 

The first story, Heroes of the Revolution, was also one of my favorites. An American female college student is responsible for providing visiting foreign journalists with typical American experiences. She takes them to pick apples, but walking through the orchard stirs memories, revealing the student's sheltered life while the journalists grapple with the lasting damage of the atrocities they personally lived through.

This is Not a Love Song questions the nature of art and friendship as one woman pursues a music career while her friend captures her life on film.

I loved Airborne, the story of how having a child transformed a couple's life and relationship, the crazy obsession over a child's safety, which in the story goes to an extreme, but which I well remember with the birth of my only child.

How Long Does the First Part Last? is about unrequited love.

Dunn & Sons is "the story my father never tells;" three generations of men share stories that connect them and those that split them, and the stories that "might save us" if "ever told the right way."

Look at Everything is an amazing story about a photography student who by accident causes a fire and responds by taking photographs instead of reporting it.

The Drive takes an ironic peek behind the ubiquitous story of a dad taking the babysitter home.

Henry and his Brother speaks to the bonds of fraternal love and a mutual need that transcends family ties.

In Salvage, a man working in the shady business of removing architectural pieces from ruined buildings finds the item that he thinks will finally change his luck and life.

The last story, My Last Attempt to Explain to You What Happened with the Lion Tamer, reads like a parody and comedy but feels like a tragedy involving the love triangle between a clown, a tightrope walker, and a lion tamer.

I can't wait to see what Mathews does next.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

This Is Not a Love Song
by Brendan Mathews
Little, Brown and Company
Pub Date 05 Feb 2019
ISBN 9780316382144
PRICE $26.00 (USD)

Jane Austen for Kids

Jane Austen for Kids: Her Life, Writings, and World by Nancy I. Sanders was written for ages 9 and up, but don't think you are too old to read it! This is a great resource for any reader new to Jane Austen and her world. I have been reading and learning about Austen since 1978 and Sanders taught me a few things.

One biographer stated that Austen led an uneventful life, which is how her Victorian Age family wanted her portrayed. Sanders touches on the many ways Austen's life was far from uneventful: family scandals, illness and horrible deaths, wars and epidemics, the loss of a beloved home, romances gone awry, and fame that brought her to the attention of a Prince.

I loved the excerpts from Austen's juvenilia! Her wicked humor and parodies are such fun. What a great way to get kids to connect. A summary of each novel is given.

The 21 projects included are great ideas to make Austen's world come alive. There are instructions on how to play Whist and illustration of popular dances. Kids can create imitate side whiskers and roll their hair with tied cotton strips. There are writing activities.

I can't wait to try the Knight family gingercake recipe! And as a sewer, the reticle will be fun to make.

Jane Austen model

This is a great introduction to Austen.

This book is part of the For Kids series from Chicago Review Press. Books cover a wide diversity of subjects from history and biographies of authors, artists, inventors, explorers, and more. Learn more about the series here.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Jane Austen for Kids
by Nancy I. Sanders
Chicago Review Press
Publication February 5, 2019
ISBN 9781613738535, 1613738536
Trade Paperback  $16.99 USD, £14.99 GBP