Holly Case is a historian at Brown University specializing in modern European history. Her first book, Between States: The Transylvanian Question and the European Idea during WWII, was published in May 2009. She also recently completed The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, published in June 2018. Email: Holly_Case [at] brown.edu
by Holly A. Case Croatian State Archives, main reading room This story—a true one—is about a graphomaniac. I found him in the Croatian State Archives, Zagreb, where even the washrooms have signature tiles. Art nouveau beads drip from the lamps over the desks and carefully restored owls stare down from the tiled ceiling. The building,…
by Holly A. Case German soldiers invading Belgium, August 1914 It was from Isabel Hull that I learned what tu quoque means, and how important it is to know. Hull is a professor of German history at Cornell, where I have also taught. Once I invited her to a class to talk about the British…
by Holly A. Case James Baldwin Dost Mektupları (Letters of a Friend) is a collection of correspondence between James Baldwin and the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar (pronounced Jezzar). Although they were written in English with a spattering of French (Baldwin) and Shakespearean English (Cezzar), the letters have only been published in Turkish. This may seem…
by Holly A. Case Attila Kiss Attila Kiss speaks beautiful English. He has been a simultaneous interpreter—from Hungarian to English and English to Hungarian—for various intellectual and spiritual luminaries, among them the Dalai Lama, and for the European Union. When he speaks of interpreting, it is with uncanny precision, betraying an awareness that even speech…
by Holly A. Case Ares, god of war When Joseph Brodsky taught poetry at Mount Holyoke College, his method of choice was memorization. At the beginning of every class, students took out a blank sheet of paper and wrote out the poem for discussion that day from memory. Every comma, every line break, every word:…
by Holly A. Case Alison Lurie, 1947 It was the first garden party of the year. In attendance were a couple dozen writers and would-be writers, a pastor, and myself. I knew no one except the host and a couple of other people, who were all knotted around each other engaged in writerly shoptalk, so…