Music
She had a great ear for classical music. She told me stories about going to classical concerts all over the city - many were free or had very cheap seats. She also remembered the days when New York had several classical music radio stations with almost no advertising.Literature
Reading was a joy for her since childhood. The New York Public library system was a way for poor kids to have access to all the great literature. Mama took advantage of all that New York had to offer her. Her lifetime of reading started with American literature in school. She rapidly expanded her repertoire.
Malraux, Proust, Gogol, Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorki, the Brontes, Ivan Turgenev, Stendhal, Goncharov, Anatole France Lytton Strachey, Thackeray, Balzac, Trollope, Tolstoy , Henry James, Zola ..
Here's an image of a tiny fraction of her items - copyrights dated around 1947. In that post-war period, there were several reasonably priced imprints: Penguin Books, JM Dent's classic Everyman's Library, the Oxford World's Classics, and many others. Many of these were British companies who printed in England and America. Britons were very poor after the war. In America, Random House, founded in NYC in 1927, published great world literature. AA Knopf was founded in NYC in 1915. She took her books with her wherever she went.
She loved Russian literature including war history and biography - Yevgenia Ginzburg, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vassily Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, Anatoly Kuznetsov author of Babi Yar.., more to come..
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| Books acquired around 1947 |
Malraux, Proust, Gogol, Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorki, the Brontes, Ivan Turgenev, Stendhal, Goncharov, Anatole France Lytton Strachey, Thackeray, Balzac, Trollope, Tolstoy , Henry James, Zola ..
Here's an image of a tiny fraction of her items - copyrights dated around 1947. In that post-war period, there were several reasonably priced imprints: Penguin Books, JM Dent's classic Everyman's Library, the Oxford World's Classics, and many others. Many of these were British companies who printed in England and America. Britons were very poor after the war. In America, Random House, founded in NYC in 1927, published great world literature. AA Knopf was founded in NYC in 1915. She took her books with her wherever she went.
She loved Russian literature including war history and biography - Yevgenia Ginzburg, Ilya Ehrenburg, Vassily Grossman, Solzhenitsyn, Anatoly Kuznetsov author of Babi Yar.., more to come..
Here's a recent comment from Kathy,
ReplyDeleteThanks Dave. What a lovely thing to do, creating a blog like that.
One of my favourite books was given to me for my birthday by Annabelle... It’s called “The grass of oblivion” by Valentin Katayev. It was her own copy, the inscription says “To Kathy – Many happy returns of the day. Please forgive the second-hand nature of this gift. Next year – from the U.S.A. – something much nicer. Love, Annabelle.”
She [probably] didn’t realise that the fact that it was her own copy made it even more precious to me.
It’s about Katayev’s friendships with the Russian poets Bunin and Mayakovsky, but it’s also about poetry, and how to observe a scene and turn it into poetry. The writing is utterly beautiful.
I hope you’re getting on okay with all the stuff that has to be sorted out.
Love, Kathy