Elie Wiesel was born in 1928 and lived through one of the most horrible periods in history. During World War II, he, with his family and other Jews from Romania, were sent to Auschwitz concentration camp where his parents and little sister were gassed and cremated. Wiesel and his two older sisters survived. But Wiesel’s faith and heart were broken. “My God died,” Wiesel said, “in the fires of Auschwitz.” Wiesel changed from a devout Jew to a broken, bitter young man who doubted his belief in God. If there is a God, how could he allow this to happen? he wonders. Elie Wiesel speaks for a generation of 21st-century people who doubt the existence of God.
Elie Wiesel in the book Night laments, “I lost my faith in the shadow of the gas chambers.”1 Wiesel, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp, was not an agnostic, nor an atheist; he was a believer who decided to stop believing because God seemed to be cruel and unloving. The compassionate God Wiesel had known in youth seemed to have turned into a vindictive, destructive, vengeful creature. Wiesel echoed the words of Aeschylus in his Greek tragedy Agamemnon, “From the gods who sit in grandeur/grace comes somehow violent.”
Likewise, in the midst of tragedy, Jeremiah, the author of Lamentations, as his name and family are taken into captive to Babylon, honestly began to question if God really loved Israel, if He would ever show them grace. And worse than that, while Israel floundered, while Jerusalem lay in ruins, sinful, heathen adjacent nations prospered. Jeremiah complained, “All my enemies have heard of my calamity; they are glad that you have done it” (Lamentations 1:21).
I once saw a Peanuts cartoon strip. With his typewriter, Snoopy is writing a novel. The first words are, “It was a dark and stormy night.” In Lucy’s characteristic forceful manner, she sees what is on the page and gives Snoopy some advice.
“You stupid idiot! That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever read. Who ever heard of such a silly way to begin a story? Don’t you know that all the good stories begin, ‘Once upon a time.’ ’”
Snoopy, taking her advice, began his novel, “Once upon a time, it was a dark and stormy night.”
If that were our lives, would it begin the same way? It seems that our lives, that begin so promising, always end in dark and stormy nights. Our fairy godmother never appears and we never wear glass slippers. Other people seem to have it so easy — especially wicked people! A survivor of the Lodz Ghetto, a Jewish internment camp in Poland during World War II, describes how devastating it was to look through barbed wire at laughing, fat, healthy sons and daughters of his Nazi captors playing on a merry-go-round while the Lodz emaciated children had to work from dawn to dark. The protagonist in Fiddler on The Roof shakes a half-cynical fist at God in the wake of another Russian pogrom, “And you call us the chosen people!”2
Well, I am no longer very young, I know, but what do I know? I know this: There will be Lodz ghettos and gas chambers. But I know that hope lives yet. That there is no tragedy that cannot be overcome.
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood4
Howard Pyle
You who so plod amid serious things that you feel it shame to give yourself up even for a few short moments to mirth and joyousness in the land of Fancy; you who think that life hath nought to do with innocent laughter that can harm no one; these pages are not for you. Clap to the leaves and go no farther than this, for I tell you plainly that if you go farther you will be scandalized by seeing good, sober folks of real history so frisk and caper in gay colors and motley that you would not know them but for the names tagged to them. Here is a stout, lusty fellow with a quick temper, yet none so ill for all that, who goes by the name of Henry II. Here is a fair, gentle lady before whom all the others bow and call her Queen Eleanor. Here is a fat rogue of a fellow, dressed up in rich robes of a clerical kind, that all the good folk call my Lord Bishop of Hereford. Here is a certain fellow with a sour temper and a grim look — the worshipful, the Sheriff of Nottingham. And here, above all, is a great, tall, merry fellow that roams the greenwood and joins in homely sports, and sits beside the Sheriff at merry feast, which same beareth the name of the proudest of the Plantagenets — Richard of the Lion’s Heart.
Beside these are a whole host of knights, priests, nobles, burghers, yeomen, pages, ladies, lasses, landlords, beggars, peddlers, and what not, all living the merriest of merry lives, and all bound by nothing but a few odd strands of certain old ballads (snipped and clipped and tied together again in a score of knots) which draw these jocund fellows here and there, singing as they go.
Here you will find a hundred dull, sober, jogging places, all tricked out with flowers and what not, till no one would know them in their fanciful dress. And here is a country bearing a well-known name, wherein no chill mists press upon our spirits, and no rain falls but what rolls off our backs like April showers off the backs of sleek drakes; where flowers bloom forever and birds are always singing; where every fellow hath a merry catch as he travels the roads, and ale and beer and wine (such as muddle no wits) flow like water in a brook.
This country is not Fairyland. What is it? ‘Tis the land of Fancy, and is of that pleasant kind that, when you tire of it — whisk! — you clap the leaves of this book together and ’tis gone, and you are ready for everyday life, with no harm done.
And now I lift the curtain that hangs between here and No-man’s-land. Will you come with me, sweet Reader? I thank you. Give me your hand.
Suggested Vocabulary Words
A. Up rose Robin Hood one merry morn when all the birds were singing blithely among the leaves, and up rose all his merry men, each fellow washing his head and hands in the cold brown brook that leaped laughing from stone to stone.
B. So saying, he strode away through the leafy forest glades until he had come to the verge of Sherwood. There he wandered for a long time, through highway and byway, through dingly dell and forest skirts. Now he met a fair buxom lass in a shady lane, and each gave the other a merry word and passed their way; now he saw a fair lady upon an ambling pad, to whom he doffed his cap, and who bowed sedately in return to the fair youth; now he saw a fat monk on a pannier-laden ass; now a gallant knight, with spear and shield and armor that flashed brightly in the sunlight.
General Review
1. Whom they were I really cannot specify.
2. Truth is mightier than us all.
3. If there ever was a rogue in the world, it is me.
4. They were the very two individuals whom we thought were far away.
5. “Seems to me as if them as writes must hev a kinder gift fur it, now.”
You will improve your writing a great deal if you can add details that show, instead of tell, your main point. For example, “My stomach growled and my mouth watered when I looked at the juicy T-Bone steak” is better than “I was so hungry!”
Active Reading
”Rikki-Tikki Tavi” in The Jungle Book (1894)
Rudyard Kipling
This is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bathrooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the Tailorbird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice, but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.
He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his head and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink. He could scratch himself anywhere he pleased with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use. He could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottle brush, and his war cry as he scuttled through the long grass was: “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”
One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking, down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying, “Here’s a dead mongoose. Let’s have a funeral.”
“No,” said his mother, “let’s take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn’t really dead.”
They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his finger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked. So they wrapped him in cotton wool, and warmed him over a little fire, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.
“Now,” said the big man (he was an Englishman who had just moved into the bungalow), “don’t frighten him, and we’ll see what he’ll do.”
It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He looked at the cotton wool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy’s shoulder.
“Don’t be frightened, Teddy,” said his father. “That’s his way of making friends.”
“Ouch! He’s tickling under my chin,” said Teddy.
Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy’s collar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose.
“Good gracious,” said Teddy’s mother, “and that’s a wild creature! I suppose he’s so tame because we’ve been kind to him.”
“All mongooses are like that,” said her husband. “If Teddy doesn’t pick him up by the tail, or try to put him in a cage, he’ll run in and out of the house all day long. Let’s give him something to eat.”
They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out into the veranda and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better.
“There are more things to find out about in this house,” he said to himself, “than all my family could find out in all their lives. I shall certainly stay and find out.”
He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing table, and burned it on the end of the big man’s cigar, for he climbed up in the big man’s lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy’s nursery to watch how kerosene lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up, too. But he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy’s mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow. “I don’t like that,” said Teddy’s mother. “He may bite the child.” “He’ll do no such thing,” said the father. “Teddy’s safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now —”
But Teddy’s mother wouldn’t think of anything so awful.
Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda riding on Teddy’s shoulder, and they gave him banana and some boiled egg. He sat on all their laps one after the other, because every well-brought-up mongoose always hopes to be a house mongoose some day and have rooms to run about in; and Rikki-tikki’s mother (she used to live in the general’s house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if ever he came across white men.
Then Rikki-tikki went out into the garden to see what was to be seen. It was a large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes, as big as summer-houses, of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass. Rikki-tikki licked his lips. “This is a splendid hunting-ground,” he said, and his tail grew bottle-brushy at the thought of it, and he scuttled up and down the garden, snuffing here and there till he heard very sorrowful voices in a thorn-bush.
It was Darzee, the Tailorbird, and his wife. They had made a beautiful nest by pulling two big leaves together and stitching them up the edges with fibers, and had filled the hollow with cotton and downy fluff. The nest swayed to and fro, as they sat on the rim and cried.
“What is the matter?” asked Rikki-tikki.
“We are very miserable,” said Darzee. “One of our babies fell out of the nest yesterday and Nag ate him.”
“H’m!” said Rikki-tikki, “that is very sad — but I am a stranger here. Who is Nag?”
Darzee and his wife only cowered down in the nest without answering, for from the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss — a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear of the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake’s eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of.
“Who is Nag?” said he. “I am Nag. The great God Brahm put his mark upon all our people, when the first cobra spread his hood to keep the sun off Brahm as he slept. Look, and be afraid!”
Predict the ending of this short story.
Word Problems
1. Divide the number 105 into three parts, such that the second shall be 5 more than the first, and the third three times the second.
2. A man had a certain amount of money; he earned four times as much the next week, and found $30. If he then had seven times as much as at first, how much had he at first?
3. How many fourths are there in 7x?
4. How long will it take a man to build x yards of wall if he builds z feet a day?
