3 comments about Shadow Over Shangri-La.

1. ESSAY
   The best memoir you never heard of:
   'Shadow Over Shangri-La' offers compelling and timely story of Nepal
   By Cynthia Haven
   Sunday, November 12, 2006
   
   Every so often a reader discovers a memoir that has the power to disturb long after the last page is turned. It shakes your world -- but not only yours. Its author becomes a megastar, a household word appearing on talk shows, perhaps even bagging a Nobel Prize (think Rigoberta Menchú). The book shoots to the top of the best-seller lists and becomes required reading at universities.
   
   And every so often one runs into a memoir that should have had such power -- and mysteriously didn't. It winds up at the top of the remainder bins.
   
   Durga Pokhrel's compelling, inspiring "Shadow Over Shangri-La: A Woman's Quest for Freedom" was published in 1996, and disappeared without a bubble in the sea of annual offerings. But its true relevance might be now, as Nepal hovers on the brink of change. With the signing of a peace agreement on Nov. 8, Maoists terrorists have joined an interim government -- but after waging a 10-year insurgency, the Maoists' track record for nonviolence is unpromising.
   
   The Himalayan kingdom, home of Everest and Annapurna, is 550 miles east to west and 100 miles north to south, much of it mountainous -- but its strategic importance is disproportionate to its size. It lies between the world's most populous democracy, India, and communist China, or more specifically, the Chinese province of Tibet. Maoist influence could destabilize the entire region -- but few in the world worry about the peril; few people could name a famous Nepali since Gautama Buddha.
   
   "Everyone who cares about freedom should be interested in her story," writes Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu in the book's foreword. Yet hardly anyone has read it at all. Ten years ago, "Shadow Over Shangri-La" vanished from bookstore shelves long before word of mouth might have given it a second, or even a first, life. Its intelligent and appealing heroine, an inconnu outside her native land, had been adopted by Amnesty International as a prisoner of conscience two decades ago. She might be someone who could successfully put a face on a national crisis, making a remote people and culture more immediate to an uninterested world, which exhausted Nepal's sound-bite possibilities when the hippies left in the 1970s.
   
   Pokhrel's tale begins with her political frame-up for an attempted kidnapping of the crown prince -- an almost comical Keystone Kops imbroglio, with bombs toted like cell phones. ("I was being portrayed as a revolutionary and extremist when I could not even kill a mosquito," she writes.) It includes her 18-day hunger strike as she was detained in police custody without charges, and her subsequent imprisonment in the far western hinterlands of Nepal, where dirty prisoners lived on blackened, maggot-infested rice, which smelled like "a dead animal." What followed was worse: In the hellish Kathmandu Central Prison, arbitrary torture and beatings were routine entertainment for the prison staff. Prisoners, sometimes girls in their early teens, were jailed without charges or trial. The socially inconvenient were herded with the naked pagal, the mentally ill prisoners who were injected with tranquilizers and living amid bedbugs, fleas and feces. Pokhrel ends with an impassioned plea -- a visionary hope for a Hindu democracy, a cry that echoes to the present day.
   
   Who has heard of it? I bought my own copy on Amazon.com for 65 cents. The book had deeper ties for me: I had lived with Durga 28 years ago in Kathmandu, when she was a little-known political activist, a young professor and journalist with a law degree (an unprecedented combination for a Nepali woman, even today), a rebel whose Brahmin family in the easternmost hill country was constantly arranging marriages for her that she resisted. Rejected by them, she lived alone.
   
   Time has done much to both of us, but some things time cannot undo: "Shadow Over Shangri-La" brought back the Durga I remember -- fearless, headstrong and dedicated, with an astonishing lack of self-pity.
   
   We had been introduced at the bungalow of scholar and statesman Rishikesh Shaha, then chairman of Amnesty International's Nepal chapter, an erudite, roly-poly man in his early 50s. He presented her like a national jewel, with good cause.
   
   She was in her late 20s, her unbound black hair hanging well below her waist. Her sari was a brilliant yellow that might have resembled a monk's saffron -- but I'd never seen a monk wear chiffon. The lift of her head was proud, almost defiant, as was her half-smile as she drifted into the room and stood before us in "Namaste" greeting. She was unbending, like a lily.
   
   By that time, she had already been jailed on several occasions in the corrupt Hindu kingdom with one-party rule. Durga was one of the promising up-and-comers of the outlawed Nepali Congress Party. Her dedication to democracy was her bond with Shaha, who had been his country's ambassador to the United Nations as well as its foreign minister. An opponent of royal autocracy, he had only recently returned from exile.
   
   With Durga, I met men who would play prominently in Nepal's future: B.P. Koirala, a newly released Amnesty International prisoner of conscience, who would later become the nation's first elected prime minister; his brother G.P. Koirala, the current prime minister; Ganesh Man Singh, a disciple of Gandhi who was considered Nepal's father of democracy; and Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, who served as prime minister twice. When I returned to my then-home, London, I schlepped through Gatwick in Durga's pink-and-blue chiffon sari and a pair of sandals; my luggage had been stolen days earlier on India Rail.
   
   Durga's path took her to exile in the West in 1983, after receiving a tip-off that she was to be rearrested. Friendly American tourists sent her a plane ticket to Minneapolis. She escaped into a Minnesota blizzard with little more than a lightweight sari and a pair of sandals. The 16-year American sojourn that followed (an American Durga would have seemed an oxymoron in the 1970s) garnered her a Harvard doctorate, marriage to a specialist in rural agricultural development and conservation, and three half-English sons. "Shadow" was written in exile, largely from memory. Police raids and distance had whisked away many personal records, which, perhaps, accounts for some discrepancies in dating.
   
   But how to account for the total disappearance from the public eye of her own powerful testimony? Alas, the authors with the best stories to tell may not have the publishing savvy to climb the best-seller lists.
   
   Durga, in a characteristic moment of intuition, had found a publisher only a quarter mile down the road from her digs in the outskirts of Washington, D.C. When a manuscript was requested within days, she may not have realized how vital the right publisher is to a trade book's success (and not one largely devoted, as Brassey's was, to military history).
   
   She and her husband and co-author, Anthony Willett, approached the project like the scholars they are, and not like veterans of the showbiz that is publishing today. They received a grant from the J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, and a tiny advance from Brassey's. But in the world of trade books, the size of the advance signals the publisher's commitment to the project, and how much it will promote and publicize the finished book. Durga never had an agent to tell her this. Author tours were small and largely confined to the East Coast. Translation rights, TV rights, movie rights were not discussed. The book received little notice and no major reviews -- not even from the Washington Post, where the authors were living and the publisher was situated.
   
   Publisher's Weekly justly criticized the book for its occasional infelicities, which, to my memory, closely replicate Durga's own idiosyncratic English, and also the book's shortcomings in explaining Nepalese culture and politics. It further notes "her own suffering was mitigated by exceptional privileges, particularly the services of a cellmate as her maid and cook." The reviewer failed to grasp that Durga's "privileges" largely accrued because she was classified as a political prisoner rather than a criminal one, and the "maid" was simply a lower-caste woman deferring naturally to a Brahman. Such is the world of caste. Even in hardship, Durga was served by the loyal cook she always referred to simply as "Lama" -- a mild boy so self-effacing that, in the months he cooked for us, I cannot recall him uttering a single syllable, a kid so unassuming I was surprised to find he had a full name (Ram Bahadur Lama) listed in Durga's index -- or that he was listed at all.
   
   "Shadow" is labeled "biography/women's studies" -- a category that, in Barnes & Nobles everywhere, foredooms it to shelf space alongside Gail Sheehy's "Passages." The jacket cover has a well-meaning blurb from a friend of Durga's, health guru Deepak Chopra ("impelling support for the revival of true feminine energy"), that further pigeonholes "Shadow" as a "woman's book." Although Durga is a passionate advocate for Hindu meditation, prayer and yoga, especially for prisoners, "Shadow" is no New Age textbook.
   
   In the reptilian mutual eating of the publishing world, the English-owned Brassey's Inc. soon became Potomac Books Inc., which was acquired by American book distributor Books International in 1999. Some will argue that "Shadow" is outdated. The royal family she discusses in the book was assassinated, en masse, in 2001. Ironically, they were slaughtered by the Crown Prince, who had been the centerpiece of Durga's political charges.
   
   "Shadow" was published the year the Maoists began their decade-long People's War -- characterized by looting, abduction, torture and extortion -- which has so far left 13,000 murdered by one side or the other, most of them civilians, and many of them children. (The villagers say that 95 percent of the people support the Maoists -- by force -- only 5 percent by choice.) While Maoism is being consigned to the dustbin of history, even in China, it thrives in the green hills of Nepal, a country whose Nepali Congress Party was ultimately too weak to forge lasting democracy.
   
   One political insider of my acquaintance described the political situation in September: "Now, along with Lebanon's Hezbollah regime, we are the only country in the world that has a heavily armed terrorist movement openly operating its national office in the capital city. They have some 40,000-plus regular guerrillas in their People's Liberation Army and another 100,000 less well trained but armed militia -- almost as many people as the formerly Royal Nepal Army. "In October, when the Maoists deployed 200 rebel soldiers in the Kathmandu streets as "security patrols," one wondered whether it was the first step toward a rumored revolution. ("We have arrested 190 people, of whom 180 were freed after investigations," the Maoist commander said, blithely overlooking the illegality of the move. One can only speculate what methods were used in the investigations, and what happened to the remaining 10.)
   
   Durga, a devout Hindu, would say the nation's problem remains unchanged since she wrote her book: She would say that the nation's dilemma stems from a loss of dharma -- a term encompassing personal duty and sacred action, resulting in social harmony. ("I remember first recognizing at this time that human rights issues extended beyond political killings, imprisonment, and harassment to the social realm of domestic tragedies," she writes.) No doubt her sense of dharma was greatly reinforced by Nepal's decision, pressured by Maoists, to abandon its Vedic roots and its commitment to being the only Hindu nation in the world.
   
   "What secularism does in inherently religious societies like Nepal and India is to politicize religion, and the last spectacle I wish to see is a Hindu resurgent movement mobilizing against other groups in society," she writes.
   
   That was the point where Durga broke with the Nepali Congress party she had worked so hard to promote -- that, and its elimination of the monarchy from its constitution. Durga served on the royal cabinet as its minister of women, children and social welfare until it was disbanded after April's political upsets. She is tainted by her association with the short-lived government of King Gyanendra, but she says she was motivated by her wish to clear herself of charges for which she never stood trial. Gyanendra may not be a great king or even a good one, but until last year, he was considered Nepal's living incarnation of Vishnu, an important link with Nepal's past and its ancient traditions. Durga's longed-for Nepal -- akin to Gandhi's erstwhile dream for an agricultural India -- is already part of our vanishing choices.
   
   "Shadow" has many scenes of "institutionalized torture," featuring haunting characters the reader will never forget, but I will remember this one, early in the book, when Durga, in police custody, hears the terrified screams in the night of the "new prey." At 3 a.m., she speaks to a police officer:
   
   " 'Did you kill somebody tonight?' I asked.
   
   " 'You always imagine something big; he is not killed. As a routine treatment he was enclosed in a sack and beaten. But he would not speak a word, so some other police friends put a couple pins in his fingers. That is all,' he replied.
   
   " 'Who was he?' I asked.
   
   " 'Not a big shot. It was your cook, Lama,' he said."
   
   Don't hold your breath for the Nobel.
   
   Cynthia Haven most recent book is "Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations."
   
   [...]



2. For most people, the country of Nepal (nestled between India and Tibet) conjures up images of magnificent Himalayan peaks.
   Nepal is an incredibly wonderful country of great contradictions - breathtaking beauty against a backdrop of poverty and political and social injustice. Shadow over Shangri-La is the true story of one woman's experience in this country on the top of the world.

   Durga Pokhrel was born into wealth and privilege in Katmandu's educated upper class, but as a young woman her conscience led her into Nepal's underground democratic movement. As a university lecturer and a prolific writer (with an opposition printing press), she worked tirelessly for political change in her country. Arrested for her activities, Pokhrel was thrown into a medieval-like prison "where women were hung by chains from beams, beaten mercilessly and left to die." Eventually adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, Pokhrel was freed from prison but death threats against her continued. She left Nepal and found safety and good friends in Minnesota and eventually received an advanced degree from Harvard, married and had a family.

   The years spent away from her native country only strengthened her resolve to return to Nepal one day and be an effective agent for change. Today, the political tides have turned in this now fledgling democracy and Pokhrel and her family have returned to Nepal. More passionate about her politics than ever, Pokhrel has recently been appointed as the director of Nepal's newly formed Commission on Women.




3. I am surprised I have not heard of the author's name before: Durga Pokhrel... what an amazing woman! She presents this book to the world as a plea for consciousness, and once you read it, you can't help but want to do something to help advance her cause. In this enlightening book I learned about modern Nepalese culture, it's "dharmic" Hindu roots and its disentegration as modern leaders gave up their responsibility for leading and protecting the people, and instead have victimized the weakest members of the population to maintain and cover up their greed, criminal activities, and lust for power.

   Durga herself became one of these victims, falsely accused of attempting to kidnap and/or kill one of the royal princes. Although her status as a political prisoner, and as a person of the Brahmin caste gave her some protection, she suffered from extremely poor conditions of nutrition and cleanliness in the places she was imprisoned. She saw horrible tortures perpetrated against other women inmates, also falsely imprisoned. The image she presents of imprisoned women in tattered rags, worn day and night and washed only once a year, with their hair matted with filth and lice, of so-called demented women living in concrete rooms without even a mat to sleep on, huddled together, trying to keep their feet out of piles of excrement, women hung from pillars for days on end, their female organs protruding from their bodies because of ghastly violations perpetrated against their bodies... this is unforgettable, and totally inexcusable.

   Durga's book is a call for enlightenment and action...not only on the part of the world community to learn from Nepal's mistakes, but for Nepal itself to face its failings against its people and against its spiritual roots. Durga ends the book with an incredibly intelligent, thoughtful, and spiritual vsion for Nepal. She lays out a plan for government change, the role of the monarchy in developing a spiritual "dharmic" community, for the course of tourism, conservation, education, human rights, agriculture, and economy. Her vision of a country resurrected from the shadows into a true Shangri-La seems impossible to achieve as long as people continue to be greedy and corrupt, but Nepal would do well to heed this wise woman. Since finding refuge in America, I wonder what Durga Pokhrel is doing now, and if she herself will ever end up in a position of leadership in Nepal. Nepal should be grateful to her.

1 comments about From Hell to Redemption: A Memoir of the Holocaust.

1. While there can be no question as to the veracity of my cousin Boris' account of his Holocaust expereince, I found it curious that he makes no mention of my father, Julius Dalkoff. Boris' wife, Tamara, has gone on at great length as to how Julius helped bring them to the states after the liberation. Jacob is mentioned--even his wife Ethel. But not Julius.

   No, the Holocaust should never be forgotten. One would like to believe though, that those who helped should not be forgotten either.--Seymour Dalkoff

1 comments about Last Dance at the Hotel Kempinski: Creating a Life in the Shadow of History.

1. Hirsch's account of growing up German Jewish in England is wonderful - while his story is often laugh out loud funny, it remains a thoughtful exploration of the repercussions of the Holocaust and the pain in growing up with a difficult father. After Hirsch sets out on adulthood, his own story is not as compelling, but his encounters with elderly Holocaust survivors, as well as his attempts to come to terms with his father, are still fascinating.

1 comments about Maria Zacharczuk-Gruenwald: The true story of a young non-Jewish girl's dreams shattered by the Nazi regime.

1. This book is exciting and heartwarming that describes the story of a young girls experience in a horrible time of our history. The sacrifies and she had to endure without knowing if she was going to live or die and to sustain harsh treatment on a daily basis, suffering from medical complications and lack of food. This book is a true testiment of what war is and the many lives that our destroyed because of hatered and discrimination. A great book for the young and old.

1 comments about My War: Memoir of a Young Jewish Poet (Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust).

1. Edward Stankiewicz begins by describing his life in prewar Warsaw--his schooling, early love of Latin, and graduation from his gymnasium in 1939 shortly before the German invasion--and his escape to the Soviet-occupied zone. In Lwow (Lemberg) where he attended the university as a student of classics, he began writing Yiddish poems and joined the Writers' Club where he met other Jewish and Polish writers.

   After the Germans occupied Lwow, he was forced to work in a factory that provided the German army with leather and pelts. Later, in a German uniform, he fled to the Ukraine where he wandered from town to town for several months until he was captured by the Gestapo, beaten, and sent to Buchenwald.

   There, as a Pole hiding his Jewish identity, he ended up working as a scribe in the block for sick and dying prisoners. He also managed to continue writing poems, some of which are reproduced in this book.

   As hellish as Buchenwald was, the fact that its political prisoners had for the most part wrested control of its inner workings from the camp's criminal prisoners, meant that there was something of a buffer between the prisoners and the SS in charge of the camp. This situation allowed the prisoners to exact their own justice. Twice Stankiewicz saw prisoners kill other prisoners who had been kapos at other camps ("Buchenwald was meting out justice the prisoners' way."). Toward the end of the book the author describes the day--April 11, 1945--the camp was liberated by the Americans.

   The author's passion for poetry and language runs like a thread through the entire book (he is professor emeritus of Slavic linguistics and literary theory at Yale University). His memoir is an important source of new information and insights about previously little known aspects of wartime Eastern European intellectual life, as well as a moving story of survival against incredible odds.

   --Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust

No comments about Requiem Letters.

No comments about Saved By the Spirit of Lafayette: The French Righteous & the Hidden Children.

4 comments about At the Mercy of Strangers: Growing Up on the Edge of the Holocaust.

1. I really liked this book. I'm a teacher in adult education and I found this to be a very accessible, personal account of Ms. Loebl's experiences as a teenager hiding from the Nazis in Belgium during World War II. In telling her story she manages to bring in a lot of background information for people who don't know much about the war. The students liked it a lot.



2. This autobiography is moving, beautifully written, and hugely important to Holocaust Studies, Jewish Studies, and contemporary European History.

   As a memoir, _At the Mercy of Strangers_ alternates between two voices: that of the young German Jewish adolescent hiding from Nazi persecution (the book includes Loebl's actual diary that she kept while moving from place to place in Brussels) and the retrospective voice of Suzanne Loebl, accomplished art critic, children's book author, and science writer, who survived the war and moved to the U.S. in 1946. These two voices are so beautifully counterposed it is easy to see the resonances of each in the other.

   Her hiding places risky, the identity papers her family purchased for her detectably false, often hungry, always always alone, Loebl's diary recounts her daily struggle to find employment as a maid or governess (her cover from Nazi detection) and the daily reality of working for employers who, realizing she was Jewish, often took advantage of her, sometimes fired her at whim, and excluded her from even the most basic human kindnesses. Buffeted about in war-torn Brussels, Loebl's interrupted education, the disappearance of Jewish family, friends, teachers, resistance fighters, her constant hunger (physical, emotional, and intellectual) do not fundamentally dampen her spirit, which is so large it spills beyond the margins of every page.

   This book is so accomplished it is difficult to categorize; it includes so much World War II history woven in and out of both narrative voices it should be required reading for college students studying this historical period. As a piece of Holocaust literature, this book illustrates the complicated ways that the story of one highly intelligent, articulate German Jewish adolescent is, itself, a political one. (In the tradition of New German Cinema, I can see this book rewritten as a screenplay depicting the impact of World War II on the personal life of one individual.) Without a doubt, _At the Mercy of Strangers_ is also the finest autobiography this reviewer has ever read.




3. As a child in grade school, I heard and read more than my share about the Holocaust, as I was very interested. But never has a book struck me in this way--pulled me in. It suddenly made me look at World War II in a different way. It gave the war a personal aspect for me...put a name and a face on it. This book has allowed me to look at the Holocaust in the different way.



4. At the Mercy of Strangers : Growing Up on the Edge of the Holocaust was a decent book that displayed the times and feelings of the times during the holocaust fairly well.

1 comments about Glimpses: Through Holocaust and Liberation.

1. I have just finished Glimpses and want to say it made a deep impression upon me. It's a moving account of the World War II experiences of the author and his wife. It's beautifully expressed and one of the best written personal holocaust narratives I have read.

   While not a Jew myself, I have long had an interest in Jewish history and especially in that darkest of periods known as the holocaust. Every time I read a book like this it is painful to realize that for every person who survived, there were thousands who were less fortunate. To know that these two people have remained together for so many years and are now helping others to learn the truth about this period in history is especially satisfying.

No comments about My Years in Theresienstadt: How One Woman Survived the Holocaust.