The Plateau
(Sprache: Englisch)
Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award
Named a Best Book of 2019 by BookPage
During World War II, French villagers offered safe harbor to countless strangers mostly children as they fled for their lives. The same place...
Named a Best Book of 2019 by BookPage
During World War II, French villagers offered safe harbor to countless strangers mostly children as they fled for their lives. The same place...
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Winner of the American Library in Paris Book AwardNamed a Best Book of 2019 by BookPage
During World War II, French villagers offered safe harbor to countless strangers mostly children as they fled for their lives. The same place offers refuge to migrants today. Why?
In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness?
In this beautiful, wind-blown place, Paxson discovers a tradition of offering refuge that dates back centuries. But it is the story of a distant relative that provides the beacon for which she has been searching. Restless and idealistic, Daniel Trocmé had found a life of meaning and purpose or it found him sheltering a group of children on the Plateau, until the Holocaust came for him, too. Paxson's journey into past and present turns up new answers, new questions, and a renewed faith in the possibilities for us all, in an age when global conflict has set millions adrift. Riveting, multilayered, and intensely personal, The Plateau is a deeply inspiring journey into the central conundrum of our time.
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Chapter 1Unanswered
I Daniel was grieved in my spirit in the midst of my body, and the visions of my head troubled me.
Daniel 7:15
Let's just say that suddenly you are a social scientist and you want to study peace. That is, you want to understand what makes for a peaceful society. Let's say that, for years in your work in various parts of the world, you've been surrounded by evidence of violence and war. From individual people, you've heard about beatings and arrests and murders and rapes; you've heard about deportations and black-masked men demanding people's food or their lives. You've heard about family violence and village violence and state violence. You've heard these stories from old women with loose, liquid tears; from young men with arms full of prison tattoos.
There were men on horseback calling the boys to war, and long black cars arriving to steal people away in the dead of night; girls who'd wandered the landscape, insane after sexual violations; there was the survival of the fittest in concentration camps; there were pregnant women beaten until their children were lost and bodies piled up in times of famine; there was arrest and exile for the theft of a turnip; there were those who were battered for being a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim or a Bah ' .
Let's say that, in the world of ideas that swirled around you, approximations were made of how to make sense of this mess: the presence of certain kinds of states; the presence of certain kinds of social diversity; the presence of certain kinds of religion. And let's say that the shattering stories had piled on over the years until, at some point, you just snapped. You wanted to study war no more.
As it turns out, it's harder to study peace than you might think.
Or it has been for me. I'm an anthropologist who spent years living among country people-mostly in a couple of tiny villages
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in Russia-asking basic questions about how memory works in groups. I had some ideas about how I might start a search for peace. After all, even though the stories of violence were many, for the most part people seemed occupied with other things: They worked in kitchens or fields, hauled water, made decisions about what to do based on the weather, ate with guests, cleaned up after livestock. Even if they bristled sometimes, people generally faced each other day to day with working problems and working solutions. There was love and there were revelries and heartbreaks. And in spite of what they'd seen in life, or what their very own hands might have wrought on their worst days, people saw themselves as basically decent, and expected basic decency back from the world.
Surely, there had to be ways of looking for that kind of eye-to-eye decency. Surely, there were ways to study its power and its limits, particularly when people were faced with tempestuous times. Were there communities out there that were good at being good when things got bad? In my research on memory, I'd studied practices of resistance and persistence. Could there be communities that were somehow resistant to violence, persistent in decency? I didn't know exactly what I was on to, but I knew I wanted to study it. In shorthand, I called it peace.
But peace was hard to find. I dug into contemporary scholarship in anthropology, sociology, and political science; I went through databases and bibliographies and talked to colleagues who had been in the trenches with me in the study of a tumultuous Eurasia, and to other colleagues in peace studies programs or peace institutes. What I found was this: There is vastly more contemporary social science on violence than there is on peace. And most contemporary empirical research that says it is about peace is really about conflict. About resolving conflict, cleaning up after conflict, about programs to bring aid to people in conflict settings. About law and justice
Surely, there had to be ways of looking for that kind of eye-to-eye decency. Surely, there were ways to study its power and its limits, particularly when people were faced with tempestuous times. Were there communities out there that were good at being good when things got bad? In my research on memory, I'd studied practices of resistance and persistence. Could there be communities that were somehow resistant to violence, persistent in decency? I didn't know exactly what I was on to, but I knew I wanted to study it. In shorthand, I called it peace.
But peace was hard to find. I dug into contemporary scholarship in anthropology, sociology, and political science; I went through databases and bibliographies and talked to colleagues who had been in the trenches with me in the study of a tumultuous Eurasia, and to other colleagues in peace studies programs or peace institutes. What I found was this: There is vastly more contemporary social science on violence than there is on peace. And most contemporary empirical research that says it is about peace is really about conflict. About resolving conflict, cleaning up after conflict, about programs to bring aid to people in conflict settings. About law and justice
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Autoren-Porträt von Maggie Paxson
Maggie Paxson is a writer, anthropologist, and performer. She is the author of Solovyovo: The Story of Memory in a Russian Village, and her essays have appeared in The Washington Post Magazine, The Wilson Quarterly, and Aeon. Fluent in Russian and French, she has worked in rural communities in northern Russia, the Caucasus, and upland France.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Maggie Paxson
- 2019, 368 Seiten, Masse: 16,2 x 22,8 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Riverhead Books
- ISBN-10: 1594634750
- ISBN-13: 9781594634758
- Erscheinungsdatum: 06.01.2020
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for The Plateau:A lyrical book, by turns ungainly and graceful, dark and uplifting right in step with the struggle to be good when it s hard to be good. The Atlantic
This radiant, anthropological history unearths the community s tradition of caring for the displaced and reflects on whether goodness is innate. O, The Oprah Magazine
The plateau, [Paxson] concludes, is a place made holy by the aggregate acts of love within. It could be an example again of what can be done for the refugees of today. One of the great tragedies of World War II was that there weren t more such plateaus. It s a tragedy, as Ms. Paxson s book demonstrates, that continues to this day. The Wall Street Journal
A loving combination of personal memoir, historical investigation and philosophical meditation. The Washington Post
"Powerful and engagingly written . . . The strength of her work lies in its refreshing blend of scientific rigor and openness to the intricacies and mysteries of the human heart. . . . [opening] the door to vulnerability, faith, love, and beauty, reminding us that they really will always draw us toward the light." Jewish Book Council
Paxson s beautiful writing threads these stories together so exquisitely that at times I had to stop and take a breath, even cry, before carrying on." BookPage (starred)
Inspiring, riveting, and brilliantly researched and written, this is a book for our time by an author who has found her calling and risen with literary grace to a powerful challenge. Booklist (starred)
Lyrical, complex, [and] genre-melding...History, memoir, profound soul-searching about peace, and meditations on the moral limitations of observation (rather than action) are woven together with dreamlike sequences imagining the lives of victims whose fates aren t on historical record. The beautifully written, often heartrending
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narrative is as unforgettable as the region and individuals it brings to life. Publisher's Weekly (starred)
Multilayered, intimate .. Paxson is meticulous in her attention to the way people live, their language, the choices people make in times of violence An elegant, intensive study that grapples with an enormous idea: how to be good. Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Maggie Paxson went in search of human goodness and found a story that affected me in ways few books ever have. The Plateau is exquisite, excruciating, fearless -- a book not only for these times, when our need for understanding is so great, but for all times. A masterpiece. David Finkel, author of The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service
After so much written about evil and pathology, here at last is a beautiful book that proves that selflessness is not a fairy tale. In describing an astonishing tradition of idealism and sacrifice, Maggie Paxson captures human goodness in all its complexity and ferocity.
Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
Maggie Paxson takes us on this wondrous, probing journey in her search for the roots of kindness. How is it, she asks, that this one small place has so bravely stood up for strangers? The Plateau and the people you ll meet in its pages are just the right antidote for these unsettling times.
Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here and An American Summer
In a world that feels increasingly dark, Paxson's remarkable search for parallels and paths to goodness between past and present, war and peace, is a heartbreaking and clear-eyed exploration of all that makes us human. She offers readers the key to survival: hope. Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
Multilayered, intimate .. Paxson is meticulous in her attention to the way people live, their language, the choices people make in times of violence An elegant, intensive study that grapples with an enormous idea: how to be good. Kirkus Reviews (starred)
Maggie Paxson went in search of human goodness and found a story that affected me in ways few books ever have. The Plateau is exquisite, excruciating, fearless -- a book not only for these times, when our need for understanding is so great, but for all times. A masterpiece. David Finkel, author of The Good Soldiers and Thank You for Your Service
After so much written about evil and pathology, here at last is a beautiful book that proves that selflessness is not a fairy tale. In describing an astonishing tradition of idealism and sacrifice, Maggie Paxson captures human goodness in all its complexity and ferocity.
Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning
Maggie Paxson takes us on this wondrous, probing journey in her search for the roots of kindness. How is it, she asks, that this one small place has so bravely stood up for strangers? The Plateau and the people you ll meet in its pages are just the right antidote for these unsettling times.
Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here and An American Summer
In a world that feels increasingly dark, Paxson's remarkable search for parallels and paths to goodness between past and present, war and peace, is a heartbreaking and clear-eyed exploration of all that makes us human. She offers readers the key to survival: hope. Sarah Wildman, author of Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind
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