If readers of Read Fast, Eat Slow would like to feast on some LDS books this summer, hurry over to New LDS Fiction and sign up for the Summer Book Trek.
How do you get a mini-series made? Do petition drives work? I would like to nominate Mary Doria Russell’s Thread of Grace for a nice, mid-winter two-weeker. Let me go lay in my supply of popcorn and couch blankets while she gets busy on the script.
It might be a five-year wait before they pull it all together. They will have to cast the deserting German doctor, and the rakish Italian resistance leader, and the lovely rabbi’s wife, and many, many more. They will have to find some make-up artists who can conjure convincing war wounds and frostbite, and some costumers who know just where to rustle up the worn-out street shoes and threadbare coats that say “refugee.” We’ll need a few nun and priest outfits, too. And somebody ought to write a great movie score.
They will also have to find some lovely grape-and-olive country churches and farms, blow them up, rebuild them and hand them back to the folks who still live there in the little villas.
Better give it six years, then.
Meanwhile, it won’t spoil your mini-series experience if you go ahead and read the book.
It starts in the northwest corner of Italy, butted up against France. It is 1943 and Jewish refugees from all over Europe have gathered there, drawn by rumors that Italians don’t hate Jews. The refugees hide in plain sight. The children go to school. The mothers go to the market.
Then Italy surrenders. German officers pour into the country, running the war with their own cross-every-T, dot-every-I sort of efficiency. The Germans have definite opinions about the Italians. “Anybody want an Italian rifle?” they joke. “Never been fired. Only dropped once.”
These brutes make it their business to hunt down all the citizens who hide or help the Jews.
Thread of Grace is war on the micro-level, light on the troop movements, heavy on the little people just trying to get by. A budding young woman falls in love with the soldier that leads her across the Alps. A little boy is whisked way from his parents and sent to a convent, where the nun explains that sometimes, it’s OK to lie, OK to pretend you’re Catholic. And the German doctor drunkenly wanders the village in search of a priest. He’s got a confession, the likes of which the priest can barely comprehend.
War is never pretty, but wasn’t it Mr. Rogers who said, about frightening events on the news: “My mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.”
That’s the story Russell gives us in Thread of Grace.
Thank goodness, no war or intrigues in my corner of the world today. Just a tasty dinner of Chinese Turkey Pasta Salad with breadsticks, and Pumpkin Orange Cake.
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