Abigail by Magda SzabóMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
“All my life I have been a wild thing… I am impatient and impulsive, and I have never learned to love people who annoy me or try to hurt me. Now I shall try to learn these virtues, and I shall do so for the sake of my father: for him I shall seek to be gentle and patient.”
My sister slash hand model helped me take a photo of the book set against a fountain during our last walk outdoors. And it’s a perfect photo to match the fountain of tears shed as I tore through this classic’s pages til the wee hours of this morning.
This little brown book is now among The Top Three of my favorites of ALL TIME! It’s like a combination of other loves: the wisdom of Little Women, the drama of A Little Princess and Jane Eyre, and the urgency of Anne Frank’s diary. But comparisons do not match the reality of Abigail, as three syllables do not suffice to convey the incredible gift of Szabó’s tale of the loss of school girl innocence. Even Anne of Green Gables has to grow up, especially during a war.
It is a book steeped in truth, for the author did indeed teach during World War II, and was part of the country’s Ministry of Education in wartime.
It is also a very wise book, written by one who herself used to be a headstrong, precocious teenaged girl chafing against the rules of teachers she looked down on. (Admit it: At one point in our lives as immature children, we all did. Only to grow up and realize how much wiser they were, and how kind, and how we never fully appreciated them while we were benefiting from their unsung heroism.)
It is also quite fitting for a Halloween read! Abigail is, after all, the name of a statue who MAKES THINGS HAPPEN. Heartbroken schoolgirls write to her in moments of despair, only to set off a series of events that help alleviate the source of deep pain.
Is it alive? Is there a supernatural horror behind this? But why fear ghosts when flesh-and-blood men allied with Nazis come knocking at the school’s gate, seeking to bear students away?
The teacher in me loves this book because it shows how schools, quite literally, save lives. Yes, they are imperfect institutions run by flawed humans. But sometimes… in school’s hallways walk living saints. These are people who willfully give up their own personal ambitions because they seek to form, and protect their country’s future.
So many immortal scenes abound, but my personal favorite is an unforgettable (and questionable) Parent-Teacher Conference towards the end. If that isn’t a battle cry for the importance of warrior-teachers in the soul of country, I don’t know what is.
The bookstagram hype is well deserved, the quest to collect all the Szabó books in English has commenced.
“Life, for all its horrors, was wonderful, and of all these wonders the most precious was youth.”
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