Ray Nayler Transcript [Francesca] Ray Ray Nayler, welcome back to Writer's Voice. [Ray Nayler] Thank you. It's great to be here again. [Francesca] I love this new novel, Palaces of the Crow. It's different than the other one that we spoke about, which was The Mountain and the Sea, because that took place in the future. This takes place in the past, and it takes place in Eastern Europe during the war. You worked for roughly two decades in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I think you really brought the Eastern front of World War II, where this novel is set very much to life, very vividly. I'm just curious, what were you doing in Eastern Europe in the former Soviet Union? [Ray Nayler] So I joined the Peace Corps in 2003, fully expecting, because I had sort of a stereotype idea of the Peace Corps to serve in Africa. Instead, I was offered a post in Turkmenistan in Central Asia, formerly, of course, the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. Actually, the last of the republics to leave the USSR, it was kicked out. Basically, they said, look, sorry, there's no USSR anymore, you have to leave. Turkmenistan was a dictatorship while I was there, and had been since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ruled by Saparmurat Turkmenbashi, not his real name. Turkmenbashi means father of all Turkmen. His real name was Niyazov. I was there for two years teaching English at the Azadi Institute of World Languages in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, in the capital there. After that, I learned Turkmen and then I learned Russian there. I decided I really loved the region and I wanted to stay somewhere around there. So I got a job in Moscow, traveling around Russia and recruiting for a high school exchange program called the Future Leadership Exchange Program, or the FLEX Program, it's usually known. And I worked in Russia, and then I worked in Afghanistan, I worked in Kazakhstan and in Kyrgyzstan. And I worked again in Russia for a few years where I met my wife, and then we worked together in Tajikistan for a few years. And from there, I joined the Foreign Service. They posted me to Vietnam first. The only explanation for that that I could come up with was they figured if I had managed to learn Russian and it didn't kill me, then Vietnamese wouldn't kill me either. But after that, I went back to the region. I worked in Kyrgyzstan again, I worked in Azerbaijan, and then I moved a little bit further west into the Balkans and worked in Kosovo. And that was my last posting abroad so far. So I fell in love with Central Asia first, and then with the whole region. What I love about Central Asia, what I tell people I love about it is, it's one of these areas where if you say, I worked in Turkmenistan, people really don't even have a stereotype of the place, right? It's just still very much, for a lot of people in the West, a completely white space on the map, you know, a blank, and they have very few ideas about what it's like. And I had very few ideas about what it would be like. And so it was just completely new to me. And it left, you know, a deep impression. It's really like a second home. [Francesca] And this novel is set in the former Pale of Settlement. Is it Byelorussia? [Ray Nayler] No, it's set in Lithuania, but it's quite complicated, because technically, the area of Lithuania that it is set in is Poland, when World War II breaks out. So while it's been Poland, and then it's Lithuania, I mean, it's extremely complicated, it goes back and forth. But it is set in the forests outside of Vilnius, present-day Lithuania, historically a part of Lithuania and the Polish-Lithuanian Kingdom, but also had been a part of Poland, historically. And it's interesting you should say Belarus, because it was originally going to be set in Belarus, but I am a real stickler for research, and I could not travel to Belarus to do the kind of research I needed. So I changed the location of the novel to Lithuania. [Francesca] Oh, that's interesting. Well, the novel follows, and we're talking about Palaces of the Crow, it follows four young people, a Jewish girl, a Polish deserter, a Roma horse trader, and a nameless boy, for most of the book, well, until he's a man and he gets named, who cannot speak. And they are surviving in a Lithuanian forest, with the help of a flock of extraordinarily intelligent crows. And in your acknowledgements, Ray Ray Nayler, you write about the recurring presence of crows in human myth and literature, and about their ability to thrive amid our conflicts, our wars, and of course, this takes place during World War II. How did those observations of crows become part of this particular story about war and reciprocity? [Ray Nayler] You know, first of all, one of the things that I'm really thankful for was my time in Peace Corps, at a time when other people were losing, probably, this was 2003 to 2005. And so, email and the internet were really taking hold, but this is previous to people just carrying cell phones mostly around with them everywhere, or most people carrying them, and it's certainly a long time before smartphones. But people were certainly becoming much more distracted. I, on the other hand, was in a place where there was quite often literally nothing to do, right? I lived in Ashgabat, and Ashgabat, while it was the capital of Turkmenistan, was certainly not a metropolis of any kind. I lived by myself in a Soviet apartment block after I had moved out from my host family's house. And for entertainment, I literally used to go outside. I would go outside, I would stand in the courtyard of these Soviet apartment blocks, and I would throw pebbles into the air at night and watch the bats swoop for them, right? This is what I would do for fun. I read innumerable books, and I learned to just be good company for myself. But one of the things that Ashgabat also had was these enormous, enormous, I wouldn't even call them flocks, these societies of crows that would come in from the desert in the winter, in the evenings, and they would come in and just darken the sky and fill the trees with their conversations. And I started just paying a lot of attention to them. And they wove themselves kind of inextricably into my Turkmen experience. And then later, when I was in Kosovo, Kosovo was very interesting. The name of the country actually means blackbird. But it's not a reference to blackbirds as we think of them. It's almost certainly a reference to crows, or jackdaws, or ravens, because Kosovo has to be the most dominated by the corvid family that I've ever seen in a country. It is absolutely saturated with corvids. And we lived there on a street, a couple streets below a park that was on a hilltop. And in the evening, the crows would fly from that park, along with the jackdaws, the ravens, the rooks, and all of the other birds, down to the central park in the middle of the city. And my daughter and I would watch through our picture window as they flew over for just minutes and minutes on end. I find them fascinating because they really do thrive in our broken places. And they are, I think, for that reason, in our myths associated with negativity. A lot of people have pointed out, I've come across it several times when they say, because I always refer to them as a flock of crows, they'll say, no, no, it's a murder of crows. And my response to that is two. First of all, those collective nouns for birds and other animals are basically just a medieval invention. And this was by largely the ruling aristocracy. They came up with all these cutesy names for different kinds of birds. They are all just flocks of birds. But also, murder is what we do as humans to attract crows to eat, right? So, it's not the crows that are the murder. It's human beings that are the murderers. And the reason we would probably refer to it as a murder of crows was because they were attracted to the corpses that we made. [Francesca] You were in Kosovo way after the war, right? [Ray Nayler] Yes, I was in Kosovo from 2016 to 2018. So, I was in a very vibrant, very young, very sort of up-and-coming Kosovo, very different from the Kosovo of the 1990s and the war, but still, of course, deeply scarred by that conflict and deeply ethnically divided still as well. [Francesca] And so, tell us about the crows of the palaces in this novel, because they're wonderful. And briefly introduce us to Nerea, Cheslov, Kezia, and the boy. Sure. [Ray Nayler] So, for me, as a science fiction writer, what I often like to do is put myself in a very small box. And what I mean by that is, you know, it's very easy in some ways to invent an alien species. It takes some creativity, but you can kind of do whatever you want. Instead, what I find is really interesting is to take a real species and just slightly adapt them beyond maybe where they are right now. And so, you could think of these crows as being much like the kinds of crows you would encounter, which are extremely intelligent, curious animals, but more developed in that direction. So, even more intelligent, probably using some kind of a symbolic language, which is something that so far, as we can tell, humans do, and more developed. And their society, likewise, is more developed. But I feel like I wanted to do it, first of all, in a way that felt believable to me. Secondly, in a way that wasn't anthropomorphizing the crows, that left them as birds and not creatures that we could immediately understand or maybe ever would understand. So, that's the crows. Neria is a young Jewish girl whose father and mother are doctors. Her father's a doctor, her mother assists, but is also basically a doctor, although was unable to complete her education. And they live in the summers in a shtetl, but in the winters and the other seasons in Vilnius. In the shtetl, her father operates a clinic for the Jewish population there. And she's in that shtetl in June of 1941, when the Nazis come crashing into the eastern part of Poland that the Soviet Union had occupied because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Act. And so, she's there, and she routinely interacts with these crows from the forest near her. And one of them leads her off into the woods just before her shtetl is destroyed and effectively saves her life. And then we have Cieslaw, who is a Polish deserter in the Red Army. He joined the Red Army to keep from being purged, basically, because his father and grandfather were purged, and he didn't want his mother to have to go through seeing her son purged as well. He is there in Poland slash Lithuania when the Red Army is basically destroyed and pushed back by the German onslaught in June of 1941. He also enters the forest. And then we have Kizia, who is the Roma horse trader, and her family are on the run from Soviet authorities who are trying to collectivize them. So, they want to settle them the Roma all over the Soviet Union and force them to be sedentary and take up approved trades. And they are in the forest hiding from them when the Germans come in. And then the nameless boy is the victim of some kind of, unspecified in the book, but you'll sort of find out about it a little bit later, war trauma, which has taken away his ability to speak. He's based on a number of different accounts of children who lost their ability to speak during the war, several of which I came across in my research. It's interesting that it is one of the primary effects of trauma for children of a certain age in World War II appeared to be just losing the ability to talk, right? Maybe because, I guess my theory is that the world seemed to them just to have become something that couldn't be communicated anymore, couldn't be absorbed and shaped and talked about. And so, why ever say anything again? [Francesca] Unspeakable. [Ray Nayler] Yes. Yes. Quite literally unspeakable. And it's a real thing and come across in many partisan memoirs and other memoirs of World War II. [Francesca] And usually sci-fi writers go into the future. Why did you decide to tell this story about the past in this place? And I mean, this is a forest which is just crawling with all kinds of people. There are Lithuanian fascists who are hunting Jews. There are invading Germans. There are Russians who are evading the invading Germans. And then all the people caught in between. Why did you go there? [Ray Nayler] So, I really believe that we can't understand the modern world unless we understand World War II. I think that World War II in some ways, and World War I and World War II, I would sort of put in the same, I would call the same conflict. World War I basically gives rise to World War II. It introduces some of the mechanization and the technologies that later in World War II will sort of metastasize into these gigantic and overwhelming technologies. But World War II gives birth to what I'd call the war babies, right? There are four of them that I would identify. There's radar, which allows us to perceive things that cannot be seen at a great distance. This becomes very important. Of course, we now live in a world saturated by things we cannot see and things that come to us from a great distance. There is the rocket, which allows us to put things at a great distance. It's, of course, a dual-use technology. It can be used for positive purposes, like putting things into space, but it also could be used to deliver destruction from afar. There's the atomic bomb, which we all lived under the shadow of ever since World War II, and remain under the shadow of, even though I think it's not quite as much at the center of our culture. I think we're still very much in a world that is under nuclear threat. And then fourth, and maybe in some ways most importantly, the management of these enormous armies and cryptology and aerial bombardment all led to massive amounts of data collection and computerization. And so these are the technologies that will come to define modernity as we know it. And I think also what comes to define modernity as we know it is the treatment of human beings as if they were resources to be extracted from, and also as if they were physical objects that could be destroyed the way one might destroy or dismantle a building or kill animals en masse. [Francesca] Yeah, the great civilian casualties. Before that, war was something that more or less took place on a field. [Ray Nayler] Yeah. Yeah, I mean, World War I is the first time we really see bombing of civilians en masse. Although, of course, this does happen before you see in 1870. In some of the previous wars, you'll see shelling of cities and that kind of thing. But 14 million people, non-combatants, will die between the borders of Germany and the Soviet Union during this period. And this is the first time we really see that kind of scale of destruction of civilians. And then, of course, there's the Holocaust, which is part of that larger elimination of Roma, of homosexuals, of prisoners of war, the Soviet Union's prisoners were killed by the Germans, by the millions, the German prisoners of war, many of them also never came home. So there is this massive abyss that opens up in World War II that technology makes possible, right? And that rises not out of barbarism, but really rises out of mechanization and science. [Francesca] Yes, and I agree with you. I mean, and I think in Europe, they certainly do treat both wars as the same. And that's so interesting that you decided to take that tack, because there are so many things that are happening today that do refer back to that. I mean, you talk about nuclear, there's a new nuclear arms race. There's also the destruction of the post-war security framework by Trump, in many ways, NATO and things of that kind. And something else, a rewriting of history. The novel is deeply concerned with both the destruction and the preservation of memory. In fact, there's a manuscript throughout the novel, we encounter excerpts from the autobiography of a burned village, a found manuscript by an unknown author. Tell us about that and what role does that manuscript play in the architecture of the novel? [Ray Nayler] So I think if there's something that runs for me through this book, a thread that connects that manuscript, the crows and the children, and many other elements of the narrative, it's really this idea of care for one another. I think that, you know, we've talked a lot about the abyss of World War II and about the cruelty involved and about the technology. And about the amazing loss of human life, something that's just unfathomable, like numbers that just can't really be imagined. But I think something else that's really difficult for us to imagine is how many people put their lives at risk and died, in fact, for perfect strangers, to protect not only people that they care about and knew, but people that they didn't know. And you come across these stories everywhere when you do research on World War II. You know, women who took babies, they were handed through a gap in a fence, right, and hid them and cared for them as their own. People who hid entire families in their root cellars, who they had never met before for years, fed and preserved at great personal risk to their own selves and their own families. And I think that there's this extraordinary upwelling that happens during periods of conflict, both of the inhumane, which I think is sort of unfair to other animals as a term, right, because other animals, in fact, don't do things that are inhumane. Only humans appear to do them. So it's almost an ironic word. But there's this upwelling of that savagery, right, also an unfair term, but that horrific treatment of one another. And there's also an upwelling during times of conflict of care. And the character who wrote the autobiography of a burned village cares for the crows in that, and we see evidence of that care in that book. They care for him, and that will be passed on, that care will be passed generationally on to the children, who will be cared for by the crows, and then will also care for them. And so I was trying to capture this memory of care, let's say, in a sense, and then also how much memory is under threat. There's a friend of mine, an academic who talks about a concept called semi-aside, right? This is where you don't necessarily have to kill a group of people, you just render their culture meaningless. So for example, what was done to the Native Americans by placing them in these schools where they would unlearn their own language and traditions and have an alien tradition, an alien language put there in its place. Or the destruction of people's art, literature, and values. So this kind of semi-aside, which is in some ways, I think, akin to genocide, is something that we see happening, I think, both intentionally and unintentionally all around the globe. And how do you preserve this sense of care, this sense of community, and this sense of self in a world that is so invested in destroying your identity? So that's kind of one side of it. I think the other side of it is how much we carry around inside us of other people. I think I have a feeling, I have an intuition, I suppose, that ourselves are really composed of the voices of other people more than anything else. Both unintentionally, we really are products of our culture, our place, and our time where we grew up. But we also literally hear the voices of the dead quite often, right? Or of people who are not present with us. I know that I hear my grandmother's voice every day inside me. Like, she still speaks to me. And she says the things that she said when she was alive. One of the things that my grandmother used to say was, all the time, and I hated it when I was a child and didn't really understand it until I was an adult, she would say, get over it. All the time. I would fall down, I would get hurt. I would come to her looking for comfort. And she, who had grown up in Appalachia and had a very, very hard life, a life that makes my life really seem like a cakewalk, would say, get over it. And I mistook this for a lack of care, right? But it wasn't. What she was trying to communicate was that the best lesson we can really learn in life is that you have to keep moving forward, right? She had an optimism, actually, about life. But that optimism involved having the strength to overcome things that happened, right? To get over them and move on. That was the only way she could see to live. And it was really, she was talking to herself. [Francesca] Yeah. So, is that what Czeslaw means when he says, I don't think we live for other people, I think we live as other people? And if so, then, you know, I mean, clearly we don't just live as other people. Say a little more about that. [Ray Nayler] I think we're composites of other people. I think about, for example, how much influence teachers that we have have on us, and how much they shape our being, and how much of them ends up inside us, inside of our sense of self, right? I had a dream, and I had a notebook by my table. I woke up, and I wrote this sentence that I had dreamed, and the sentence was, the self is that portion of the other that the self accepts as constituting the self. And it sounds like a tautology of a kind, but what I mean is that we're completely composed of alien matter, really, right? Other people's opinions, the ways our parents raised us, the society that we came up in, whatever the raw physical material is that we were given, all of those things, but we compose ourselves out of those things that we accept within ourselves, both unintentionally and intentionally. So our stereotypes about others, our ways of looking at the world, the food we want to eat, all of those things really come from outside of us and come to compose us. And so that's, I think, at a level what Czesław is saying, is that we really live as other people. We are composed of other people, and then also we carry on what other people started. We carry on their work. I feel this all the time when I read books by people who are now dead. I think about, for example, the Peloponnesian War, right? I've read this book several times, and it always strikes me as having a conversation with someone who is just sitting at a table across from you, telling you the story of this conflict, even though the person who's writing Thucydides has been dead for well over two millennia at this point. His voice is a modern and very real voice. And so, you know, we read these books, and those words are inside us, and I think because we are texts that are kind of composed of words more than we are anything else, language is our kind of primary component, we really do consist of others and others' words. [Francesca] Well, it's so interesting because when it comes to the animals, you know, both in The Mountain and the Sea and in this novel, Ray Ray Nayler, Palaces of the Crow, you are imagining non-human animals possessing or developing forms of intelligence that humans have failed to recognize. And both, of course, as you said before, crows are very intelligent, so are octopuses. And when you say we are composed of all of us, I mean, this extends in a way to the animals that we also share the world with. So that's one thing I'd like to ask you to talk about. But also, I wonder if you think that animals are beginning to evolve towards new kinds of intelligence, or are we humans merely beginning to perceive capacities that were there all along? So this is really a story about how much do we, I mean, a question about how much do we see common ground between us and the other animals, and how much do you see common ground? [Ray Nayler] Yeah, so maybe I'll answer that with just a few short kind of stories. I mean, one is that we were traveling, and I saw there was a stable that was kind of in the, had been repurposed, become a cafe in the middle of this town. And it occurred to me that only about 100 years ago, just a little more than 100 years ago, everyone had really deep relationships with horses. Right? Horse power was what moved humans around for the most part. And even up until World War II, for example, the German army, despite Blitzkrieg and that kind of thing, could really only move at the speed of horses, and horses were providing most of the transport, right? So even up until the middle of the 20th century, horses were so present in human life, and everyone would have had deep and meaningful understandings of hoarseness, right? Of how horses act, of why horses do the things that they do. And everyone would have had, in some degree or another, much more profound relationships with the horse, right? And the horses are something that have kind of disappeared from most of human society. Now most modern people do not have a relationship with a horse, right? They know very little about horses. And so there was this way in which there was this fabric that was woven, the society that was kind of of humans and horses, that existed until modern technology pushed the horse out of human society and contact. We still have some of that, but that's interesting to think about how much horse was interwoven in human culture, right? That's one. And thinking about animal intelligence, also a story about a horse. So there was this horse called Clever Hans. And Clever Hans, it's a story, you may know it, it's relatively well known. Clever Hans was a horse that could supposedly count. And for years, people were convinced that Clever Hans was a hoax, that somehow his owner was passing him some kind of a signal. And Clever Hans was not really capable of counting. But no matter what tests they did, no matter how still the owner remained, all of those things, the horse answered mathematical questions accurately. Years later, on re-examining these early sort of movies of Clever Hans performing, it was realized by behavioral scientists that Clever Hans, whose owner was convinced that he could count, could not count. That Clever Hans could do something even more interesting. He could sense, although there was no movement visible to the human eye, the moment that his owner wanted him to stop counting. And his owner did not know that he was sending a signal to Hans. And so the question that I ask is, no, this horse doesn't have mathematical skill, which is a very human skill, but doesn't it possess some other kind of intelligence that is far more difficult for us to perceive, but just as meaningful in some way, right? Um, another way of maybe, you know, talking about this is my, my daughter and I were taking a walk in the woods and she saw a fox and she said, Papa, for some reason, I don't know why she was thinking this way, but she said, Papa, I'm smarter than a fox. I said, okay, all right. She said, I can do, you know, like I said, tell me why you're smarter than a fox. She said, well, I can, you know, I can read and I can write and a fox can't do those things that I can do this and I can do that. And I said, okay, you know, that's a, that's a one way of looking at it. But let me ask you, who is smarter in the forest? And she said, oh, well, the foxes. And this is really hits at the heart of it for me. Um, it's not a matter of us being more intelligent. It is very much a matter of context. And the difference largely, I think between human intelligence and animal intelligence is that human intelligence is less contextualized. It is less attached to a physical world and to the facts of the physical world. Animal intelligence is completely embedded within its environment in a way that humans have managed to detach themselves from. This has largely become because we are the technological animal, right? I think that you could place a moment between animal and human at the moment when one of our ancestors picked up a rock and use that rock to alter the environment in order to better suit itself. And that's the path that we've been on is altering our environment in order to better suit ourselves. And our intelligence has been developing within that pathway. That's not the path of any other animal that we really know. Although they are architects and builders and they alter their niches, they don't do what we do. [Francesca] Yeah. And if anything, we have lost so much intelligence by being disconnected to the world. Because at one time, we were like the animals. Our survival depended on our understanding of the world. And it still does. Our survival still depends on that understanding. But we are woefully unaware of that. [Ray Nayler] Yeah, absolutely. It's become a bit of a cliché to say that the human brain has not actually developed in about 50,000 years. But that appears to be true. And a question that you would ask is, okay, well, if you've got this modern brain that's capable of these mathematics and all of these other things that we can do with our modern brains, what were people doing with it 50,000 years ago? And I think that the answer to that is exactly what you pointed out. What people were doing with it 50,000 years ago is being completely integrated into their environment. It took that level of intelligence for a hunter-gatherer 50,000 years ago to achieve the kind of mastery necessary to move their genes into the next generation. They really had to know everything, everything about the world around them in incredible detail. We know almost nothing anymore about the world around us. We can't even identify most plants while we're walking down the street, but we know an awful lot about other things. And so, we're using our energies for very different things. But they needed all of the intelligence that we have just in order to be in the world. [Francesca] I think that's really the answer. Yeah, exactly. So, I wanted to shift to talking about another aspect. You said earlier that this novel is very much about care. And that's true, both the care that the characters have for each other and that they have for the crows and the crows have for them. But another, it's also a novel about trauma and how people deal with it, it seems to me. After the war, Tesla, for example, undertakes a long project of revenge. And he enters a very system whose power, well, he intends to use it for revenge, but it's a system that one would not imagine that he would have ever wanted to be part of. What does that pursuit of revenge do to him? Why does he embark on it? Does it preserve his bond with the dead? Or does it threaten to make him a part of the very machinery that destroyed them? [Ray Nayler] Well, I think one of the most unfortunate things, when I think about how humans are structured, I think one of the saddest things about us is that we have a story that we tell ourselves, that people who go through hardships are made better by those hardships, that someone who is abused will have more empathy for others, that someone who goes through a terrible experience learns from that experience and carries forward this different way of being, and that we are improved in some way by pain and suffering. This doesn't appear to be the case. It really appears that trauma makes us worse, that it damages us sometimes in ways that are irreparable. It damages our societies. Countries that are invaded by other countries don't learn not to invade other countries. Quite the opposite. People who are persecuted by other people do not learn not to persecute other people. Instead, they persecute them with more strength quite often. People who are abused as children go on quite often to abuse other people. And communities that are traumatized radiate trauma out from themselves. I wish we lived in a world where most people gained wisdom through having bad things happen, and learned from those things, and tried to make the world a better place. But that really is the exception, I think, more than it is the rule. And Czeslaw is a victim of deep emotional trauma, who then goes on to attempt to get revenge for the other victims of that trauma, and instead ends up doing exactly what people who are attempting to get revenge end up doing, which is inflicting trauma, and radiating trauma out into the world. And it's a way, it's a trap, right? Damage creates damage. It radiates outward. It is very, very difficult to end that kind of radioactive spiral, that kind of destructive spiral. It just involves an enormous act of human will to not repeat what has been done to oneself. And I think we rarely see it. So I think what he's representing in the book is probably what many people did after World War II, and not just people, but peoples, right? Which is to seek revenge on those who had hurt them, and to continue to seek revenge long beyond its actual achievement, or beyond the point at which revenge was really possible, and where it just tilts over into a kind of cruelty that's identical to the cruelty that was, that occurred during the war. We saw this a lot on the Eastern Front. We saw it in the Soviet Union. We saw it done, for example, to prisoners of war. Like I said, most of the German prisoners of war never returned, because they were kept in Soviet camps where they died. Same with the Japanese prisoners of war that the Soviets took. I saw a grave in Turkmenistan, a mass grave of Japanese internees who died in the 1960s in Turkmenistan, right? You can imagine these soldiers were captured during a war, a battle in Manchuria. They were transported to Central Asia, and they had still been there 15 years to 20 years later when they finally died. So, that's part of what the book is about, as well as the spiraling outward of violence, right, and revenge, and how do you stop it? [Francesca] Yeah, I mean, that is a question. You said before that so many people took care of other people during World War II. As my listeners know, that was true of my father. He was Dutch, and so during the occupation, he hid Jews during the war, one boy in his own home. [Ray Nayler] A wonderful thing. I'm so glad that he did that for himself and his own sake, as well. [Francesca] Absolutely, absolutely. That's true. And so, that's kind of like what Rebecca Solnit talks about in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell. And on the other hand, as we've seen, in many ways, I mean, I'm Jewish, and I have seen for a long time, and I'm a student of the Holocaust, that the actual precise ways, many of the precise ways that Nazis humiliated Jews by making them dance as they shot at their feet, are things that the Israelis have done to Palestinians. And of course, now we've seen the genocide. So, why are these two things so possible, that people take extraordinary care of each other, and then people who've been traumatized continue the cycle of trauma to others? And even in this story, Czeslaw turns from revenge to taking care of the crows. So, what is the lesson here? How do we translate the goodness into something that can endure after the trauma is over? [Ray Nayler] I think there's no easy answer. It's really difficult to understand how, for example, one person, let's just say, to take it back to a personal level, one person maybe who has been parented badly will go on to parent badly, right? Yet another person who's been parented badly will go on to parent extremely well, seemingly having learned the lessons of that bad parenting and doing something very different. I have a feeling that a lot of this comes from learning from other people who have managed not to continue to just react to trauma by creating more trauma, some kind of mentoring. I have a feeling that, for example, in my own life, you know, teachers along the way have been very important to me in opening up possibilities for me that I would not have seen, right? And I talk about carrying people's voices around. I actually had a, I remember having a supervisor early in my career who said to me, and I hear it all the time, and it has stopped me from doing, you know, from reacting sometimes, anger is the poison that you drink, right? And I have heard this, you know, in my head just before I was about to do something out of anger, and it has literally stopped me from doing that thing and caused me to do something else. And so maybe that's the only answer I can give is it's something deeply, it's something learned from other people who have deeply invested the thought into overcoming these things. It has to be given to you, capacities. We're not largely born with them, I think, but we encounter them through other people who've had those capacities passed on to them from others, just in the same way that, you know, when you look at the story of one of these people who's pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps or one of those stories, there's always someone in that history, right, who actually did the pulling, right? Some other person, some mentor who is carrying on this kind of chain of helping others not just go down this path of destructiveness. [Francesca] Mills So really, I mean, I think we have the inborn capacity, but what you're saying is that in order to nurture that in ourselves and in others, we require relationship reciprocity and modeling. [Ray Nayler] Yeah, I think that we're creatures of, I very much believe in the Aristotelian statement that, you know, antropos son politikon, right? The human being is an animal of society, is the best translation. Not man as a political animal, as it's quite often mistranslated, but the human being is a creature of society, right? We thrive when societies are healthy, and we are surrounded by people who make us great and give us the capacities to do good and be better people. We fail when we are surrounded by sick societies that encourage failure, violence, and those kinds of things. And we do have some capacity to go against the grain, and there are people who've been able to do that, but I think that the more effective way is for healthy societies to encourage healthy individuals to do healthy things. [Francesca] Mills Well, that is, you know, that's such a dilemma now. You know, I have often thought, how do we, I mean, we are so, so far off balance in the society, so moving away from that kind of core of ethics, and yet many people are talking about creating the beloved community. How does a society that is so corrupt and so gripped in the hand of evil, as ours seems to be, ever right itself? What are some of your thoughts on that? [Ray Nayler] Chris Well, as some of my ex-military colleagues would say, it's above my pay grade. But I think we have to re-encounter one another. I think part of the problem is that, especially in the United States, we've learned to deal with other people as abstractions, means to an end, and objects, and not as subjects of their own stories. And empathy has become a dirty word, right, in some quarters, and we need to get back to reality, right? Reality is that other people exist, and those people are just as important as we are, that you are just as human, alive, and important as I am, and that the stranger passing me on the street is the same, just as important as me. And if we can get to that place where we see one another as being important, that would help. How do we get there? I mean, I think that literature can help. I think reading books builds empathy. I think that learning about other people's stories and entering into other people's minds is how children build empathy. It's how adults reinforce empathy and care for one another. It does seem like the structure is built against them in many ways, right? Like that it is built to actually press down any sort of fellow feeling that we might have for other humans. But that, I think, would be the solution. We just have to encounter one another as real, in a real world, and it's hard. [Francesca] Yes, and just to emphasize that, I think, you know, while nonfiction is often useful, that especially fiction, because you do get into the characters, and this brings us back to Palaces of the Crow, because it is so much a wonderful story about these four young people, really children still, who find a way to take care of each other, and then even well into their adulthood to take care of the animals that took care of them. It's just a terrific novel, Palaces of the Crow. Ray Ray Nayler, it's really been a privilege to talk with you about it. [Ray Nayler] Thank you. Thank you. It's been wonderful to talk to you. I look forward to the next time.