36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Astonishing auto-biography of the ultimate Eastern European, November 13, 2000
If you want to better understand Europe and European history of the 20th century, this is a book to read. Milosz is a Nobel prize-winning poet and writer. This book is his autobiography. He was born in 1911 on the territory of the former Russian Empire. He comes from the Polish-Lithuanian family and is an ultimate Eastern European. He also knows America and Western Europe well.
His knowledge of the European history of the 20th century is nor from the books, but something he lived through himself. Milosz traveled to Siberia with his father. He survived both World wars. He studied in France before WW2 and spent the war in Warsaw, where he witnessed destruction of Warsaw after the upraising. Milosz seems very observant, honest, and has a tendency to self-reflection, which makes the narrative even more interesting.
He had many dangerous adventures during the war years and he remembers and describes them in great detail. Many of his remarks about Russia are right on target (as Russian I can confirm that). This is great and unique book of the ultimate Eastern European. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in the history of this part of the world.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Look homeward brother, July 1, 2005
This review is from: Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (Paperback)
The test of a truly great book is when you long NOT to finish it. A hundred pages to the end, then fifty, and you slow your tempo down to a page-a-day, then a paragraph, and then finally, just a couple of sentences as to prolong the pain, the pleasure. Milosz's autobiography par excellence, Native Realm, is one such book. And much more than that. A modern Odyssey, it traces the tempestous voyages of one of this century's greatest poets, one of Europa's finest sons.
Subtitled 'A Search for Self-Definition,' Native Realm unfolds as a diary of one who lived through some of the twentieth century's bleakest moments, two world wars, the complete destruction of a city (Warsaw) and the near-complete extermination of a people (Poland's Jews). Milosz takes us step by step down into the inferno of his century, into the quagmire of his homeland. A sorrowful Virgil, Milosz guides us through each cavern of a very personal hell. Born in one of Europe's most forgotten and mystical corners, Lithuania, Milosz recounts the recipe of his own European-ness, a Lithuanian mother and a Polish father of Sorbian descent. His family was of one petty gentry and thus, young Milosz's youth was a cloudless one of innocent expeditions into the dense Baltic forests of pine and spruce. Milosz reminisces with a slight tinge of nostalgia, painting pictures of an Eden-like world where man and surroundings were linked in a symbosis of mutual respect and awe. Milosz's homeland was a ethnically heterogenous one where Lithuanian, Pole, Byelorussian and Jew lived in an amicable tension, each bringing precious ingredients to their common feast. The kitchen of this feast was the city that more than any other left its brand on Milosz's psyche: Wilno, known today as Vilnius, capital of the Lithuanian republic. Here, Milosz revels in his reveries through narrow cobble-stoned streets and over an equally bumpy Catholic education which also left its mark on the man. Conflicted with his deep love for Creation, Milosz never gave up his faith in and awe of the Creator. Smithing his own highly individualistic faith, Milosz remained skeptical of the new creed of salvation that spread the good news to depression-racked Europe: Communism.
One of this book's richest chapters focuses on Marxism and Milosz's cautious rejection of its monolithic message, and another one picks apart the nation that carried this evangel to its furthest extreme, Russia. Milosz analyzes Russia and her people much like Dostoevsky did with Poland and the Poles in House of the Dead, with a grudging respect and a candid admission of distaste. Pole and Rus, brothers who are separated by a spiritual fence and only too happy to stay on their perspective sides. Milosz embraces his Polish, Roman roots and draws a marked line in the sand between him and the Byzantine east. Yet, Milosz remains fair and does his best to present the all sides of the Russian bear, from the red-bearded, vodka-breathed soldier in the Tsarist army who befriended young Milosz to the 'kind-hearted' Red Army Ivans who shot their German captive so as to save him from the cruelties of a Russian winter.
The most gripping part of Milosz's story is his description of life in hell, that is of surviving the Sodom and Gomorrah of Nazi-occupied Poland. Milosz squeaked out an minimalist existence in the nightmare of Hans Frank's General Gouvernment, the Nazi-controlled part of Poland. Amidst the starvation and daily executions, Milosz kept his sanity and humanity intact by etching out his poems, all the while painfully aware that things were a whole lot worse over the ghetto wall. Milosz never tries to escape his culpability in not doing more. He remarks, 'To live with one's cowardice is bitter.' Bitter indeed, but the reader feels the hopelessness of the situation and asks himself/herself, 'Would we have done any different?' Milosz lets us stare at the answer.
Native Realm's secret not only lies in its almost hyponotic ability to sweep the reader along the tumultous waves of 20th century Eastern Europe, but most of all, in its captain's steerage. Milosz's prose beams with the simple elegance of his poems. Every word solid and right in its place. Every sentence either rings with near-Homeric concreteness---hiding in Warsaw's sewers during the Uprising, " The women closed the metal cover over us, and inside we immediately began to suffocate. It was quite theoretical: in the light from the electrical bulb I saw the mouths of fish thrown up on the sand and heads withering on stems of necks," or with aphoristic sting, "Westerners like to dwell in the empyrean of noble words about spirit and freedom, but it is not often that they ask someone whether he has enough money for lunch."
Such gems lie like amber on a beach. You reach one and you just want to sit, admire, examine and give blessings for the happiness burning in your hand. But all good things must come to an end, as does Milosz's eloquent tale of self-discovery. After the cauldron simmered down, Milosz escaped to America and found a fresh, new world where opportunity lay for the taking and nature smiled with the purity of Paradise. But his sojourn remained a tentative one as Europa beckoned constantly. Eventually, Milosz succumbed to his homesickness. "Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace...Europe, after all, was home to me."
A fitting end to this eloquent dissection of what it means to be European, to 'become' European. Czeslaw Milosz has finally reached home, to that pantheon filled with those rare few who have succeeded in over-coming self, sect, and narrow nationhood to be worthy of the title, 'European.' Montaigne and Goethe, welcome home your brother to his rightful native realm.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
5.0 out of 5 stars
Humanizing companion to more formal histories of eastern Europe, June 7, 2010
This review is from: Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (Paperback)
Really a superb book. I agree with all the other reviewers, and don't have much to add because I don't want to be redundant. Just a few things:
As a Jew, I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the university and political climate in Wilno of the 1930s. It sounded to me so much like its modern North American counterpart in numerous cities, and I could really feel how much was lost when this world ended, its natural evolution stopped dead in its tracks. Milosz is such an astute, balanced observer, bringing to light a more optimistic picture of a past that became understandably buried by the tragedies that soon followed.
His other gift is to humanize the historical currents that were driving eastern Europe towards Communism. He explains the political and social pressures that influenced the period's intellectuals, without ever becoming pedantic. The prose exudes such a beautiful sense of warmth and humanity.
Near the end he becomes rather Hamlet-esque. He admits that he fears readers will see him as such, and I have to say, it rang a bell for me because he goes on and on into eloquent contradictions. But perhaps this is an allegory for his state of mind at the time, when he was contemplating whether to defect to the West and leave his native country for good?
The conclusion seems to just trail off......I was disappointed with it, because he starts into themes that he had not explored in depth beforehand. Weak. I fear I may have missed something. But otherwise, a fabulous book and I'm so glad that I read it.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
