I’m a history buff, and I take it upon myself to wander down the more obscure paths of history and discover what I called “Great Undertold Stories of History” (GUSH). History is truly an amazing force, and just as powerful as History is the victor’s ability to re-write it to suit their tastes and purposes. No revolution is the product of one pivotal man (or woman), but “official” accounts of history tends to talk only about these pivotal figures; leaving the people on the peripheral who have stories just as powerful out of the picture. And here’s one of these neglected stories.

Portrait of a Young Forger
Marian Pretzel

I think one of the Greatest Undertold Stories of the Holocaust happens to be that of Marian Pretzel, author of the book “Portrait of a Young Forger”. Most people probably haven’t heard of this book, though it tells a story as compelling, brilliant and important as “Schindler’s List”, “The Piano”, “Adolf”, “Maus”, and other real-life accounts of the Jews in Nazi Europe.

The Nazi occupation of Lvov in Poland started when Marian was a 17 year-old art student, and like many other Jews, he was rounded up and bundled into the infamous Janowska concentration camp. However, he managed to escape, and thus began his astonishing story of survival that is unlike any other Holocaust story I’ve read. Marian had the luck of being a blond-haired blue-eyed Jew, looking pretty much like the perfect Aryan specimen. His art training also gave him the ability to forge documents and seals, and this gave him a cover for masquerading as a German officer; withdrawing German money, travelling on top-class German trains, and eating German food. He basically escaped the Holocaust by successfully passing himself off as a German, though tragically many of his family did not escape the concentration camps. One can only imagine how painful it was for him to have done what he did, knowing that he was able to live in luxury while other Jews perished in the gas chambers.

While his experience may sound as if he was “let off lucky”, it’s an important and under-mentioned part of the Jewish experience in World War 2. Marian was not the only German-masquerading Jew – the book reveals there was actually a network of Jews who pretended to be German in WW2. His is the story of a daring con-man who conned his way into the heart of the enemy, and while his experience is completely different, I couldn’t help comparing him to Oskar Schindler. Also lurking beneath the surface of this story is the satisfaction of knowing the Nazis weren’t even aware there were Jews right under their noses. It pounds the stereotypes people have of Jews into the dust.

Overall, a highly recommended and important part of the Holocaust that is frequently overlooked. If I were to adapt a story about Holocast into manga format, I would do this one.

I said last week that this week will have a fire-fighting manga, so here it is. I’m not as enamoured of this manga as I am of others (I prefer fantasy anyway), but it’s a cut above a lot of other similar manga.

Megumi no Daigo (Masahito Soda)
20 Volumes

Megumi no Daigo is actually available through Viz, though I’m not sure how popular the series is since I’ve only seen a few volumes on the shelves. The English name is “Firefighter! Daigo of Fire Company M”, which gives a better idea of what it’s about than just “Megumi no Daigo”.

Plot
“Me-gumi” means company “Me” (the Japanese phoenetic, not the English word), and it’s a fire department in a part of the city where there seldom are fires. As a result, it’s sometimes made fun of by the other fire departments. The story begins with the hero Daigo, a constantly spaced-out and seemingly clumsy new recruit starting his first day at Me-gumi. Daigo is barely trained and given to fits of temper, but soon his bosses notice something about him – he may not seem competent, but he has an uncanny ability to find people in danger that much more experienced firefighters will miss. Is it a sixth-sense, or just uncommonly sharp observation skills? The story never answers that, but provide plenty of interesting scenarios to explore this.

Why I recommend this
It’s not just for the novelty of the content. Firefighting may not be a common topic for manga, but considering there are political manga, salary man manga and manga about policeman, why not firefighters? What elevates this manga above others in the same field is the quality of the characterization. While there are some weird characters, not everyone is as they seem, and as Daigo finds out more about them (and also about himself), the characters become rich and three-dimensional. I also commend the amount of research done about firefighting, and while some of the situations are a tad over-the-top, they are always compelling and interesting. You can learn a great deal about firefighting and escaping from fires from this story!

While the drama and action is all good and dandy, I must point out that the approach of the manga is something I am bothered by. This manga, like nearly all sports manga (which I mostly dislike), subscribes to the Japanese “sports philosophy” of taking whatever it is the characters are obsessed by very seriously and personally. This means that the characters don’t have much life outside firefighting; they have “rivals”, and sometimes perform superhuman feats of endurance to prove the point. This can spoil it for people looking for a realistic peek into the life of a firefighter; this manga takes a mild superhero approach. However, it is only a small complaint, and this series is recommended to anyone who likes exciting and original situations with good action and drama.

This week’s manga recommendation is a manga about… surgery (Next week: Manga about Firefighting). People may run away, but before you do, know that this manga is by the legendary Osamu Tezuka, known in Japan and around the world as “The God of Manga”. I believe the title is fitting for Tezuka: like a real god, he’s created some great things, some bad things and some totally unnecessary things. His mediocre works aren’t bad by “general” standards, though his best works are, simply put, sublime.

Black Jack (Osamu Tezuka)
(22 volumes)

There are Black Jack anime movies out there, but you should avoid these movies because (a)Tezuka didn’t direct them, and (b)Like Doraemon, Black Jack is a collection of short stories that is meant to be read in large batches.

Plot
Black Jack is a series of stories about a brilliant but ruthless surgeon, who operates unlicensed because of the enormous fees he charges for his services. Black Jack is a peculiar-looking fellow, almost the antithesis of what we expect doctors to look like – he has hair like Cruella de Ville, a black cloak like Dracula (I actually based East Seawood’s cloak on his!), and scars all over his face. He looks like a villain, but is the hero of the story, and despite his cold facade, he really has good intentions.

Now, if I had made the story sound like something about a misunderstood loner with a heart of gold and a core of inner strength; it’s the wrong impression. Black Jack is a doctor, NOT a hero – he does things that I would consider heroic, but this is a mature story that doesn’t necessarily see heroic behaviour or noble sacrifice as rewarding. Black Jack doesn’t always succeed in saving his patients, though alot of the time it’s through no fault of his, but through fault of circumstance or of human weakness. Many of the stories have happy endings, and many do not.

Why I recommend this story
This particular Tezuka manga has a special place in my heart, because it was the first Tezuka work I read. My manga-mad cousin first handed this to me when I was 15, and while he explained how good it is, I wasn’t initially impressed. A story about surgery?? How terribly exciting. Not to mention the art seemed really dated and unattractive. It went straight to the bottom of my manga pile, under the DragonBall and Swords-and-Sorcery manga.

After I read all my new action adventure manga, I decided to give Black Jack a try, and then I found I couldn’t put it down. It wasn’t like anything I’ve read before, and it actually held my interest. Up until Black Jack, what I mainly read have been Shonen fighting-and-adventure manga, and rarely ventured outside that world because other stories had little appeal to me. I wasn’t much interested in the (repetitive) romantic problems of Japanese High School girls, so alot of popular 90s Shoujo bored me. Popular 90s Shounen were mostly DragonBall-offshoots, and fairly formulaic. What I found in Black Jack were stories that was NOT formulaic, and about things other than whether I’m going to save the world and/or get the guy of my dreams. This manga opened up a whole new universe for me.

While this manga uses surgery and weird illnesses as it’s main premise, it’s not really what the stories about. These are stories of humanity examined through a medical perspective, and so have the characters at the heart of the drama rather than whatever the Disease-of-the-Week is. That is why I’m able to recommend Black Jack to just about anyone – here is something that SEEMS to be aimed at a niche market (doctors?), but is infact universal in its appeal.

Well, look what I found on my computer! In 2001, I attended a course on philosophy called “Changing Perceptions of Human Nature”. If I had known all they would talk about were Western Philosophers, I wouldn’t have attended it. Nevertheless, I did learn alot of useful things, and it turns out that one of the assignments in the course required students to keep a journal. I wrote 5 journal entries: and I posted this one up because it gives some insights into what I consider when I write my stories. The entry is about the work of Erving Goffman, who was my favourite philosopher in the course. Descartes is an idiot. (And I think I got a bad mark for this assignment).

My Views on Goffman
Goffman’s views on human nature is particularly interesting for me, because he believes that the concept of the self is created through social encounters and the way people try and present themselves in a certain social situation. Certainly, he is not the only philosopher to look at human nature through a social perspective, but he is different in the sense that he uses a dramaturgical approach in his arguments. Having a great deal of interest in writing myself, I find his views rather surprising and should I say – helpful. While characters created for literary purposes are no substitutes for real people, his thoughts give structure and framework to a creative process that otherwise cannot be learned from a book.

The basis of the self and its behaviour in Goffman’s work is the Primary Interpretive Framework (PIF), which is a set of assumptions about appropriate behaviour in certain social situations each person learns in early childhood. To draw literary parallels, You can say that this is the first and most crucial step in creating a character for a story – determining the background and a past for the character. Surely, you wouldn’t expect a character living in 11th Century Europe to have similar behavioural or speech patterns to those living in the 20th Century – each period are governed by different social rules. To heighten the sense of reality in a story, the relevant characters must first speak, think and have the morals the reader would expect them to. Only when the social code of the times have been created can the characters start to interact, and the story start to unfold.

This leads onto the next part of Goffman’s theory – that “underlying all social interaction, there is a fundamental dialectic between reality and appearance”. When the characters meet each other in a scene, there could well be story elements under way that the characters don’t know about. Some characters may know things that others don’t. You cannot set up a situation and assume all the characters know the backstory – it’s not realistic to assume that. Characters who have just arrived at the scene will either have to figure out for themselves what is going on, or ask someone there to explain to them. Like real life, that person may not necessarily explain what is truly happening for their own reasons. And so you have a situation where everyone has their own motives, with the reader being the only one who knows what is truly happening.

Which brings us to another part of Goffman’s theory; the way in which the performed character’s self emerges through activity in conjunction with other characters or with props. From a writer’s point-of-view, this is the most important part of developing a character – not only do you have to impress the character’s designated personality upon the reader, but you also have to create character dynamics between the different characters’ personalities. I must say that at times the relationships between the characters are even more important than the personalities the characters originally have – because there are certain elements in a personality that can only be drawn out through interacting with another character. A heroic character can express their heroism through actions, but no one is going to know that this same heroic character has a jealous streak in them unless they are placed in a situation (with the right characters) which brings out this trait.

Overall, I’m fairly impressed with Goffman’s ideas; they may not necessarily apply to real life, but they apply to situations that try to imitate life – the creation of worlds in literature and film. From a philosophical stand-point his ideas may be no more valid than that of other philosophers, but I find it certainly has more relevance with my life and my understanding of humans than the other theories offered.