Turkey and Stuffing vs. Sawdust and GlueIf you're sitting around still digesting Thanksgiving dinner, there's a way to feel even more grateful for that extra helping of pie or gravy. (Yes, for some of us, gravy is an actual food group.) Just pick up a copy of "City of Thieves," by David Benioff. It not only is the most nonstop laugh, cry, gasp, laugh-some-more, cry-and-desperately-turn-the-pages novel I've read in ages but also happens to be about that thigh-slapper the Siege of Leningrad. I'd heard about the siege, of course, and known that a lot of people froze and starved when the Nazis cut off the city's supply lines. But the book made the hunger so vivid that my full stomach was practically gloating. How good it is not to starve! How good it is not to have to eat, as Benioff's odd-couple young protagonists do, "Library candy." That is, bars shaped like chocolate but made from the boiled-down glue stripped from bookbindings. The glue had once been animal renderings and thus held a modicum of nutrition. That was enough to make each miserable-tasting bar cost at least a hundred rubles — a small fortune. More expensive was the dirt sold by the glassful. This particular dirt was so pricey because it came from under a sugar factory the Nazis had burned to the ground. The sugar melted in the fire, and its sweetness seeped into the earth. Just to have a cup of sugar-laced dirt was an incredible luxury. And let's not talk about the gleaming meat patties the characters find on the black market. When they follow the butcher home to make a bargain, the meat they see hanging from hooks makes them run for their lives. Suffice to say, the siege was so severe that the Leningrad police formed a special unit to fight cannibalism. It didn't always win. In the book, a shy 17-year-old Jewish kid gets thrown into prison for looting a dead Nazi parachutist. He assumes he will be shot the next morning, because looting carries the death penalty.
Our heroes — one dark, one light, one a virgin, the other the life of the party, both of them mordantly funny — spend the rest of the book freezing, being shot at, seeing death up close and, of course, hunting for eggs in a city that eventually will see 1.5 million of its citizens starve to death. Whole Foods it's not. One 11-year-old girl, Tanya Savicheva, wrote in her diary during the siege that her grandmother had died of starvation. Next page: her uncle. Next page her mother and then her brother. On the last page, it says, "Only Tanya is left." The Siege of Leningrad lasted 2 1/2 years and has no modern-day parallels. The resilience of the people thwarted Adolf Hitler's plans and eventually helped pave the way for his defeat. Most of us don't think about the siege very much, but thanks to this fabulous book, more of us will. By the last page, I was cheering and sobbing at the same time. Read it over and over. The book is food for the soul, nourishment for the mind. And if you're really in trouble, you could strip off the cover and boil down the binding glue. Happy Thanksgiving. Lenore Skenazy is the author of "Free-Range Kids: How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry)" and "Who's the Blonde That Married What's-His-Name? The Ultimate Tip-of-the-Tongue Test of Everything You Know You Know — But Can't Remember Right Now." To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lskenazy@yahoo.com) and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2010 CREATORS.COM
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