WAR, EVERYWHERE

Personal libraries are shrines to who we are. But can they alter what we may become?

by Kenneth R. Rosen

Some 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the personal library was a bizarre room stuffed with cuneiform tablets, a vault for reading and exposition. In Ugarit, a coastal city in Syria, archaeologists later discovered the earliest known private library, which dates to the Bronze Age. Beginning in 1928, French archaeologists discovered several libraries, all containing tablets inscribed with ancient languages like Hurrian, and varied Ugaritic literature, including tablets listing the names of gods. Some texts also referenced a great flood, as with the story of Noah and the ark. One library was a strange little room like a wine cellar. The shelves were filled with cuneiform tablets.

The Library of Ashurbanipal, near the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, dates to the seventh century. Named for the last great king of Assyria, the library housed the Epic of Gilgamesh and more than 30,000 clay tablets, mostly war loot. The martial commander was a literate intellectual who prized bounties of heads and volumes just the same. Ashurbanipal sent scholars to roam Babylonia and beyond in search of legislation and aristocratic declarations, but 6,000 tablets were also chronicles of foreign correspondence. The Library of Ashurbanipal hosted dispatches from scenes of violence, the library born and its site occupied in conflict. In 2016, the Islamic State overran its former location.

The “Light of Italy,” the Duke of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro, a Renaissance patron, did not lose his library to war. He built it atop clashes and crusades. Montefeltro’s library contains not a single printed volume but rather 600 Latin, 168 Greek, 82 Hebrew, and two Arabic tomes, all handwritten. Montefeltro himself was a wealthy mercenary, fighting wars for cash, a condottiere. He used the spoils of war to create his library walls of inlaid wood covered in portraits. One depicts Montefeltro in full armor, with his son, reading a manuscript.

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As a one-year-old, my daughter chewed the spine of Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault. During tantrums my two-yearold son would reach for a copy of Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True

Stories from a War Zone, then toss it at my head. When they visited me at my home office, their little necks craned to glance at the shelves of books: Valley Forge and The Things They Carried, but also titles like The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy and The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943–1944. A recent arrival in our home was Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?: A Foreign Correspondent’s Life Behind the Lines by Edward Behr. My son, now three, thumbed through it absently.

A personal library is the closest thing we have to a tangible representation of one’s mind. Someone who stops adding to theirs is someone who is content with what they already know or believe. But perhaps someone who adds only books within the realm of their interests risks losing sight of the broader world in which those subjects are situated.

I had covered international conflict for years, along the way collecting volumes that imprinted on me a particularly morbid, if somewhat hopeful worldview: it was clear that humankind had been here before. Of course, I know all writing is about tension. For this, war is an exemplary milieu. Yet as my children grew after I packed Sebastian Junger’s War and Tribe on a family trip through Provence I found myself drawn into violence both real and imagined, in work and relaxation, sometimes from the corner of a hotel room while my two children slept silently nearby. I watched their chests rise and fall as I read about the horrors of a distant war and the young men and women, sons and daughters, who fought and perished, and recalled my reporting trips to conflict zones near and far.

My library lit by the buttery glow of a broken lamp, its books’ spines cracked, uncracked, and stuck with library stamps or egg-yolk-yellow “USED” stickers is spread across a storage unit, a private office, and my family’s modest apartment, its contents splayed, upturned and down, read and unread, highlighted and underlined and dogeared, some with pages ripped out or stuffed into a folder from which I could later draw nourishment. A phrase, a paragraph, a word I had not known I needed. Were my children ever to ask how or what to learn, how they should spend their waking days, I’d point to our many bookcases and shelves, scattered across a crowded, roughly 1,000-square-foot apartment in northern Italy, and tell them: “Start there.” There are plenty of war books, but I also have law dictionaries and books about physics and mathematics. I have books on woodchopping and homebuilding, on birds and other ephemera. They would get snapshots of life in crisis, sure, but the geography is broad.

For now, they seem most interested in conflict, a token of their age. My son might look up from his cereal and ask why I have a bullet-resistant helmet and vest in my office. He might ask why that child lugged a pail of water in a photo from Afghanistan. I had purchased the print to support photojournalists working now under the Taliban. Those are objects easily explained away and largely forgotten, consequences of a job that one day requires waders and a fishing rod and the next armored protective equipment. But the books are stalwarts.

We do not live in active conflict; far from it. Through osmosis, though, a stream of violence seeps into our home. One day, after I returned from a reporting trip to Ukraine, my son played grenadier with A Problem from Hell, Samantha Power’s tour de force on global genocide and America’s complicity in it. So, I came to wonder: if we are who we surround ourselves with, can we also become the violence or hatred found inside the pages we collect? Would my children inherit violence? Would they conflate home and conflict?

“Parents,” the British writer Richard Hughes once wrote, “finding that they see through their child in so many places the child does not know of, seldom realize that, if there is some point the child really gives his mind to hiding, their chances are nil.”

Stephen Ambrose, the vaunted and maligned World War II historian, was my first great love. Before attending a military academy in my adolescence, I read Citizen Soldiers twice, cover to cover. That book part propaganda, part historical accounting was a lifeline to a war I’d been exposed to only through video games. The first of the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises had recently arrived and it was how I spent much of my recreational after-school time. When my allotted time on the computer concluded each day, I found continued obsession in the conflicts, weaponry, and operations depicted on-screen through the books and writings of Ambrose.

I was no older than nine when my yeshiva teachers in New York City were teaching my class about Kristallnacht, the pogrom carried out by the Nazi Party in 1938. Number the Stars by Lois Lowry was required reading. I have the vaguest memory of an arts class in which we cut yellow stars from construction paper around Yom HaShoah and stood in silence at the exact time when the country of Israel pauses for its annual two minutes to remember the six million souls lost. It wasn’t long after that my parents took us to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, with its solemn display of victims’ shoes. Eventually, the revival of Rudolf Steiner’s library signifies a blessing of postwar reconstruction, containing copies of all the books banned and burned by the Nazis the minds of the dead resurrected, if inchoate.

It can be difficult for young children to identify the implicit bias of narrative writing, and therefore to hold war stories at a critical distance. Counterinuitively, researchers have found that when children read “enemy” narratives it results in positions of supporting war for the sake of peace. Young readers of “ally” and “imperialist” coalition narratives focusing on conflicts of “merit” were “less supportive of war” and “proposed using ‘talk’ to ‘understand’ both sides of conflict.”

These impressions, however, often change along class and educational divides. A 1993 study in the Journal of Peace Research sought to understand the ways Australian children think and feel about war and peace, especially in response to constant threats of nuclear escalation. The study is unique in that it links a “degree of security children feel” to “attitudes to war.” The author found no substantial link between information sources or violent media (in whatever form consumed) and these attitudes. The more exposure, the better realization of war’s ill-gotten pursuits.

War is a morose and morally complex subject. Whether or not to expose children to such literature is frequently debated among educators. Those who wish to restrict access believe that doing so will prevent the glorification of violence, as well as shield young readers from disturbing imagery or accounts of human cruelty they might not be ready for. But what is lost when we curb access to such stories? War has long been considered an adult domain, but the vulnerabilities and experiences of children in conflict zones have great stakes as they are future contributors to solutions for those conflicts. According to studies by the United Nations, “more children are hurt and killed in today’s wars than are soldiers.”

Whether in children’s literature or comic books or video games or the news media, conflict is often made sensational, heroes triumphing over villains. Children’s literature can be a much-needed counterbalance to the dangerous oversimplification of depictions of war as a proving ground for righteousness, strength, and courage. One scholar, Kem Knapp Sawyer, noted a particular shift in this direction with “many recent children’s books […] challenging the notion of warriors as heroes while redefining the word courage. Today’s authors are fighting stereotypes and adding new dimensions to an old subject. These stories are often told from a child’s perspective, but not of a boy who dreams of following his father into battle.” I imagine this applies also to adult literature accessible to children. As another researcher, Jennifer Armstrong, has argued, “If you really want to teach young readers about peace, give them books about war.”

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War is often the backbone of a civil society. Books are perhaps the least conspicuous reminders in our various homes of the conflict and constant suffering endured by others around the world. But there is no shortage of reminders. My aunt uses a spent artillery shell to roll up her garden hose.

Military guards patrol the local yeshiva and synagogue. Pressed into the sidewalk cement outside various residential buildings across my city are golden plaques commemorating those taken from their homes during the Second World War and slaughtered in concentration camps. Whether reminders of what was lost or monuments to what was saved, the detritus of war brings about change. If not for the better, perhaps for some increased moral tensile strength. Emma Carroll, the author of the children’s book When We Were Warriors, once wrote about the importance of war stories for children: “untangle all the prejudice and misunderstandings, and the reasons people take up arms against each other doesn’t change. It starts, in the beginning, with hate. […] What stories do is help us realize that differences can be overcome. They give us hope.” These differences can be overcome in the moment, but the conflict reproduces itself throughout history. That presence was always built on conflict, libraries referring to earlier libraries and the spoils of war or dominance that led to their creation.

The Japanese word tsundoku refers to the stacks of books purchased but unread. Though my children already possess the books in my library, it’s up to them to decide how they will become adapted to their literary journeys. These books of conflict and war and carnage are portentous to what young people can prevent in their own lifetimes, a duty toward amelioration my children uphold through exposure. Those books could be found guilty of, as Miguel de Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote of the personal library, “casting dangerous spells.” For each child, their spells will be their own.

TV, Bedroom, Berkeley, CA, c. 1972–75

Gelatin silver print, 6 13/16 x 6 7/8 inches