Word: stephania
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...last month, with the phony intelligence report secreted in a pack of cigarettes, Gardy headed for the Soviet sector of Berlin. When U.S. agents grabbed her, she fought, bit and gouged. Under questioning, she confessed that, under the code name of Stephania, she had been spying for the Russians from the day she stepped into Air Force intelligence headquarters 18 months before...
Even the Literary Guild, customarily little interested in unknown novelists, chose three first novels in 1953, and two were good. Stephania, a story of difficult and subtle relationships among patients in a Swedish hospital, was the surprising work of Ilona Karmel, a Polish graduate of Nazi concentration camps who wrote an adopted English that was both expert and moving. The other was Helen Fowler's The Intruder, an Australian novel about a mind-sick veteran and the family of his dead buddy. Another notable first was Mr. Nicholas, a whiplash dissection of a tyrannical London father by young...
MacLeish was right. Though almost plotless and seldom dramatic, Stephania is a mature study of life in a hospital for the handicapped. Stephania, her body tortured by the Nazis and her mind churning with memories of horror, upsets the placid routine of the two other patients in Room No. 5. Desperately intent on having her crippled body reshaped, she has neither understanding nor sympathy for the resignation of the paralyticThura or the gross self-indulgence of Fröken Nilsson, who has overeaten to the point where her broken leg cannot support her porcine body...
...long stretches, Novelist Karmel offers a meticulous description of the intrigue that is almost inevitable among patients who are not acutely ill yet must stay in bed month after month. Stephania's willfulness, her almost ferocious desire to bear the agonies of a plaster cast that may reshape her grotesque body, seem offensive to the other patients. But gradually they gain some of her hunger to become normal again, while she learns to value their simple, unheroic humanity. Under Stephania's prodding, little Thura begins to move her paralyzed fingers, while Fröken Nilsson, outraged at being...
Writing English as if she had been born to the language, Ilona Karmel has composed a novel of admirable restraint. She has sketched in the horrors of Stephania's past only lightly, and has avoided the trap of feeling sorry for her heroine. In its quiet, even-paced way, Stephania is a novel of complete integrity-and a testimonial to one of the human rights that finally bind all men together, the right to suffer...