Jozef Mak

...they are used to explain thoughts and events to the reader, that the inarticulate, "ordinary" (as common as mak, the poppyseed) Jozef cannot speak of...

...Because poor Jozef Mak has "no one waiting for him except his mother's fright," and therefore no presents, the figure gives him its hands, saying "'Take them, but don't expect a mouth to match them, not even when you grow up and understand people, and they try to persuade you that you should also get a voice somewhere...

...So, when the young Jozef Mak returns from the military service to find that his lover, Marusa, has married his half brother, and finds too, that he has to share a cottage with them, the reader is prepared for tension...

...But Hronsk~ reveals more -- fidelity, sacrifice -- in the figure of Marusa (later depicted quite differently) who kneels by the bed she shares with her husband, knowing that Jozef is across the room, awake: "Marusa was stronger than Jozef Mak, and she lay down next to her husband only after Iozef Mak had fallen asleep...

...In this, Mak could be Everyman...

...they have opted out of the continuing struggle to understand and shape the Catholic (or any other) institutionalization of the Gospel...

...The church is inevitably and intensely a political institution, even or especially in the processes by which its dogmas and disciplines are formed and re-formed...

...Describing the peace & the patience I I I I 10ZEF MiX Jozef Clger.Hronsk~ Translated by Andrew CJncura Slavica Pabiishers (P.O...

...He'snot going to read this book...

...It waits patiently to tell a story at once cruel and hopeful, to a whole new world of readers...

...We are a forest: tree next to tree -- and only that is important I An awkward fit THE LOST SOUL OF ANERICAN POLITICS VIRTUE, SELF-INTEREST, AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF LIBERALISM John P. Diggins Basic Books, $23.95, 409 pp...

...Everything here will become the same as soon as the dragging hymn flows over their heads, for everyone here is like you and you are like all the others...

...In another, he shows exasperation at the greed that permitted American merchants to traffic shamelessly with the enemy...

...And there is no doubt that because of this revelatory episode in the life of the church some Catholics achieved a more mature understanding of moral law and the role of conscience...

...For some, of course, the church thus demythologized no longer holds any interest...

...In one of them, he explains that the colonials have the same self-seeking passions he knew from home, yet they lack the manners which make "ours" tolerI able...

...To be sure, the scandal was mitigated somewhat by the forthright responses of some Catholics, including those national hierarchies that "accepted" the encyclical but by their interpretation deprived it of binding force for individual couples...

...The publication of Jozef Mak by Slavica Publishers should serve to encourage interest in Central European literature...

...Further, the new enlightenment of some educated Catholics in the developed world contributes little to an easing of the problem of overpopulation, nothI ing to the progress of ecufiaenism...

...One is reminded of Thomas Merton's epiphany on a Louisville street corner, when he felt thankful that he was only one man among others, "that they were mine, and I theirs...

...Knowing the personal, social, and demographic costs, knowing that not even the principal authors of Humanae Vitae believed that its argument led to moral certitude, the pope still asked docile acceptance...

...A brief synopsis of recent Slovak history might bolster the I effectiveness of the footnotes...

...This is not, however, a political novel, and although Jozef Mak is aware of the occasional resistance of others to injustice and servitude, he never considers rebellion9 Less than resignation, or an embrace of suffering, Mak carries an infinite human patience, an unrealized sense that wisdom is possible for the ordinary person, but is only achieved through life's trials...

...For anyone brought up in the rationalist stream within the Catholic tradition, that was indeed a shocker:, a kind of corruption at the core...

...So you cannot disappear just like that, Jozef Mak...

...That came home with special force to most members of the birth control commission, as it will to readers of this book...

...Thus, Mak's wife Jula asks herself, "Are there any countries in this world where a person is not forced to leave his native village and go to work out in the world...

...Its forty-year dominance was replaced by the "consenCommonweal: 22...

...Later, the author uses the image of a sleeping child to describe the peace felt by Jula, Jozef's wife: "Then everything around her came to rest, because a child with dried milk on its lips is a powerfully strong force that can sometimes accomplish what a hundred adults cannot...

...All night, the white figure "that has no body but only hands, bleeding from their pierced palms, and wise and good eyes," has been giving presents to the "quiet men and women" of the village...

...Three schools have dominated the debate among historians of the American Revolution...

...Therefore Jozef Mak becomes aware of his unity with other men, their common humanness, while in his village church, where no miracles occur: "Jozef, no one in church will notice who you are, that you are Mak...

...And so the character Jozef Mak remains with the reader, inarticulate still...

...He is "just one of millions, a mere statistic," but he is one who endures...

...Hronsk)~'s sensitive and complicated treatment of his female characters is notable...

...But to believe that this state will be permanent is the stuff of novels...

...Kaiser reports what can be learned about how this gentle and intelligent man, who had constantly upheld the freedom of his commissioners to explore new paths, could rob their findings of all weight merely because the vote was not unanimous and because "certain criteria" adopted by the majority "departed from the moral teaching on marriage proposed with constant firmness by the teaching authority of the church" (paragraph 6...

...And yet, Mak can clearly represent the Slovak people, writes Norma L. Rudinsky, general editor of the Slovak literature and language series that this book inaugurates...

...which waters the roots equally and which rocks the treetops in unison...

...I hope that many others will, particularly the bishops who went to Rome for the synod...

...It must be said that Pope Paul's decision to restate and reaffirm the ban on contraception -- or, more accurately, the banality of the encyclical through which he conveyed his decision -- contributed greatly to that result...

...But no, this would not be, reasoned the diplomat: exactly that pettiness he had described explains why ambitious men turn their attention anywhere but to the political arena...

...Jozef Mak is replete with observations of human behavior -- small, wise observations...

...But this personal growth doesn't clear up the institutional mess that has been created, which weakens the church's credibility on abortion and other moral issues and damperl s hope that disciplinary questions such as celibacy and the standing of women in the church can ever be addressed on their merits...

...But frequently one f'mds that these explanations, with their specificity, confound the reader not familiar with Slovak language, or its traditions...

...Through an amorphous green dawn a white figure appears at the wooden cottage where the illegitimate Jozef Mak has just been born...

...One of the sadder aspects is that Karol Wojtyla, then bishop of Cracow, now John Paul II, bishop of Rome, took no part in the work of the birth control commission, though he was appointed to it...

...It will also discourage it...

...The oldest is the "progressive" orientation best known through Charles A. Beard's "economic interpretation" of the Constitution...

...The epiphany of Jozef Mak, the villager, transcends time and space...

...Life is a cliff, a valley, mountain, tree stumps, an ax, bread, and hoarfrost, and all those things are not just pieces of scenery and stage props which one can move about to suit one's fantasy...

...The neglect of this writer's work -- considered by scholars to be some of the finest Slovak lyrical prose of this century -was consciously exercised, until its "rehabilitation" in the 1960s, when it was again published in Czechoslovakia...

...University of Columbia professor Peter Petro suggests in his helpful afterword that Hronsk~ may have disbelieved in the power of the word...

...A third dispatch goes to the heart of American politics9 Evidence of dissension within the army and the misfunctioning of the Confederal Congress had sparked rumors of a coup...

...Mostly, it is Mak's crucified hands that appear throughout the story -- not as an image, but as a reality: Jozef Mak 9 must continuously travel to sell his labor as a lumberjack's helper, as a digge/" for the railroad -- anything -- merely to exist in a world, where, alone, he lias "no voice...

...For me, what does not emerge with sufficient force from Kaiser's account is the depth of the intellectual scandal created not only by that astonishing paragraph but by the contorted reasoning of the encyclical as a whole...

...Symbols are interwoven with the lives of realistically drawn characters, revealing the villagers' unconscious integration of both the spiritual and the sensual...

...In the book's preface she mentions that the Slovak people sustained themselves with their "laboring hands and the nearly inarticulate though beautiful voice of (their) folk art" during the "tragic political and economic conditions that followed the breakup of the Great Moravian Empire...

...Interspersed throughout the text are footnotes that direct the reader to the back of the book, and further explanations of Slovak history and customs...

...The novel JozefMak has endured, too...

...Where mothers and sons are not left without husbands and fathers...

...I II Dick Howard T HE BEMUSED dispatc.hes of the first French ambassador to the rebel colonies whose de facto independence was assured by the French alliance in 1778 can serve to introduce John P. Diggins's quest for a "lost soul" of American politics...

...Hoi1u Metz I OZEF MAK, the second novel of the early twentieth century Slovak writer Jozef Ciger-Hronsk~, has just now been published in an English translation -more than sixty years after its first printing in the author's homeland...

...You are not just Jozef Mak, you're the whole village...

...At the close of the book Hronsk: speaks directly to the miserable Jozef Mak, whose wife has died: "In a novel something would happen to remove Jozef Mak from the world...

...But one must also recognize the cultural chauvinism of English language readers which sustains ignorance...

...Box 14388, Columbus, OH 43214), $12.95, 232 pp...

...Here villains abound, Cardinal Ottaviani of the Holy Office and the' American Jesuit John Ford chief among them...

...But life is not a novel...

...Included in the Slavica publication are four black-andwhite renderings by Alexander Rud17 January 1986:21insky, which competently depict different scenes from the book...

...though there have been years of neglect...

...Thus, the implication in Kaiser's Introduction that the story has a happy ending seems to me doubly wrong: The story is more sad than happy, and it hasn't ended...

...Thankfully, the reader need not initially pursue such references in order to enjoy this lyrical vision of village life, into which one is immersed from the very first page...

...It was the barons, not King John, who took the initiative leading to the Magna Carta...

...In Hronsk)~'s depiction of village life there are no miracles -- he never sentimentalizes: "The candles, gilt, and statues tried as hard as they could to help her, but their desperate efforts were futile because gilt and statues are no longer permitted to move or speak, the age of miracles having long since passed away9 But he does show that an ordinary man can experience what James Joyce called an epiphany (with a small "e"), transcendence through the everyday...