Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

A few times a month, Agata and I went to the girls’ gymnasiums in Loksow to work on recruiting the older girls for our courses, and these were days I greatly looked forward to. First there were the long walks, the conversations with Agata, whose little boy Piotr was two, six months older than Klara. And second, there was the joy I felt in talking about our school, remembering again and again what it had become. What we had made it. Now that we had a fixed location, we were no longer a Flying University, and we gave ourselves a new name, one so bold it could only be said in secret: Women’s University of Loksow.

Whenever I spoke to the girls at the gymnasium about what we did, what they could learn, I got a little thrill saying our new name out loud. Women’s University. Right here in Loksow. I had started this. Agata and I both had.

BY THE SPRING, LOKSOW WAS BURNING WITH RESISTANCE. IT was, at first, a dull hum on the streets as I walked to teach my Wednesday night class, a whisper among the younger women I was teaching. And then it erupted into crowds of people blocking the street, making it hard to get around. Kaz’s students went on strike, protesting for the right to learn in Polish instead of Russian, for better pay for all workers, and so Kaz was at home during the day, with me and Klara. He kept to himself, working all day on his research, but our meager savings dwindled, and I worried we’d soon run out of money to eat. My salary was not enough for us to live on, to continue to afford our two bedrooms on Złota Street.

In Paris, Hela and Jacques had made a finding with their minerals and magnetic properties, winning a prize from the French Academy of Sciences and with it a generous sum of francs. Hela wrote me with the good news and mailed us a portion of their prize winnings, offering this gift as her very small and faraway contribution to the revolution in Poland.

Kaz did not like it, taking charity money from my sister, but I said to him: “What would you have us do instead? Starve?”

I hated the way he looked back at me, both startled and disappointed. “As soon as I publish this research . . .” he mumbled, turning back to his papers.

But we had gone on this way for so many years, I didn’t know if I believed there was something more for us any longer, something beyond what we were and what we had now. And though I hoped for Poland to be free, for my university to be allowed out in the open and for our lives to be easier, ever since I gave birth to Klara, none of the rest of it mattered quite as much as it used to. I did not dream of Paris or the Sorbonne any longer.

Instead I dreamed mostly of enough food to eat, a nice place to live, and for Klara to grow up happy and healthy.

“COME WITH US, PANI MARYA,” ONE OF MY STUDENTS, A small, bright-eyed girl, Aleksandra, implored me one Wednesday in May. My walk to class had been lined with students her age, both men and women, chanting in the streets, protesting. And when I walked inside our school, my students were all humming about protesting, too, not readying themselves for my lesson.

“What is going on here?” I asked. I had prepared a lesson tonight on the new research about X-rays I’d been reading that Hela had sent to me last week. A paper by Henri Becquerel, a pioneer in the field, and Hela wrote that she had actually met him recently! He had come to their lab, wanting to view their new prizewinning discovery about his Becquerel rays and their minerals. Imagine that.

“We are going to join the revolution tonight,” Aleksandra answered, her blue eyes shimmery even in the dim lighting.

“No.” I held my hand up. “Everyone put your signs away. You have paid me to teach you. And do you know where the real revolution is?” They all stopped what they were doing and looked at me, their young eyes eager, trained on my face. “Right here.” I tapped my forefinger to my head. “If you become educated. If you learn . . . well, that is how you will beat them. How you will win.”

It was something Papa had said to me and Bronia and Hela so many times when we were girls, and remembering his last deathbed words to me again, I smiled a little. “Now,” I said to the girls. “Should I begin my lesson? There will still be time to protest after.”

LEOKADIA KEPT HER PROMISE AND WROTE ME ONCE EVERY few weeks from Berlin to update me on the goings-on in her life. And I kept my promise to her and replied to the letters sometimes, when I had something to say, or when my heart softened toward her again as she mentioned being lonely in Berlin. She was learning so much, being paid to perform in the city, and beginning to be offered new and exciting opportunities all around Europe. But she had no friends in Berlin, no family.

Hela wrote me from Paris and Bronia wrote me from Zakopane weekly too. But the letters I looked forward to most of all? The ones I treasured and kept in a pile inside the top drawer of my chest? The occasional ones that came from Pierre.

As the revolution was overtaking the streets of Loksow, Pierre wrote me about the flowers blooming once again, taking over the gardens surrounding his house in Sceaux.

Sometimes when I am taking my morning bicycle ride, I can’t help but think of you, he wrote. Hoping that you are well, belle intelligente Marya. When do you think you might return to Paris?

Marie

France, 1906

Easter weekend we go to our cottage in Saint-Rémy, leaving all