Elisabeth Åsbrink’s 1947 begins
appropriately, in January. At the start of that year in the
Palestinian village of Arab al-Zubayd, a 16-year-old girl is one of
several children captivated by an itinerant entertainer’s tales and
magic box pictures.
In the White House, President Harry S
Truman writes in his diary and thinks about his predecessors, some of
whom are “controlling heaven and governing hell”.
In New York, Eleanor Roosevelt convenes
the first meeting of the first session of the United Nations
Commission on Human Rights. Thousands of Nazi fugitives stream into
Denmark and Sweden, and then escape to South America.
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The Communists win a landslide victory
in Poland’s elections. And in a rural town outside Cairo, a
clockmaker’s son yearns to “turn time towards Islam”.
At the end of the book, and by the end
of the year, the world has changed dramatically. The Cold War has
heated up and Truman has created the CIA. Nazis continue to flee
Europe but so too do Jews in search of their promised land.
The clockmaker’s son, Hasan al-Banna,
has instructed his Muslim Brotherhood to prepare for jihad. Over the
coming months the UN General Assembly will recognise genocide as an
international crime, and the Palestinian village will be razed. The
man with the magic box will not be back, Åsbrink explains: “there
is nothing to come back to”.
The book’s subtitle is When Now
Begins. Åsbrink – a journalist and author from Sweden – posits
the argument that 1947 was not just a turbulent year to file and
forget but a pivotal year marked by critical turning points which
have shaped, or disfigured, our modern world.
Rather than cleave to convention and
divide the book into chapters relating to specific upheavals –
social, cultural, political, economic – Åsbrink has taken the
original approach of proceeding through the year month by month and
covering all areas in short, concise sections.
The sections come with a geographical
heading and range from two-line summaries to eight-page reports;
condensed vignettes to fact-filled episodes. This snapshot-type
structure, together with the lively, lyrical and consistently
fascinating content, makes for a unique history lesson.
Åsbrink’s main strands are not
passing events but unfolding crises, whose developments and
ramifications she monitors on a monthly basis. Most of them concern
the rise and fall of nations and the clash between East and West. A
UN committee is tasked with finding a solution to the problem of
Palestine in four months.
A British lawyer is given five weeks –
“no more, no less” – to draw borders separating India from
Pakistan. The exploits of Swedish Fascist Per Engdahl and those of
his other European counterparts are indicative of a resurgence in the
Far Right (“a pendulum about to strike back”). And piece by
piece, the mighty edifice of the British Empire starts to crumble.
Åsbrink impresses with her astute
portrayal of post-war uncertainty and confusion, and her searing
depiction of violence and mayhem – in particular the bloodbath of
Partition and massacres in Palestine.
But her book doesn’t only follow
attempts to divide and misrule, or cases of political ignorance and
expedience. Åsbrink also tracks a number of significant steps and
stages: the first computer bug is discovered, and production begins
on the Kalashnikov; at his Paris “dream factory” Christian Dior
creates the New Look, while on the Scottish isle of Jura, George
Orwell works non-stop – “chain-writing, chain-smoking,
chain-coughing” – on his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Åsbrink shows world history as it happened seventy years ago, and
history in the making.
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Original review on: www.thenational.ae
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