Zuleica Got Busted

Zuleica has cleaned our house every other Thursday for seven years, but after a routine speeding stop without a driver’s license she has quickly gone back to Brazil. That’s about all we know, except that she is hoping to come back “when the papers go through”, and we think she has gone with her one year old but without her husband.

I feel badly for Zuleica and for the baby. She has family in Brazil, but she must have stayed here because she wanted to, and her child is a US citizen whose opportunities will be greater here. What I do not know is whether I think Zuleica’s apparently forced return is “wrong” in any way that makes sense to me. At the personal level I am reminded of Alicia Silverstone’s dissertation in “Clueless” that when uninvited guests come to the dinner party we ought to be able to make room at the table.

And we are hardly innocent. We and our half dozen friends for whom Zuleica worked never asked about her citizenship status. As if it were someone else’s problem, but in fact we were deeply complicit. Also – I am supposed to know these things, but I have somehow avoided knowing how much I can pay Zuleica each year without withholding taxes, as I have avoided knowing how much I actually pay her. I did not want to fill out the paperwork and I did not want to ask Zuleica for her social security number. No heroes here.

The ladies had a nice shower for Zuleica’s baby. I hope “the papers” go through, but in the meantime Zuleica has arranged for Daniella to clean the houses. My head is in the sand, but I remain torn between sympathy for Zuleica and understanding that The Guardians of the Borders do what they do.

The German Foils

I need something new to read.

I have read four books this summer - Hope and Courage by Sid Schachnow, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Barrows and Annie Shaffer and City of Thieves by David Benioff. None of the books are about the Germans but in each book in a different way they appear, do what Germans do, and the story goes on.

Hope and Courage is an autobiography of Sid Schachnow, a retired Jewish major general in the U.S. Army who lived from age 7 to age 12 in a German concentration camp in Lithuania where much of his family was killed. His is a personal story of survival and accomplishment as a refugee in the United States. In People of the Book the story of a Haggadah in Sarajevo unravels backwards through time starting with the heroine running from and then captured by the Germans in Yugoslavia. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society tells a postwar story in the context of the lives of the islanders the Channel island occupied by the Germans from the fall of France until 1945. City of Thieves is an updated “quest” novel in which the narrator plays Sancho Paza to a mystical Russian soldier surviving during the siege of Leningrad.

All four books were placed in the context of German occupation, but all four struck me as not necessarily being about the Germans. Rather they are all in one way or another about the victims, less about the acts and facts of atrocity than about the reactions of people to the atrocities and what acts of decency can be found.

I have a sense that the Germans, while real enough are now becoming a backdrop of evil, the foils of perfect malice against which the books speak. The Germans are fact-based Borg or Lex Luthor providing a vernacular of horror variously in Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Guernsey and Russia under which the characters of the books have to live their lives, grow up, raise families and try to stay alive. The telling of biography and fiction against the gold standard of real life horror.

I need something new to read.