Welcome to Tostada Speaks Blog.
I'm an avid reader and author, with a wide range of interests. Guest bloggers, most from fellow Taylor Street Publishing authors, will be here from time to time as well.
Stop by, look around, read what we have, and by all means, leave your comments for us.
My author's website is www.geogepolleyauthor.com, which also has its own blog.
I am willing to bet that most people know very little about the Ukraine and its history beyond the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and perhaps the Ukraine's independence when the Soviet Union unraveled. Fewer still may know about Stalin’s brutal campaign to starve the Ukrainian people into submission in the years before World War II. That is the world into which Andy Szpuk’s father, Stefan, was born and where lived until, as a young teenager, he and his father were forced to flee their home village to avoid execution at the hands of the invading German army. After a few months with his father’s sister and her family in a town further west, the whole town was forced to flee to the west to avoid the now retreating Germans. From there, Stefan and his father are pretty much on their own.
Imagine being 14 or 15 years old, being on the run, wondering what has happened to your mother, and what will happen to you as you flee into the Carpathian Mountains, cross into Slovakia (Czechoslovakia), into the Czech region ... and then your father is killed in an air raid, leaving you absolutely alone and knowing only one thing: you must find food, and you must continue going west until you reach Germany just as the war has ended and you are at the very end of your rope.
This memoir is a page-turner that will keep you on the edge of your seat, make you cheer and weep and give a high five to Stefan when he makes it to England and begins a new life. Then another high five when he and his family visit his old home village to meet family members he has never seen.
My hat is off to his son Andy for writing his father’s story down so the rest of us can read it, and to the Ukrainian people for never giving up no matter what the obstacles are.
What’s in a Name? Brendan Gisby asks in the title of the Foreword to this interesting history family sage. “What’s in a name?” is a question that millions of people ask every day, often chasing down the origin of their own family name. It’s a question that intrigued one of my own ancestors, Benjamin Kendall Emerson, that he traced the history of his own family from the time they first arrived in Ipswich, Massachusetts. A great-aunt gave me the book he had privately published in 1900; my eldest son now has it. Out of curiosity, I just now looked it up online and discovered that it’s been reprinted by Kessenger Legacy Reprints and is available on amazon.com. So who knows where The Five Sons of Charlie Gisby will end up in years to come? Hopefully read and reread as often as I read that book about one branch of my family.
But even more interesting than the question “What’s in a name?” is the question who is there?, because this tells the stories of the people, where they were from, how they got there, what happened to them during their lives It’s an interesting adventure, and Brendan and his cousin Phil Gisby have written a most interesting history of their family.
If you enjoy reading family histories, if the name “Gisby” shows up somewhere in your family tree, or if you’re just curious, buy yourself a copy of this fine book. Brendan Gisby, by the way, is the author of several fine books, including a memoir of his father (The Bookie’s Runner) and The Island of Whispers, being his most recent.
A review of Kumiko Kakehashi: So Sad to Fall in Battle, An account of war based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters from Iwo Jima.Ballantine Books, 2007.
As I Read Kumiko Kakehashi’s book about Iwo Jima’s commanding General Tadamichi Kuribayashi I had the feeling that, had we met, I would have liked him. He was a compassionate man who helped his wife, had their servant eat at table with the family, and worried about them right up to the final battle on Iwo Jima.
Kuribayashi was the kind of leader who commanded respect because he gave it to everyone, from the lowliest recruit to the top-ranking officers under his command. He cared about them, worried about them, and was attentive to their needs. “The army was an institution where social class distinctions were carried to an extreme … [F]or Kuribayashi to be so open and friendly with his ‘inferiors’ made him a most unusual officer (page xiii). This also made him unpopular with the military High Command in Tokyo.
Kuribayashi was meticulous in designing a plan that would protect them for as long as possible while at the same time inflict the most damage to the enemy. Though it “was completely contrary to the traditions of the Japanese army … and was derided as rash and aroused universal opposition at the time” (page 38), he held out for over a month and frustrated the goal of the Allied Command of defeating the Japanese in under a week. The Japanese military command lacked Kuribayashi’s grasp of on-the-ground reality and attention to detail. “The grimmer the reality,” Kakehashi writes, “the more commanders have to face it directly” (page 63) He “verified things with his own eyes, and never allowed preconceptions or wishful thinking to cloud his judgment. His strategy was effective in battle precisely because it originated from such a starting point” (page 63).
And in the midst of it all, the daily preparations, the sweat, the inadequate supplied and resistance from people in Tokyo, he wrote daily letters to his wife and family in which he expressed love and concern for them and their welfare.
Why, when he knew he could never win, did he keep fighting when he could have surrendered and saved the more than 20,000 men under his command that died in the battle of Iwo Jima? Honor aside, the reason was keeping the airfield on Iwo Jima from the Allied forces for as long as possible so they couldn’t use it to carry out massive attacks on Japan’s main islands. Sadly, with the advent of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bombers, these attacks had already begun.
If it dawned on him that these attacks had begun, it might have thrown him into despair. According to Kakehashi, there is some evidence that it did. Sergeant Ryumae Shinya, who was in close proximity to him, wrote: “When we escaped from the Command Bunker in the dead of night on March 17, he was not energetic… At first glance … he looked like some old man from the countryside being led outside by his children” (pages 189,190). “The sight of the weak, emaciated, and ghostlike soldiers dying in such number as they faced the terrifying intensity of the American assault on one hand, while suffering from hunger and thirst on the other, seems to have been a crushing blow for Kuribayashi” (page 191). “When he heard the news” (of the firebombing of Tokyo), (his) despair and sense of failure must have been tremendous. He did not even know if his wife and children were alive. They were, in fact, safe and sound – but he had no way of knowing that.” For a compassionate man, I don’t see how it could have been otherwise.
In his final telegram to Tokyo, with a copy to his wife, he wrote “so sad to fall in battle.” And indeed, as it always is, it was. General Kuribayashi’s body was never identified. He had removed all insignias of rank from his uniform before the final charge.
Quite a man and quite a book. I give it a hearty *****rating.
