My Father 'The Hero'

 

Today is the 14th Anniversary of my Father's death, always a difficult day for me, no matter how many years go quietly by.... and as I write these words and tears are rolling down my face, I think of My Father and my ultimate hero, the man considered to be one of the most important Serbian literary figures of the 20th century.

Today is also the First Birthday of All Things Beautiful, the blog I started in his honor on the same day a year ago.

To say that I worshiped, admired, and adored him, would probably be the understatement of all time, and not worthy of my friends and family, who know me so well. I think of him often when I have some upstart liberal on my blog falling about, knocking furniture around the room and telling me how I don't understand what fighting for liberty and freedom of speech is all about. Perhaps I don't know or understand this new form of socialism liberals today call their own precious democracy, and perhaps I don't even want to.

They do not know me, nor do they know my family history, nor what we as a family have stood for, for generations, in our small unit nor as the family as a whole. I as a person, am much more defined by my roots, growing up quite literally living the political struggle of Democracy vs. Dictatorship. My Father lived his entire life for democracy; he truly lived and breathed its often poisonous fumes when contaminated with hypocrisy and falsehood spawned from a socialist regime; he sacrificed his own personal freedom and youth for its sake.

David Binder writing for The New York Times

A dozen years after his death Borislav Pekic is acclaimed as one of the greatest writers in the Serbian language [...]

Returning to Belgrade in the waning years of Yugoslav communism, he joined a group of dissidents including Vojislav Kostunica, now president of Yugoslavia, and Zoran Djindjic, later Prime Minister of Serbia, who was assassinated last March. In February 1990 the three men founded the opposition Democratic Party. At their convention Pekic denounced the moribund Communists: "If this system has no moral foundations, principles or laws on which we can all rely equally, it ceases to be legitimate."

Four months later he marched in a demonstration against the ruling ex-Communists of Slobodan Milosevic and was injured in a police charge [...]

My Father used to say that you can never blame others for their cowardice. Everyone has different considerations and aspects to worry about. Some worry about their jobs, some their very lives, some the sponsors who keep them funded. One can only look to oneself and stand upright for what one believes in.

Betrayed many times by close friends, in a totalitarian regime of former Yugoslavia, the most significant of which, resulted in being imprisoned at the age of 18 for forming the first 'Yugoslav Democratic Youth', and sentenced to fifteen years in prison (released after serving five). During this time in prison he conceived many of the ideas later developed in his major novels.

He always forgave his friends and foe alike. He said that they had considerations of their livelihood, which he did not have to worry about due to his privileged background. They feared for their very lives, which my Father had given to the cause of freedom long ago. They had considerations for their families' wellbeing, which my Father did not have (when he married my mother he made his position clear, and she understood that, when I came along I simply was not asked. Heh.)

He forgave them, not because they know not what they do, but because he understood the human weaknesses and survival instincts and embraced them with the true spirit of the courageous man that he was.

C. S. Lewis once said that the virtue of courage is a prerequisite for the practice of all other virtues, because otherwise one is virtuous only when virtue has no cost. There are times when something needs to be done, and yet we know that if we step up and do this needful thing, we will pay a heavy personal price. Courage is the virtue that makes us willing to pay that price; cowardice makes us say, “The price is too high; I will not pay it.”

And again, he always said to me "Look to yourself, not to others. Don't ever rely on others to fight for YOUR freedom. They never will. They will always fight for their own version of it, which is relevant to their own little world. Very few people in history have truly fought for the good of mankind."

Well my Father was that person, never self-indulgent, even though he was always far too modest to recognize it. A great friend and mentor of his, and one of the literary geniuses of our time, penned a wonderful essay about him some ten years before my Father's untimely death in 1992, and I will share it again with you, as I myself love to read it for the umpteenth time. It captures the heart and soul of my own memories of My Father 'The Hero'.

"Only a short time has passed since Ivo Andric and Milos Crnjanski, having reached their zenith, began to bask in their future eternal fame and then passed from life to our literary tradition. They had ended their long, productive careers at an auspicious time in Serbian literature, leaving in their wake a number of gifted, first-rate writers who have already moved well into the realm of high art. I want to introduce one of them to you, one whose place in the future history of Serbian literature is already secure, and would be increasingly so. He is right here, living in our time, growing and developing before our very eyes - it is only right that we should get to know him.

A figure unusual in many ways: in his life, his work, his looks.

Above the slightly bent shoulders of a tall, delicately built man, chiseled, ascetic, triangular head. A stern look behind powerful glasses, a look that seems to be seeing rather than watching, is but rarely lit up by a fleeting and somewhat bewildered smile. The soft gait of his long legs, the exquisitely beautiful and restless hand. (A perceptive painter made a portrait of him as the famous icon of 'Bogorodica Trojerucica'- Our Lady with Three Hands). He speaks but a little, and almost always in curt, brief phrases - he, the author of the longest sentence in Serbian literature. He also speaks gruffly, even indignantly, as if he were angry with his interlocutor in advance, as it happens with people who hide their sensitive spirit behind the armour of irrefutable logic. An assiduous worker, uncommonly and unflaggingly committed to his trade, he is always somewhat absent in the company of other people, as if the best part of his thoughts kept toiling over unfinished manuscripts. He drinks rarely, and when he does he only takes stiff drinks, with the resolute vigour of a Cossack. He is proud, even haughty, as a nobleman would be. He seldom makes mistakes and he reluctantly excuses the mistakes of others, let alone his own. A sturdy man who keeps to his beliefs and principles, luckily without the pedantry and hair-splitting one often encounters in such characters. He cannot stand charlatanism, too strong and hasty words, or our sentimental, Slavic outbursts. He keeps his word as if he were a Scottish Highlander, and he makes much of it if others keep theirs too. In a word, a strong, tough and somewhat unrelenting man, who in spite of that can be both a precious and a preciously devoted friend to the people and ideas he has acknowledged as his own.

Of course, such as he is, Borislav Pekic could not have had an easy life. He was born in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1930, as the only son of an affluent Montenegrin father and a  mother of noble Tsintsar descent. In the turbulent, crazy times after the Second World War, at the age of eighteen, he was tried as a member of the illegal political organization called The Democratic Youth and sentenced to many years’ imprisonment, eventually serving out more than half a decade. Destined to become a writer and aware of his vocation, he had to wait for a long time and endure the double torment of imprisonment and silence. Although he was to become an erudite and one of our most learned writers, he studied psychology but decided not to finish. He is often referred to as the Serbian Thomas Mann (After all, Thomas Mann – who is Pekic’s next of kin in spiritual terms finished, if I am not mistaken, only seven grades of high school). He was strong enough after attending his 'university' in prison to go on preparing for his public debut for another decade, in secret.

And he burst into our literature suddenly and from an unexpected direction, with a book of New Testament legends entitled The Time of Miracles, at a time that was witnessing and invoking a different kind of miracles. Discerning eyes could already detect in this first book an ambitious author marked by an epic sweep, a polished style, and a paradoxical, ironic intelligence. After this, Pekic was silent for five years, as if he had all the time in the world and even more self-confidence; and then, already a forty-year-old, he published the first in a series of novels about the Njegovan family, The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan (translated into English as The Houses of Belgrade). It achieved great success, won critical acclaim and the Nin award, and the persevering recluse suddenly found himself in the focus of public attention.

He remained there for a short while and then, as if he were not from this part of the world, where people laze on the laurels of their success so easily, Pekic fled to London with his architect wife and his only daughter, and in that populous city, procul negotiis, far from the hustle and bustle of his homeland’s literary scene, he dug himself in, like a conspirator or an ascetic, in the vaults in which he creates his works.

From the faraway London then began to flow, if through a broken dam, the full spate of his novels, plays, essays, journals; Pekic’s oeuvre constantly grew until it numbered thousands of pages. And though he remains there, in that foreign city, with each new line he writes he is increasingly here and increasingly ours.

I have had the opportunity, unique for a connoisseur of literature, to follow the work of Borislav Pekic in the making, from the vantage point of a close friend. The Time of Miracles, The Pilgrimage of Arsenije Njegovan, The Rise and Fall of Ikar Gubelkijan, How To Quiet a Vampire, The Defence and Last Days of Andria Gavrilovic, and his major, central work The Golden Fleece (five volumes which have been published, and two more announced). Thirty or so plays and dramatizations (of which seven have been staged in Belgrade, one of which recently had it's 200th performance) and as many radio plays that have been broadcast across Europe, especially in Germany, where they had broadcast over 100 of his radio plays. Published fragments of an unpublished novel, The Reds and the Whites; yet to be published novel, The Builders; a thoroughly worked out plan for a novel about the Byzantine Empire; a broadly conceived and diligently kept journal of the writer's reflections. This is what Pekic has written, or is writing, or, to my knowledge, intends to write.

Let me try, though I do not even hope to succeed, to squeeze this extensive oeuvre into the tight corset of a short commentary.

Borislav Pekic is never a mere chronicler of people’s destinies, but a writer who always focuses on moral, intellectual, political, and historical problems that have caused such destinies. This is why each of Pekic’s texts rests firmly on a paradoxical intellectual construct. Basically a skeptic with a powerful imagination, Pekic sees man as a being impaled on the stake of history, on which he simultaneously twitches, cackles and cries for mercy. Like any wise man, Pekic conceives of history in broad terms: as politics, economy and morals,colour scent, the colour and the style of an epoch, as a succession of tradition and innovation, as a craft, a profession, a bloodline, a family, a genus, deeming that the only constant thing is the eternal split of man’s dual, Centaur-like nature, the split between passion and logic, between compulsion and defiance, between the mundane and the mysterious. This also explains why Pekic is so well-informed and his works abounding with so many data.

He cannot stand superficiality and improvisation: if one of his characters (Djordje) is a general, this implies the author’s deep knowledge of military matters; if another is a house-owner (Arsenije) and yet another one a future architect (the little Isidor), this implies the knowledge of all the fine points of architecture. This may even include familiarity with IG Farben if his characters happen to work in the chemical industry (the two Stefans), or the wanderers, lore from the times when the Njegovan genus was peddling across the Balkans. Since all truly great novels are in fact family novels (from the first one - The Iliad, to the best one - War and Peace), thus Pekic too, undaunted by the task he had set himself, envisioned his masterpiece in a megalomaniac fashion and perhaps for the first time in the history of world literature, took and followed a family through twenty long centuries.

Never self-indulgent, Pekic indulges his reader even less. He is what is usually called a 'difficult writer'. He writes at full length, elaborating on his subject, and the reader will often have to fight his way through the entangled thicket of his texts, though sometimes doomed in advance to failure. From his reader Pekic expects and requires that he should be absolutely concentrated, willing to pursue with him the remotest digressions or obsessions, and sufficiently informed to follow his hidden allusions and his vast learning. However, if the reader endures in this, I am tempted to say, concentration camp of spiritual demands, he shall be amply, lavishly rewarded.

He shall meet the multitudinous throng of Pekic’s interesting and powerfully depicted characters, he will follow the course of an inspired and inspiring intelligence moving through various times and taking the shape of various people, he will face intriguing problems of man’s existence expressed with subtle irony and very often with the most sophisticated spirituality and humour to be found in our culture and our language. He will find a close and indispensable companion in this great lover of paradoxes, who loves them because we are ourselves paradoxical, both we and this life we are living.

From The Selected Works of Borislav Pekic, vol. 12, 1984

Pekic died at his home in London on July 2nd 1992

Comments

[Aleksandra]

Hi Alexandra,

love ur blog and ur father :). He was a genius!! And I agree that he was the greatest Serbian writer of the 20th century. U r so lucky u got to spend time with him, see and talk to him every day. It is such a loss that he is no longer with us. But, from what and how he wrote, we can, at least, make a vague idea of the greatness of his personality..

[Ghost Dansing]

That is a wonderful tribute.

[Branko Malic]

Dear Alexandra,

i studied the most of European classics in philosophy and literature, from Plato to Wittgenstein, but only book that really ever had any real impact on my life was your fathers 'Atlantis', and i red it when i was eighteen. To this day (i am thirty two now) it still provokes my thoughts. It is a tragedy of my generation that such thinkers as Borislav Pekic don't pose a challenge and guidience any more, because their world, which is partly mine too, ceased to exist in a very short period in former YU. If it hadn't been so, we could have a generation of intellectuals and artist that learned from the best. Now we have only isolated individuals, seeking out their individual ways, contributing nothing to a bigger whole, which simply does not exist any more. I will be a happy man if once i manage to write out a fragment of truth in a manner your father has done.

Branko Malic, Croatia

[Marija Lazarev Zivanovic]

Dear Aleksandra,

I will start compliments the other way around.
I decided to find out the date of birth of my favourite Serbian writer(who happened to be your father) and to check whether he was born in Kosovo or in Montenegro. Only then I came across this blog and admired your proufound understanding of him as a charachter, not blaming him for certain aspects you must have been deprived from in your childhood. That probably shows your greatness, with unneglectable part of genes but also your individual sensibility.
My child died of leukemia. I survived with the books. Besnilo was the volume I read in 2 days. It had made me digress and progress.
The way Pekic leads through Evangiles is bitter but the genius of his mind who fought with the atrocities of prison, betrayal, human weaknesses is actually the only main stream-for me, he was never a dissident. Pekic, in his entire work, was so potent and above ordinary yet the taste he leaves in your mouth after reading grieves for Logos.
My nickname is Maca
My deepest sympathy, best regards and congratulations!

[Alexandra]

Yes I do Milica, send me an e-mail, and we'll chat.

[Milica]

Dear Alexandra,
My congratulations for the first birthday of your blog.
I have a question for you regarding your father's work. Do you know what happened with the interview with Dragi Stiojadinovic in Argentina he made?
Thank you
Milica

[jess1dering]

Alexandra,
I would be so very proud if I were you. I would have known that your father was a wonderful, special man...as you are a reflection of him. Happy, happy birthday to an incredibly special blog........and many more!
With Gratitude to you for sharing yourself with us... an extaordinary blessing in my life.

[DavidByron]

Just to add to the others -- thanks, Alexandra.

[Andreja Maric]

Alexandra - dear Maca (please permit us to use your family nickname, meaning kitten)

Congratulation for your wonderful tribute and a wonderful job of continuing the legacy of your father. Thank you for making memorable those difficult days of our childhood. My wife and I grieve with you from a great distance, but we are very proud we had the opportunity to know your father, a great author and human being, in person.
And Happy Birthday to All Things Beautiful

Respectfully
Snezana and Andreja Maric

[gringoman]

My Dear Alexandra (if I may be permitted an unearned familiarity of address):

Just came across your moving post of July 02. Funny, and interesting, how different people will note different things. For example, I was struck immediately by something your extraordinary father had in common with another famous East European author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Both, in their youth, spent four or five years in prison for "political" activities. The experience was profound for Dostoyevsky, as I suspect it was for your father too. Intellectuals (fortunately or unfortunately) do not often get tossed down into the "Lower Depths" like this. Ironically, the prison gates led to a deeper knowledge of "the human heart", the kind not readily acquired on college campi or even in graduate school.. (I don't know if the Left later tarred your father---as they did the "apostate" former socialist Dostoyevsky---as a "reactionary," after what his psychological scalpel and narrative gifts did to what he saw as their sanctimony, nihilism and thorough superficiality. Maybe they reserve that honor for you?

Your own understanding of "family" is certainly a message important in itself, and maybe comprehensible even to those who stupidly see themselves as "friends of the poor" by encouraging and subsidizing fatherlessness in society. The fortunate in family--of any economic level--will nod in assent to this understanding, and others may nod too, maybe a little more poignantly.

Another thing I like here is the worldliness. It does its bit to fill in what H.L. Mencken saw as a gaping hole in American life--i.e. the lack of any native aristocracy of the mind and spirit, the nation top-heavy with philistines and captains of money management. ATB would have to imply your father and the dramatic facts of life in Europe, far from Disneyland and The Fed. The sense is clear that all things beautiful must include some things ugly.

Your energy, industry and spirit continue to impress. (I'm no longer keen on daily/daily/daily blogging for myself,preferring longer intervals between posts, but can respect those who do it, especially with the unusual intensity of ATB. Fare thee well in it!)

The fact that you've done so much with this exceptional blog in the space of one year is proof positive of another point: My Dear, you've turned out to be not only the daughter of a creator, but one of his top creations.

And here's proof of how it's gotten to me: Confession, confession! I am a very prejudiced homo sapien. If the truth be told--and sometimes it must--I prefer, or tend to prefer--long hair on a woman. And yet, and yet, I keep coming back! Oh, Alexandra, what have you done? (Yes, of course I'm not immune to something so chic, so clipped, it's just that....Wait. I think I'll shut up now.)

Alexandra, congratulations, and thanks for the biographical detour.

[M]

Congratulations! It'd good that not many others have your talent. Otherwise blog reading could become a full-time job.

[Huan]

Alexandra, your father did a tremendous job with you. Be proud.

[Professor Andrew Bostom]

Dear Alexandra,
A very moving blog post.
Your website is a very fitting daily tribute to your father's memory.
Take care,
Andy Bostom

[Charles Cochran, aka nofate]

Whoa! I'm just a former long-haired, maggot infested....from flyover country. I ran into you on Newsbusters when you answered one of my posts, and I knew right then you were special. Being over 50 and slow on the uptake, I didn't get to your blog until about 2 or 3 wks ago. Being very visual, the artwork drew me in, but the obvious character of your personality coming through the writing is what keeps me coming back. The artwork is just a reflection. It is only a hope at this time that some day my two daughters will have a smidgeon of the regard that you have for your father. I certainly did not expect to check your blog and be brought to the point of fighting back tears! God bless you for all you do. It is people like you and the countless thousands of others from all backgrounds that make this country great and continue to give me hope that we will overcome the new trials this country is headed for.

[Darrell]

Happy Anniversary! What a proud man your father must be!

Few have achieved so much in one year's time. I hope you realize how much you mean to all of us out here, how important you are to the fight!
Great work! Confidently looking forward to more of the same in the years to come!

[Kenny Pierce]

NxN,

God bless you, Alexandra.

Well, He blessed her pretty spectacularly in her father; and I know that she also loved and admired her uncle very much. Indeed, those of us who have the good fortune to be privy to some of Alexandra's other family background know that her father is not the only family member who represents a major blessing to her, though she respects the fact that her other family members have not chosen to be public figures the way her father did and doesn't do tribute posts to them. I know how important her family's support is to her (she has spoken to me of the importance of that support with as much passion as I've heard her summon for any other topic, and that is no exaggeration; it is deeply, critically important to her). I hope they know that it's not just her dad that she talks of glowingly, and that her father the hero is not her only hero.

It's quite a family, both the public figures and the private ones. Anybody who has come from a family with bonds that intimately and inextricably bound, and family members that deeply admirable (even if not as publicly so) knows that such a family is a blessing for which nothing else in the world can be substituted. As I said, even though this is a hard day every year for Alexandra, for her friends it's an annual reminder to celebrate with her the blessing her family represents.

Okay, now I've pegged the sapometer, and being a guy I have to call a stop to that; so, no more sappiness. I'll go off in search of some immigration amnesty supporters to insult or something so that the world can return to normal.

[DLJ]

A, your father did well to raise such a daughter as the author of this wonderful blog. I greatly enjoy your work.

[North by Northwest]

Browsing through the archive there are many superlatives that spring to my mind. But perhaps the most indicative characterization of your magnificent creation 'All Things Beautiful' is your deeply moving tribute to your beloved father on ATB's first anniversary. It radiates your heartfelt empathy and genuine compassion for the fate of your fellow men. Your passionate plea for a just and democratic society is echoed by a growing family of, dare I say, soul-mates, whose comments complete each post to what has become like a daily beacon of hope and encouragement in my life. I am certain, your father is watching over you with loving and joyful pride. God bless you, Alexandra.

[Jeremayakovka]

Very moving post. Started to comment but it quickly became a blog post, trackbacked above.

[The Heretik]

Stopping by here and through our conversations, I've come to know your father and your history. And while we may come from different sides of the same conundrum we live in, I will remember what you said here today about your father . . . He always forgave his friends and foe alike.

A hard thing to say, an even more difficult ideal to live. The romantic in me says the healing of all things is possible through the strength of the heart found only in forgiveness. The forgiving heart can make a foe a friend. The heart true to itself beats forever, so the father lives in the daughter. Amen.

[Alexandra]

Dave, Kenny and Antimedia, what a Trilogy, or should I say Trinity...you make it all worth while. Truly, thank you for caring, and understanding me so, so well.

[antimedia]

I hadn't planned on crying today. I thought it would be relaxing day, enjoying the beginnings of my vacation, reading through my favorite blogs, thinking about life. Your tribute to your father touched me deeply, and I thank you for sharing what, for you, is a subject of great pride and even greater pain - your father's life and death.

What I admire most about you, and now your father as well, is that wealth and the ability to do nothing which it brings had no influence on your or your father other than to allow you to give voice to the value of freedom and the dangers of lassitude.

Thank you for sharing, Alexandra. You are doing a wonderful job of continuing the legacy of your father.

[Kenny Pierce]

Alexandra,

You know I love ya, girl, and you know I admire your father -- even more for his ability to forgive than for his courage to fight.

I know you hate to see this day roll around every year, but if you're going to mark every anniversary by reminding us of what kind of man your father was and what he accomplished, the rest of us are going to wind up looking forward to it.

What you've accomplished in a year with this blog is genuinely remarkable, and it's been a pleasure to watch it grow and take off. I'm sure your father is proud of you and proud of this blog. It's a blog worthy of the daughter of Borislav Pekic, and I don't know many that could make that claim. In fact I can only think of one.

Congratulations and condolences and above all love, all rolled up in one.

[Dave Matthews]

Alexandra,

It is not often that an author discloses the motivations and pedigree that compels her to do what she does. But when we the devoted are granted that momentary peek behind the curtain, we are richly rewarded with the answers to the Why. Those who have most often been denied the liberty and freedom to which you are now a potent advocate are usually the most powerful to defend on the home fronts the Tree of Freedom that on occasion must be nourished and replenished by the blood of Patriots. Though you do not serve on the field of battle, the battlefield you have chosen is often as important as that on which our proud military serves at the pointed end of the spear. Being able to defend our freedoms by demonstrating how bankrupt our opponents are is a calling not often to be denied because of what could happen if honorable men and women choose to do nothing.

I grieve with you the loss of your father from a great distance, of geography as well as of time. I know you have in a sense taken the torch from your father's hand and have more than made your own name with it in the area from which he distinguished himself. There is none who doubt that you have done your father proud and by your daily labors you have greatly honored his memory.

To say that I stop by here daily can be so trite and patronizing, but it occurs to me that if other scores of multitudes do the same (h/t Michelle Malkin) then it cannot be said that you are not having an impact on the current debate that compels us to write in this medium that is the Internet. As long as we are afforded the opportunity and privilege of hearing your voice, then the torch that is Freedom and Liberty will not soon be extinguished. Attempts to snuff it out will be met with the violence, logic and resolve it is entitled to receive. The voices of Freedom and Liberty, to which yours belongs, compels those that would do us harm to consider how difficult their task. We will not go willingly into the night. Nor soon. Those in need of refreshment and rejuvenation in the difficulty that lies ahead need but come here to be reminded of the nobility of our cause, that we have been blessed beyond measure and that we must not, cannot, and will not fail.

Thank you for ATB and your labors. I am often refreshed when I stop by here. It is my firm hope that others will be as I am.

Respectfully Submitted,

Dave Matthews
Atlanta, GA

[Alexandra]

Thank you all so much, you are making this difficult day really memorable for me, with your wonderful thoughts and prayers, and heartfelt messages. It's true Chrys, no matter how many years pass...and yes Alby he was "the kind of man that moves humans forward in our quest for independence and freedom of our physical beings while in this realm."

[albydam]

Dear Alexandra,
I enojoy your lucid and effective commentary. I love the art, I love the variety. God bless you, your family and your father. It sounds like he was the kind of man that moves humans forward in our quest for independence and freedom of our physical beings while in this realm.
Keep up the tradition.
Albydam

[Sal]

Alexandra

Great tribute to you and your father. My father was larger than life and meaner than mean, it's good to imagine how life could have been. I still loved him, although he never knew it.

Thank you for this gift of a blog that cheers me up every day, (it's my first stop) and thank you for your support for Israel. You truly are a shining star to these old Jewish eyes.

May God bless you and keep you safe always.

[Conservative Cat]

I read you every day, even though I don't often comment, am a great admirer of your charm, wit and intelligence. Happy Birthday to All Things Beautiful you truly are beautiful inside and out.

[MarkT]

I found your blog through your contributions at NewsBusters.com, and have been reading it for a few weeks now with great delight wandering what graphics you will choose next, and what topic with it. If this is a tribute to your blog, you can be proud of what you have achieved. I have read everything you have ever written and am amazed how you manage it day in and day out. Well done, and sorry about your father, we would all like to have heard what he has to say about the present day liberals in America. I bet he is having a good laugh up there!

[Daniel]

chrys
ditto that. this is one of the most amazing blogs i have ever seen, and i now read some more of why i like it so much. thanks for your relentless fight for our liberty, despite the fact that the democrats seem to think they patented the word. keep on doing what you are doing, i am sure somewhere up there your dad is very proud of you.

[Ann]

Alexandra, you already know I love your blog and I now admire the incredible respect you have for your father. I always knew you were special, but the way you write about him tells me a lot about you, and what qualities you hold dear. It is rare to see such gratitude and memory from our children. I can only hope mine will write something half as comlimentary about me one day, even though my accomplishment has been simply to be their mother. Happy 1st birthday and may there be many more we enjoy together.

[chrys]

Wonderful tribute. Even though my own father died in 1969 - these memories stay fresh. Congratulations on your first year - as it's a tribute.

[Michael van der Galien]

Alexandra,

You always speak highly of your father and the more I read about him, the more I completely understand your love and pride for him.
It is a sad thing that he died 14 years ago, but in someway you are carrying on with the tradition of speaking what you believe to be true. No matter the opposition / criticism.

You and your family are in my prayers.

Thanks for sharing with us more about your father, about what drove him and about what made him a great author and human being.

Congratulations with the 1 year aniversary of ATB. Carry on the tradition.