Ron's View

Three weeks ago, I finished Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, which I had been reading off and on and writing about several times over the preceding two months. As I mentioned two weeks ago, it focus in the later chapters on the close of World War II, the arrival of Red Army, and the mass westward re-location of the German population reminded me that a year earlier I had thought of reading Timothy Snyder’s then-new Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. Anne Applebaum’s review in the New York Review of Books had caught my attention, and I quoted from the review at the time.

Two weeks ago I downloaded the free opening sample of Bloodlands to my Kindle. A day later, I bought and downloaded the full book. With the arrival of snow days later in the week, I began to read it and was surprised by how gripping Snyder’s account was of the events between 1932 and 1945 in Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. No short description can do the book justice, and in any case, you can read Applebaum’s account for that. But the book turns out to be an unexpected, and horrific, page turner.

I finally broke free from Bloodlands‘s grip early this past week, in mid World War II, because a new New York Review of Books had arrived and I decided to devote my evening reading to that. A day later, fearful of returning to the horrors, I took another night off. But once I returned, I was again swept along, finishing last night.

Snyder works on three levels, if I may be a bit simplistic. There are brief overviews of the broader historic European and world events, beginning with the close of World War I and the Russian Revolution. There are detailed accounts of the actual horrors, starting with Stalin’s mass starvation of millions of Ukrainian peasants in 1932-1933 in favor of shipping agricultural produce abroad in order to obtain the necessary capital for rapid industrialization (to simplify once again). And there are the searing descriptions, typically no more than a few sentences or a paragraph, of individual lives and deaths.

Special attention is given to the lands that formed the eastern half of Poland at the onset of war in 1939, the portion that the Soviet union took over by mutual agreement with Germany when the two invaded from east and west and divided the country between them. Two years later, Hitler would take these lands over on his way east toward Moscow, and three years after that the Red Army returned, pushing its way on to Berlin.

This of course isn’t news. Nor is the ultimate result, Stalin choosing to incorporate one-time eastern Poland into the Soviet republics of Ukraine, Belarus, and Lithuania, while getting the agreement of Churchill and Roosevelt that Poland would be shifted westward to include lands that had been part of Germany before the war. Millions of Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, and others were moved back and forth, a significant percentage dying along the way. And this was the least of the horrors. The Jews, of course, were by then already largely exterminated, as were (by design) millions of Poles, this suiting the interests of both Hitler and Stalin.

How all this came about, and why, with an explanation of the evolving political logic, forms the heart of the book. A central goal is the placement of the murder of six million Jews in a broader context, where it can be seen as not just an isolated abhorrence but part of a larger universe of mass killings. Snyder argues that there is in particular a need to recognize that typical accounts of the Holocaust are skewed, and for a particular historical reason: much of what we knew for decades was based on the camps discovered by the US and British troops in the west, whereas much of the killing was done in the “bloodlands” to the east, lands conquered by Soviet troops. This had two consequences in terms of our sources of information. First, Stalin did not allow news to come out about what was found. Second, much of the killing in the east was by shooting, or mobile gassing, the gas chambers of Auschwitz for example coming into use only after the majority of the killing was done. Thus, to the extent that we typically picture the Holocaust as consisting of Jews being sent to and dying in concentration camps, we are viewing only a small part of the story.

Here’s a short passage from Snyder’s Preface:

At the end of the Second World War, American and British forces liberated German concentration camps such as Belsen and Dachau, but the western Allies liberated none of the important death facilities. The Germans carried out all of they major killing policies on lands subsequently occupied by the Soviets. The Red Army liberated Auschwitz, and it liberated the sites of Treblinka, Sobibór, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek as well. American and British forces reached none of the bloodlands and saw none of the major killing sites. It is not just that American and British forces saw none of the places where the Soviets killed, leaving the crimes of Stalinism to be documented after the end of the Cold War and the opening of the archives. Is that they never saw the places where the Germans killed, meaning that understanding of Hitler’s crimes has taken just as long.

I am so glad that I read Bloodlands, and didn’t content myself with a few reviews. A natural book to read next might be Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, which has sat above my desk for years. But 831 pages?! And small print? I don’t know. Some day. I’ll then want to re-purchase it for my Kindle, the price for that currently being set at $16.99. (What’s up with that?) For now, I’m ready for something completely different.

Europe in 1933

[Map credit: Mike King, in New York Review of Books]

I finished Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia two Saturdays ago and have intended to write about it since, but I’m struggling with what to say. I first wrote about it at the end of November, having been inspired to order it earlier in the month because of Andrew Stuttaford’s Wall Street Journal review, in which he wrote:

Max Egremont’s idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, “Forgotten Land” is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.

I commented at the time that I was “some 70 pages into Egremont’s book and thoroughly enjoying it.” But I then became distracted by a sequence of other books, returning to it intermittently but not making further progress until late December, at which point I wrote:

I’ve been slowly working my way through Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia in recent days, reaching not quite the halfway point yesterday. And what do you know? It’s reviewed by Richard Eder today in the NYT, not entirely flatteringly. I’ve been convincing myself that I enjoy Egremont’s meandering approach. A little World War I history here, a little World War II history there. A few words about one historical figure, then another. It’s not entirely clear why we spend so many pages in Ypres reading about British World War I war dead. Belgium’s a long way from East Prussia. But that’s the journey we sign up for when we read the book. Eder clearly has less patience for it than I do.

Will I make it to the end?

That Eder review almost stopped me in my tracks, given my eagerness to get to the books I had lined up to read next. Fortunately, I kept going — fortunately because of the astonishing tales that awaited me. In the latter stages of the book, the focus is on the lives of selected residents of East Prussia in the buildup to World War II, during the war itself, and in its immediate aftermath. We’re talking about land that passed back and forth in complicated ways between Germany, Poland, Lithuania, and the Soviet Union.

A chapter is devoted to the historic German city of Memel, now the Lithuanian city of Klaipėda. A recurring character in several chapters is Walter Frevert, an East Prussian forester who becomes the head forest master for Hermann Göring. Göring, of course, would become the head of the German Air Force, but when the Nazis initially came to power in 1933, he was put in charge of Prussia, coming often to East Prussia to hunt. As we learn, Frevert’s responsibilities grew as Göring expanded the forest holdings in Germany’s eastern lands. Expansion might mean, for instance, forcibly moving Poles from their villages to be re-settled farther east and then razing the villages, an operation Frevert oversaw. Frevert would take on forest duties in West Germany after the war and become a popular figure, through radio and TV programs and his memoir Rominten, about the hunting preserve in East Prussia that he once ran.

Egremont tells these stories in an understated manner that allows the details to speak for themselves, which they do quite powerfully. Another example is the story of the last Jews left in Königsberg in January 1945, whom the Germans decide to move westward before the inevitable arrival of the Red Army. They are forcibly marched to the Baltic town of Palmnicken. Two thousand die or are killed along the way. The survivors were driven down to the beach, into the frozen sea, and shot. The details of the march are described from the perspective of some of the East Prussian natives, some of whom would go through their own hell when the Russians arrived.

The closing chapters of the book reminded me that last year I had thought of reading Timothy Snyder’s 2010 book Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, which was widely and well reviewed. Anne Applebaum’s review in the New York Review of Books (from which the map at the top is taken) had especially gotten my attention. As Applebaum explains,

Snyder’s ambition is to persuade the West—and the rest of the world—to see the war in a broader perspective. He does so by disputing popular assumptions about victims, death tolls, and killing methods—of which more in a moment—but above all about dates and geography. The title of this book, Bloodlands, is not a metaphor. Snyder’s “bloodlands,” which others have called “borderlands,” run from Poznan in the West to Smolensk in the East, encompassing modern Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus, and the edge of western Russia (see map [above]). This is the region that experienced not one but two—and sometimes three—wartime occupations. This is also the region that suffered the most casualties and endured the worst physical destruction.

More to the point, this is the region that experienced the worst of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s ideological madness. During the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s, the lethal armies and vicious secret policemen of two totalitarian states marched back and forth across these territories, each time bringing about profound ethnic and political changes. In this period, the city of Lwów was occupied twice by the Red Army and once by the Wehrmacht. After the war ended it was called L’viv, not Lwów, it was no longer in eastern Poland but in western Ukraine, and its Polish and Jewish pre-war population had been murdered or deported and replaced by ethnic Ukrainians from the surrounding countryside. In this same period, the Ukrainian city of Odessa was occupied first by the Romanian army and then by the Wehrmacht before being reoccupied by the Soviet Union. Each time power changed hands there were battles and sieges, and each time an army retreated from the city it blew up the harbor or massacred Jews. Similar stories can be told about almost any place in the region.

This region was also the site of most of the politically motivated killing in Europe—killing that began not in 1939 with the invasion of Poland, but in 1933, with the famine in Ukraine. Between 1933 and 1945, fourteen million people died there, not in combat but because someone made a deliberate decision to murder them. These deaths took place in the bloodlands, and not accidentally so: “Hitler and Stalin rose to power in Berlin and Moscow,” writes Snyder, “but their visions of transformation concerned above all the lands between.”

Egremont, of course, is not writing a comprehensive history. He is examining a handful of people who are victims, collaborators, or perpetrators in one region, East Prussia, that forms part of Snyder’s larger bloodlands story. When I set Egremont’s haunting book aside, I was tempted to turn directly to Bloodlands to better understand that larger story. I haven’t yet, for fear that it will keep me from other books and other projects. But yesterday I downloaded the opening portion that Amazon makes available as a Kindle sample. It won’t be long before I buy and download the entire book. Perhaps I’ll have more to say after reading it.

I wrote last night about how much I’ll miss the daily book review in the Wall Street Journal when the paper’s delivery finally ceases. A month ago it led me to Robert Crease’s World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for an Absolute System of Measurement, the subject of last night’s post. Two and a half weeks ago, I was introduced by Andrew Stuttaford to Max Egremont’s Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia. I’m now some 70 pages into Egremont’s book and thoroughly enjoying it.

Here is the opening of Stuttaford’s review:

In 1945, Stalin seized East Prussia, Germany’s venerable redoubt on the Baltic Sea, as a spoil of war. A portion went to the “People’s Republic” that the Soviets had just created in Poland. He kept the rest. The last surviving Germans were killed or deported. The cozy old Königsberg of the Teutonic Knights—the home, during the Enlightenment, of no less than Immanuel Kant—was transformed into Kaliningrad—a bleak Soviet place named after Mikhail Kalinin, the token peasant who was titular head of Stalin’s USSR.

Nearly 70 years later, the countries behind these borders have changed, but the frontiers have not, and will not. The Polish part is finally and truly Polish; the sliver of East Prussia given to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic is now a part of independent Lithuania; the rest of the old Soviet slice is a seedy Russian exclave surrounded by the European Union. The only Germans there are tourists, in search of an elusive land that lingers on in family lore and in the dreams of the dispossessed for a vanished, fondly imagined, past.

Max Egremont’s idiosyncratic, disjointed and beautifully written volume makes an ideal guide to this shifting, shadowy realm. In part a piecemeal history of the final half-century of German East Prussia, in part a travelogue through what was left behind, “Forgotten Land” is gently elegiac. Shifting constantly between present and a variety of pasts, it is as wistful as a flick-through of an old photo album, as melancholy as a rain-spattered northern autumn afternoon.

Immanuel Kant may be the most famous genius associated to Königsberg, but the one whom Königsberg brings to my mind is Kant’s near contemporary Leonhard Euler, the greatest mathematician of the eighteenth century. Euler, a Swiss native, did not actually live in Königsberg. He spent much of his career in St. Petersburg and Berlin. But he knew Königsberg’s layout, and one of his early successes was his 1735 solution of the Königsberg bridge problem.*

I learned as a child about the problem and Euler’s solution, prompting me to wonder where Königsberg was. I was puzzled on finding that it lay in the Soviet Union and was called Kaliningrad. In due course, I read some of the relevant history, but new puzzles were introduced, such as why Prussia had an outpost so far east, embedded in modern-day Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. On reading Stuttaford’s review, I realized that Egremont’s book offered me the opportunity, at last, to put the pieces in their proper places. Plus, I could wallow in elegiac, wistful melancholy. I wasted no time downloading and starting Forgotten Land.

*Perhaps a few words on the Königsberg bridge problem would be in order. Below you see a drawing of the seven bridges that crossed the Pregel River in Königsberg in Euler’s time. (I have taken this drawing from Wikipedia, where it was the picture of the month on the Mathematics Portal for September 2011 and credited to Bogdan Giuşcă.)

The problem is to find a route through the city that crosses each bridge exactly once. Euler proved that there is no way to do this. In so doing, he laid the foundation for the modern-day mathematical field known as graph theory.

Albert Pujols hitting his second home run of three tonight in the 7th inning

[Tim Sharp, Reuters]

This is a little embarrassing. Little did I know while writing my post earlier this evening about the 1960 World Series, in which I mentioned seeing Bobby Richardson get a World Series record six RBIs in one game, that Albert Pujols was in the process of doing the very same thing. I noted that Hideki Matsui duplicated Richardson’s feat two years ago. If I had taken the time to watch tonight’s World Series game instead of writing about one half a century ago, I could have seen history being made instead of being stuck in history.

In fairness to myself, the game was essentially over when Pujols tied the record with two out in the top of the ninth. His solo homer upped the Cardinal lead over the Rangers from 15-7 to 16-7. Still, a marvelous feat. After grounding out in the first, Pujols singled in the fourth, singled in the fifth, hit a three-run homer in the sixth, a two-run homer in the seventh, and the solo home run in the ninth. That’s some kind of night. The three home runs tied the famous series record for most home runs in a game, set by Babe Ruth (1926, 1928) and tied by Reggie Jackson (1977).

I seem to be reading two books at once. I just wrote about Harold Bloom’s The Shadow of a Great Rock. No sooner had I ordered it, and while I awaited its delivery, I came upon the review eight days ago in the Sunday NYT of Charles C. Mann’s 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, which was published three weeks ago. In one of those spontaneous moments that the Kindle makes possible, I bought and downloaded it.

Well, not quite. I looked around to see what I could learn about it online first, and was led to a brief note by Tyler Cowen on his blog Marginal Revolution back in May. Cowen wrote: “I am spellbound reading it, it will be one of the best books of this year, and, although I know this area somewhat, I am learning fascinating information on literally every page. Mann stresses how much it mattered to suddenly be living in the “Homogenocene,” where Asia, Europe, and the New World suddenly started becoming more alike. Mexico City had the world’s first Chinatown and was the first global city. The discussion of the importance of the potato, and in general New World agriculture, surpasses previous accounts and he explains the importance of knowing how to make chuño.”

After reading that, I bought the book.

In his NYT review, Ian Morris explains its premise.

“1493” picks up where Mann’s best seller, “1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus,” left off. In 1491, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were almost impassable barriers. America might as well have been on another planet from Europe and Asia. But Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean the following year changed everything. Plants, animals, microbes and cultures began washing around the world, taking tomatoes to Massachusetts, corn to the Philippines and slaves, markets and malaria almost everywhere. It was one world, ready or not.

[snip]

[Mann suggests] that only by understanding what Crosby called “the Columbian Exchange” — the transfer of plants, animals, germs and people across continents over the last 500 years — can we make sense of contemporary globalization. The lesson of history, Mann argues, is that “from the outset globalization brought both enormous economic gains and ecological and social tumult that threatened to offset those gains.”

With admirable evenhandedness, he shows how the costs and benefits of globalization have always been inseparable. We cannot have one without the other. Bringing the potato to Europe made it possible for the Irish famine to kill millions when the potatoes were stricken by blight, but it also kept other millions of half-starved peasants alive. Bringing malaria to the Americas depopulated some parts of the New World, but it also kept European armies out of other parts. Mann can even see the point of view of the chainsaw-­wielding loggers who deforested the Philippines so that Americans could have cheap furniture: “These agents of destruction were just putting food on the table.”

[snip]

Most impressive of all, he manages to turn plants, germs, insects and excrement into the lead actors in his drama while still parading before us an unforgettable cast of human characters. He makes even the most unpromising-­sounding subjects fascinating. I, for one, will never look at a piece of rubber in quite the same way now that I have been introduced to the debauched nouveaux riches of 19th-­century Brazil, guzzling Champagne from bathtubs and gunning one another down in the streets of Manaus.

I made my way through the Prologue and first chapter soon after downloading the book, but then The Shadow of a Great Rock arrived, waylaying me until this morning, when I picked it up again. So far so good. I don’t have much to add. Perhaps I will once I’m further along.

Famed Babylonian tablet Plimpton 322*

[Christine Proust and Columbia University]

I read a marvelous passage earlier this week that I would like to share. It’s an old one, from a book published in 1952, but it’s new to me. The book: The Exact Sciences in Antiquity by Otto Neugebauer. Neugebauer is a giant of twentieth-century history, the expert on ancient Babylonian mathematics and astronomy. An Austrian, he studied engineering, mathematics, and physics in Graz, then Munich, and then Göttingen, where he began to work on the history of ancient mathematics. He left Germany for Copenhagen in 1934, then moved on to the US, where he spent the remainder of his career at Brown and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Neugebauer died in 1990. I was aware of his name and vaguely of his importance to the history of mathematics when we spent the year at the Institute in 1987-1988, but unfortunately I didn’t think to meet him or learn more about his work. Talk about missed opportunities. But now, 23 years later, I’ve been looking at some of his work.

In the 1930′s and 1940′s, in a series of books, he translated and interpreted the mathematics on the Babylonian cuneiform tablets that can be found in many of the world’s great museums and that date to the time period of 1900 BCE-1600 BCE. The book on exact sciences in antiquity from which I am about to quote is more of an overview that grew out of lectures he gave at Cornell in 1949. In the Preface, he explains that the nature of the presentation led him to omit the qualifications he might ordinarily have offered in a more scholarly work, adding that he has “enjoyed the possibility of being compelled for once to abandon all learned apparatus and to pretend to know when actually I am guessing.” The paragraph concludes with the passage below, which I leave for your enjoyment without further comment.

This does not imply that I have ignored facts. Indeed I have consistently tried to keep as close as possible to the source material. Only in its selection, in its arrangement, and in its coherent interpretation have I permitted myself much greater freedom than is usual in technical publications. And in order to counteract somewhat the impression of security which easily emerges from general discussions I have often inserted methodological remarks to remind the reader of the exceedingly slim basis on which, of necessity, is built any discussion of historical developments from which we are separated by many centuries. The common belief that we gain “historical perspective” with increasing distance seems to me utterly to misrepresent the actual situation. What we gain is merely confidence in generalizations which we would never dare make if we had access to the real wealth of contemporary evidence.

*The photo at the top is taken from a NYT article by Nicholas Wade last fall on the occasion of an exhibition of cuneiform tablets at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Unfortunately, the exhibition closed last December, or else I would be making plans to see it during our upcoming trip to New York. Wade explained that the “considerable mathematical knowledge of the Babylonians was uncovered by the Austrian mathematician Otto E. Neugebauer, who died in 1990. Scholars since then have turned to the task of understanding how the knowledge was used. The items in the exhibition are drawn from the archaeological collections of Columbia, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania.” Be sure to look at the accompanying slide show, which includes more tablets, a photo of Otto Neugebauer, and his hand drawing of both sides of a tablet.

Three nights ago, I finished reading Marc Levinson’s The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. My interest in it stemmed from a short post Paul Krugman wrote at the end of January, a post I quoted before in explaining what led me to William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. Krugman:

some commenters argue that the really transformative change came in the 19th century. There’s a lot to that.

As it happens, I’m rereading William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West — yes, on my Kindle, which has made a serious improvement in my life. And everyone with any interest in economics should read his account of the rise of the Chicago Board of Trade. Railroads changed everything. It wasn’t just the fact that stuff could be shipped further, faster, cheaper; the railroad also led to the replacement of concrete with abstract forms of ownership (the farmer owned a receipt for a bushel of grain, not a particular sack), standard-setting, futures markets, and on and on. If you’ve read Marc Levinson’s The Box, about containerization (which you should), it’s startling to see how many of the themes were prefigured by the grain trade, as standard-sized rail cars replaced flatboats, as grain elevators essentially began treating grain as a fluid rather than a solid, as conveyor belts replaced stevedores toting sacks.

Cronon found himself unexpectedly in the national news in late March when he wrote about political developments in his home state of Wisconsin and found himself the target of a far-reaching freedom-of-information request by the state’s Republican party. I wrote about this at the time and was inspired to download Cronon’s book to my Kindle. A couple of weeks later, I wrote that “the book was a thrilling experience. It is the most astonishing blend of history, geography, economics, and ecology that I can imagine.”

The Box went on my list of books to read some day. Some day turned out to be Father’s Day, when Joel bought it for me. It doesn’t have the scope or the beauty of Cronon’s book, but it tells a great story nonetheless, of how containerization changed world trade. This is examined at many levels, with Levinson examining the impact on port authorities and local governments, unions, the US military, cities, trains, truckers, manufacturers, national economies, and so on. Typically, each major subject is discussed in its own chapter. Union negotiations. Shipping goods to Vietnam. Developments on the East and Gulf coasts of the US plus the West coast. Developments in Britain, the rest of Europe, and Asia.

Many of the key developments coincided with my youth, as the Manhattan and Brooklyn port collapsed, with most of the action moving to new container terminals in Newark and Elizabeth, and as the longshorement’s unions fought their final big battles against modernization and automation. I was vaguely aware of this from reading the local news growing up, but I didn’t understand just how dramatic and swift the changes were. By the time I moved to Boston, as the book explains, its life as a major port had ended. Because it didn’t invest quickly enough in containerization, shippers could truck containers to New Jersey and have them put on boats there at lower cost. Similarly, the relative roles of west coast ports underwent a dramatic shift, with Oakland taking from San Francisco the dominant position in the Bay Area, but the Bay Area as a whole losing out ultimately to LA and Long Beach.

I learned when I moved here that Seattle was growing as a port because of containers and its location closer to Japan. As the book explains, shipping wasn’t a matter of getting goods to a port to serve the port’s local region. Rather, the key was to make the ocean crossing and get the goods off the ship as quickly as possible, to be put on trains or trucks for distribution nationally. But, as the book mentions in passing, Seattle took a big hit when Tacoma opened a new container port and stole a large part of Seattle’s business. This kind of story was played out all over the world. How London and Liverpool lost out to Felixstowe is an especially interesting tale.

I found a couple of annoyances as I read the book. Basic facts are repeated time and again, as if the reader is assumed to be inattentive. Or maybe the author or editor was. And the Kindleization of the book is not well done, at least for the first half of the book, with frequent breaks in the middle of words and occasional concatenation of the second half of a split word with the subsequent word. There’s no loss of meaning when this happens, but it stops the reader every time, even if just momentarily. Annoyances aside, the book tells a fascinating tale. And as Krugman noted, after reading the Cronon book, I couldn’t help but notice the overlap in themes between the two books.

Alas, re-reading Krugman’s post, I realize I have yet another book to read. Following the passage I quoted above, he goes on to say, “Add in the telegraph — the Victorian Internet, as another must-read book puts it — and it was an incredible change.” That other must-read book is Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-line Pioneers. I’ll add it to my list.

Tonight the Boston Bruins return to Vancouver, BC, for the seventh and final game of the Stanley Cup against the Vancouver Canucks. It’s been a wild series, as all hockey fans know, with the Canucks winning three painfully close games in Vancouver (1-0 with the goal scored in the final seconds, 3-2 in overtime, 1-0), while the Bruins have won three blowouts in Boston (8-1, 4-0, 5-2 and not as close as that suggests).

It’s not that often that the hockey world focuses its attention on this part of the continent. But there was a time when the world did so routinely. Before attention shifts again, let me recall those days of Pacific Northwest hockey glory.

We’re talking about 1915 to 1922, when the Stanley Cup was a competition between the champion of the Pacific Coast Hockey League and the champion of the National Hockey Association (which in 1918 became the National Hockey League). Under this arrangement, a team here in the northwest played for the Cup every year.

Reviewing the data, which you can find here, we see that Vancouver was the Stanley Cup champion in 1915. That would be the Vancouver Millionaires, who defeated the Ottawa Senators. The Portland Rosebuds lost the next year to Montreal, and then in 1917 our very own Seattle Metropolitans beat Montreal for the cup, bringing the cup to the US for the first time. We missed out in 1918, when Vancouver lost to Toronto, but we were back in the cup competition in 1919. Alas, the series was cancelled midway through because of the flu epidemic, with Seattle and Montreal tied. A year later, we were in it again, but lost to Ottawa.

That’s three cup appearances in four years for Seattle!

Then it was Vancouver’s turn, losing in successive years to Ottawa and to Toronto. By this point, a third league had entered the fray, the Western Canada Hockey League, soon to become the Western Hockey League. Soon thereafter, the PCHA folded, with the WHL absorbing the Vancouver and Victoria teams. In 1925, the Victoria team, the Cougars, beat the Montreal Canadiens for the Cup, and in 1926, they lost it to the Montreal Maroons.

With that, the WHL folded, bringing Pacific Northwest Stanley Cup hockey to an end, at least until the NHL added the Vancouver Canucks in 1970. Since 1927, the Stanley Cup has been an NHL-only competition.

Will the Cup return to the northwest? We’ll soon know. But how about returning a team to Seattle? It’s a continuing joke that the NHL has teams in some of the most unlikely southern outposts, but none in this historic hockey hotbed. We’re ready and willing. And imagine the rivalry with Vancouver.

I have already written about our first half-day in Portland, last Friday. Now I’ll go over the highlights of our one full day there, Saturday.

1. Heathman Restaurant. We couldn’t get in the night before, but no problem Saturday morning. We had a fine breakfast. Then we headed up to the room and got ready for our outing.

2. Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center. We drove up to the Old Town Chinatown neighborhood, which includes the Portland New Chinatown/Japantown Historic District, and parked just a block up from the center. It opened at 11:00 and we were there a few minutes early. At 11:00, we headed in. There’s an on-going exhibit, Oregon Nikkei: Reflections of an American Community, that we were enjoying when a guide came up to us and asked if we’d been to the center before. Once we said no, she began to give us a tour. This was a mixed blessing, given that the exhibit itself seemed up to that point to be extremely well laid out, with excellent explanations of the photos and objects. She raced us ahead, not allowing us to absorb all the items, but she also had much to say that was of interest. Then another group walked in and she dropped us in mid-sentence. Fair enough. By that point, we were on the threshold of the exhibit we had come to see, a temporary exhibit scheduled to end a day later, Taken: FBI.

The exhibit is no longer listed online at the Center’s website. Too bad. Here’s a series of photos someone has posted. It was a small exhibit, focusing on a handful of the men and one woman who were rounded up by the FBI on December 7, 1941. Some of the relevant background is laid out in a series of signs as one enters the exhibit, the key point being that already in the 1930s, Roosevelt gave the FBI permission to start collecting information on Japanese Americans, so they would know who to pick up first if war came. Mind you, the people to round up were not dangerous. They weren’t spies, or collaborators. They were simply successful members of the community, community leaders. Those focused on in the exhibit led exemplary lives. Extraordinary lives even. As you read about how each of them lived before the war, and how they tried to restore their lives afterwards, the message of national madness, irrationality, and hysteria comes through clearly.

How could it happen? Well, the exhibit takes pains to remind the reader of the racial stereotyping taken for granted 70 years ago, not that that justifies anything. Only in the final exhibit signage is it hinted that we really haven’t advanced all that far, as we continue to narrow the rights of certain ethnic groups in response to war, a war we now find ourselves in that by definition will never end. And indeed we seem willingly to take away everybody’s rights. Witness last week’s extension of the Patriot Act.

But back to the internment of Japanese Americans. Just a week before our tour, the acting solicitor general of the US, Neal Katyal, wrote about errors made by his office at the time of Pearl Harbor.

The Ringle Report, from the Office of Naval Intelligence, found that only a small percentage of Japanese Americans posed a potential security threat, and that the most dangerous were already known or in custody. But the Solicitor General did not inform the Court of the report, despite warnings from Department of Justice attorneys that failing to alert the Court “might approximate the suppression of evidence.” Instead, he argued that it was impossible to segregate loyal Japanese Americans from disloyal ones. Nor did he inform the Court that a key set of allegations used to justify the internment, that Japanese Americans were using radio transmitters to communicate with enemy submarines off the West Coast, had been discredited by the FBI and FCC. And to make matters worse, he relied on gross generalizations about Japanese Americans, such as that they were disloyal and motivated by “racial solidarity.”

See also the LA times editorial on this last Friday.

3. Japanese American Historical Plaza. From the center, we walked two blocks over to the Willamette River to see the Japanese American Historical Plaza, a part of Portland’s Waterfront Park. As the park site explains, “On August 3, 1990, the Japanese American Historical Plaza was dedicated to the memory of those who were deported to inland internment camps during World War II. In the memorial garden, artwork tells the story of the Japanese people in the Northwest – of immigration, elderly immigrants, native-born Japanese Americans, soldiers who fought in US military services during the war, and the business people who worked hard and had hope for the children of the future. A sculpture by Jim Gion, Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, also graces the plaza.”

We walked around, read the poetry on the stones, took in the atmosphere, examined the Gion sculpture. Most people milling around were overflow from Portland’s Saturday Market , which was in full swing just south of the plaza. We’d gladly have checked it out, but time was running out on our parking meter, and we had to get on with our plans. We could easily have spent the full day in Portland. Or we could have spent the day visiting wineries. We had decided to try to squeeze both in, and it was time to head out of town for our one winery visit.

4. Red Curry Thai Restaurant. We weren’t looking to eat Thai food. All we wanted to do was drive out past Beaverton to Ponzi Vineyards, where we thought we might hook up with our niece Leigh Anne. But when we were on the highway headed out to Beaverton, she texted us that she was a ways out, so once we got off the highway, we decided to stop at the first reasonable restaurant to eat lunch and kill time. The first reasonable restaurant turned out to be Red Curry. In fact, it was the first restaurant period. Just past the exit was a new strip mall. We turned in, found a 7-11, an Indian food market, and Red Curry. It didn’t look like much as we drove past. It’s extremely narrow, though deep, and we couldn’t see much. Once we walked in, we found it to be surprisingly elegant. I see now that it’s been open only two months. The reviews at urbanspoon that I’ve just been looking at sum it up well: “A very nice, elegant Thai restaurant in the ‘burbs! Nice decor and tasty menu!” “Don’t let the small store front fool you. They did a very good job decorating the place. The food can rival some of the better Thai restaurants.” “just the best food ever. … a fantastic meal. Service was very gracious. Decor is way above caliber for a restaurant in an office park.” We weren’t looking for much, but we had an excellent meal.

5. Ponzi Vineyards. Why Ponzi? No good reason, but there were reasons: (i) It must be the single closest winery to downtown Portland. As one heads west, past housing developments, one crosses Roy Rogers Road and all the development ends. I missed it, but Gail says there’s a sign saying you’ve entered an agricultural district. And moments later, there’s a turn down a small road that deadends at the winery entrance. (ii) The hotel gave us a card for a free tasting for two. Not that the tasting would have been so expensive. But we decided to take advantage.

The tasting room was crowded, and became even more so while we did our business. They start everyone off with a free tasting of their pinot gris. Then one can get a three-wine flight for $10. This is what our card entitled us to for free, so we took it. A rosé, a white, a red. I think they call their first one their rosato. Next was their new release arneis, which we were told would be sold out within the week. And then their lower end pinot noir. From there we could pay another $5 for their pinot noir reserve and $2 for their dessert wine, the gelato. We tried them. Then we asked how the reserve compared to the next level up in their pinot noirs, which was not available for tasting. She did pull from somewhere a chardonnay for us to taste unasked. And then we proceeded to choose wines to make up a case, with the 15% case discount. Four of the gelato, a few of the higher end pinot noirs, three of the arneis, a chardonnay, another white. Now we have some tasting to do.

6. Japanese Garden. We never did meet up with our niece. It was time to head back to Portland so we could visit the famed Japanese Garden. First we had to find it. I knew it was in Washington Park, just above downtown. I suspected we could get off US 26 at the zoo exit before reaching downtown, on the assumption that the zoo is in Washington Park, and then drive around until we found the garden. But I didn’t trust my suspicion. Or listen to Gail’s advice to take Canyon Road, the next exit. Instead, we drove right into downtown, back out to the park, but entered the park on a road that bypasses everything and puts you right back onto US 26 heading out of town. At that point, when the zoo exit appeared again, I took it. This had the benefit that we did in fact get to drive through much of the park and see what it has to offer. The zoo. The children’s museum. The world forestry center discovery museum. The arboretum. Holocaust and Vietnam memorials. The famous rose garden. And finally, the Japanese Garden. We couldn’t find parking, and suddenly we were right out of the park, into a fancy residential neighborhood that looks down from the hills to downtown.

We parked, walked back to the shuttle stop, took the shuttle up the steep hill to the garden entrance, paid our $9.50 apiece, got a map, and entered. Map in hand, we followed the suggested route and saw many of the sights. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the amazing view that would have awaited us on another day of Mount Hood, sitting above the city. We never did see Mount Hood. It was quite a weekend of weather, with showers, hailstorms, sun, rain, but never views of the Cascades. And our time in the garden was probably the hottest, sunniest time of the entire trip. Highlights? Gosh. It’s all really quite lovely. I’d like to go again earlier in the day. We were near our limit in terms of taking in new sights by the time we got there.

We walked down the hill to the tennis courts, considered going down below the courts to the rose garden, but decided instead to call it a day. Minutes later, we were back in the Heathman.

7. Lacrosse. This was Saturday of Memorial Day weekend. Normally, that means I’m watching the NCAA men’s lacrosse championship semifinals. I wrote last week about the earlier rounds. We had already missed the first semifinal, in which Denver’s historic ride came to an end against Virginia, 14 to 8. But we were in our room in time to pick up the Maryland-Duke semifinal. Maryland won an amazingly low scoring game, 6-3. Time for dinner.

8. Pearl District. We headed up to the Pearl District, anticipating a meal at one of Portland’s renowned brew pubs. Alas, when we got to Deschutes, we were looking at a one-hour wait. We headed back to Henry’s Tavern, which sits within the old Blitz-Weinhard Brewery building. The doorman had warned us didn’t have the greatest food, though it did have the largest beer selection. And the wait was only 15 minutes. Soon we were seated. What we didn’t know was that we would then have a 40 minute wait for our appetizer, hummus and bread, which Gail wasn’t convinced we even needed. And 3 minutes later, our dinner came. A fiasco. The waitress apologized, I suggested we needed more than an apology, she said yes, of course, the manager already knew and would be coming to discuss adjustments. When the manager did come, she told us several tables had the same problem. The bread, it turns out, is really a thin pizza, essentially, with herbs but no toppings, and the pizza guy somehow flaked out. She assured us we wouldn’t have to pay for it, and we could have dessert on the house, which we did. Not the best experience. What can you do? Maybe next time we should wait at Deschutes.

9. Hotel. We had anticipated wandering through Powell’s Books after dinner, it being just the next block over. But dinner was so long that we were ready to call it an evening. We headed back to the hotel and our day came to an end.

If you read my report From the Book Front a month ago, you might have been anticipating a post about Jennifer Egan’s novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I had suggested was next on my reading list (and which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction just a couple of days later). If it were on my Kindle, I bet I would have read it in the following week. But it isn’t, and I seem to have a strange difficulty lately picking up physical books, so it has gone unread.

Instead, thanks to my friend Werner’s suggestion and its availability on the Kindle, I unexpectedly find myself reading Miranda Carter’s tri-biography George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I. (Published last year in the US, but in 2009 in the UK under the title The Three Emperors: Three Cousins, Three Empires and the Road to World War One.)

Werner wrote to me last week that he had just finished it and had been unable to put it down. I got home and downloaded the opening sample, but evidently to the wrong device, so when I went to read it that night, it wasn’t there. I saw Werner the next day and we talked awhile about the book. This time, when I got home, I decided to forget the sample. I paid for and downloaded the whole book.

I was soon reading about the difficult labor in 1859 of Queen Victoria’s oldest child, eighteen-year-old Vicky, and the birth of Victoria’s first grandchild, Willy, eventual Kaiser Wilhelm II and grandson of soon-to-be Kaiser Wilhelm I. A couple of days ago, I read about the childhood of Victoria’s grandson George, the eventual King George V, and now I’m on to the childhood of the future Tsar Nicholas II. Not new stories, to be sure, but stories well told so far.

I wrote yesterday about our seeing The King’s Speech two nights ago. It was fun to read about the young George in the morning and then watch him in the evening as his life came to a close. I seem to have skipped over some important details in-between. I’m counting on the book to fill in the gap.

It’s a bit jarring to realize that just two weeks ago we (well, not me, but some of us) were watching the wedding of George’s granddaughter’s grandson. Time moves right along, and as it does, one realizes that Prince William isn’t so far removed from Queen Victoria. With more than a few twits in between.