Female soldiers given forum to speak
Svetlana Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II” is an outpouring, a deluge, of conversations with women who have waited their entire lives to speak.
Roughly 1 million Soviet women fought in World War II, mostly as reinforcements after the slaughter of so many men. But when the war ended, few wanted to acknowledge what was considered a national shame.
“There was no one I could tell that I had been wounded, that I had a concussion,” one woman says. “Try telling it, and who will give you a job then, who will marry you? We were silent as fish.”
Alexievich is a Belarusian journalist who won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015 for what the ■ Swedish Academy called her “polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Her books, essentially interviews, include “Voices From Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster” and “Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets.”
“The Unwomanly Face of War” was her first book. The Soviet Union sponsored a poor, heavily censored English version in 1988. This new version, undertaken by respected translators, is the first full English translation.
Some of the women in the book were snipers; others, nurses or tank drivers. They were young. One tells Alexievich, “We went to die for life, without knowing what life was.”
Many of the stories begin as the military cuts off the women’s braids, an umbilical severing from their old worlds.
Some of the women find satisfaction in their wartime tasks. Others worry, touchingly, about looking unattractive after their deaths.
There’s a great deal that’s moving, but it’s possible for readers to have reservations.
Many of the interviews are repetitive in facts and tone, and the author provides little context. The reader only occasionally knows where and why events happen. This is by design.
“I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings,” Alexievich says in an introduction. “I am a historian of the soul.”
(This sort of talk would have gotten Studs Terkel bounced from his local Chicago bar.)
In fact, Alexievich has called her books “novels in voices,” and they appear to reside in a gray zone between fiction and journalism.
Nevertheless, the book has a kind of greatness.
But the shock and sadness are, at times, crushing. The women do things it had never occurred to them they would do. And some terrible scenes are not easy to shake.