The Country of the Blind

guess I should comment on “why five stars,” but somehow, I find it very challenging to say something about this book. It feels way too personal. For the past thirty-six years, I have shared my life with a person who has been experiencing a gradual but inescapable vision decline. Too many situations described in this book are painfully familiar. I gave this book to my husband to listen to, and his reaction was: if I read it twenty years ago…

This book is really important for people who have just started to experience vision decline because it helps them understand that they are not the first person experiencing this pain and that there is a “life after.” It is equally important to those who do not have much knowledge about vision-related disabilities. It talks about different gradations of declining vision (for many people, it is “blind-not blind” without understanding a million different degrees of vision decline and how important it is to have at least some residual vision). Also, it talks about how a regular person can assist blind and low-vision people around them (it’s frustrating how much well-meaning people are unaware of the proper ways to help a blind person find a way around). I hope that people will read it 🙂

Tamara Pietkiewicz Memoires (part II)

I read the first part of this Memoires many years ago, and then I could not find the second part in an audio format. My friends made an amazing Christmas gift for me, narrating this book and assembling it together. I was very happy back then. Now, I look at the names, and I feel sad knowing how many of them are not my friends anymore. I do wonder a lot about what I have missed and why I haven’t seen what I should have seen. In many cases, everything was predictable, but not for all of them.

In any case, I wanted to listen to this book again, and when I learned that a professional narration is now available, I bought it right away.

It felt, needed, like a new book. Now, that I am almost constantly reflecting on my family past and my own past, that I am trying to find “where it went wrong,” the things I didn’t pay attention to ten years ago, stand out. It feels especially striking, because the events Tamara Pietkiewicz happened in the later 40s – 50s, when all of these events were so recent….

In chronological order:

• “Nothing was wrong before 1937.” Given her family history, she should have known better. Still, “37” sounds like a secret handshake for former prisoners. As if nobody was imprisoned or exiled before that.
• Her vacationing on occupied territories. When I recall being at the same places for vacations, it makes me cringe. If there can be any excuse for me, I was a teenager, I was born forty years later, and I was visiting these places twenty-five or thirty years later. Thus, my questions are:
• How could she “enjoy Lithuania” at the time when the Forest Brothers were still actively resisting? How could she “feel welcomed?”
• She was in the Carpathian Mountains. My forever love, love with tears in my eyes, and with eternal hope that one day ai will be back. In 1976, I visited all the same little villages and big towns she visited. Even being a complete idiot as I was, I could not not notice the difficulty with which the local people talked to us; I could not not feel that they would rather not talk. I felt 100% in a foreign country. Even knowing only a very brief history of this land, switching hands every dozen years for several hundred years, I could only think: poor country! Poor people! How much they had to suffer, and there is no end to it.
• Her working with blind people. The episode when blind people tell her that they do not want to be helped (I would add: they are often helped the wrong way). They tell her that feeling independent is very important for them, For which Tamara Pietkiewicz says that “they should allow others to feel good about themselves.”

I understand that she was “a product of society,” but still…

To Hell and Back

I started this book several times, and I would put it away to switch to something everybody was buzzing about. I finally finished it last week. I want to say that it felt incomplete, but having how long it took me to read it, it might be very well my fault. Also, I read a lot of historical books in between, so by the time I finished it, I mostly got the facts from other sources. I guess the idea of the book was to be a gigantic observation, and it was not supposed to end with a firm and detailed conclusion…