Are some years in their entirety, as opposed to discrete events, more pivotal than others so that all these decades later we are still left dealing with their reverberations? And if so, how do we get a measure of their lasting impact on our lives? In recent years, answers to these questions have been attempted by global histories of certain years. Closest home, in his study, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh , historian Srinath Raghavan began with the premise that there had been nothing inevitable about the formation of the new country, and argued: “The breakdown and breakup of Pakistan can only be understood by situating these [domestic] events in a wider global context and by examining the interplay between the domestic, regional, and international dimensions, for much of the contingency stressed in this account flowed from the global context of the time.”
If 1971 was focussed on Bangladesh in particular, in Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century, American journalist Christian Caryl identified five transformative developments to say: “Like it or not, we of the twenty-first century still live in the shadow of 1979.” Those five developments were the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pope John Paul II’s visit to his Polish homeland, Margaret Thatcher’s election as Britain’s Prime Minister, and the definitive start to Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China.
A larger atlas
Now, in a powerful and enormously moving new book, 1947: When Now Begins, Swedish journalist Elisabeth Asbrink casts her net much wider, covering the year month by month, and in each chapter carrying short capsules from cities spread across the U.S., South America, Europe, Africa, West Asia and India. Interestingly, if Caryl spoke about us living in the shadow of 1979, Asbrink claimed in an interview that we live in the “echo” of 1947.
The fragmented nature of Asbrink’s narrative (translated from the Swedish by Fiona Graham) perhaps derives from the way she researched it. She set out with the intent of writing a biography of the Swedish fascist leader Per Engdahl and picked on 1947 after reading a sentence written by Stieg Larsson (the posthumously bestselling author of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo , etc.) that in that year Engdahl went to Denmark to start a Nazi party. She conducted her research by reading newspapers of the entire year, and by the end the larger story of 1947 in all its edginess suggested itself.
It’s a year in which Europe is in ferment; Britain is in retreat and the Cold War is taking shape (with, just in September, the Central Intelligence Agency being founded in the U.S. and the Soviet Union forging the Cominform in response to the Paris conference on the Marshall Plan); the issue of Palestine and the question of a Jewish state is facing the world and specifically the United Nations; trials for Nazi war crimes are being conducted in Nuremberg, Hamburg, Krakow even as fascist forces are trying to regroup and Holocaust denial is given utterance; human rights are being defined; one man, Raphael Lemkin, has thrown himself into an obsessive quest to get “genocide” recognised as an international crime; India is moving towards independence; and great literature is being written.
One of the devices Asbrink uses to convey the uniqueness of the year is the uncertainty about time, with her first-person narrative reinforcing the sense of hurtling forward. There is Louis Mountbatten, who is appointed Viceroy and given 18 months to withdraw British rule from India, but “he aims to speed things up”, recklessly rushing the modalities of the agreed Partition. After freedom comes to India and Pakistan, “even though everything happens at the same time, the two nations celebrate their independence on different dates”.
In fact, Asbrink opens the book with The Times informing people in Britain that they “cannot rely on their clocks” and should tune into the BBC to get the accurate time. And it is the year George Orwell takes himself off to Jura in Scotland to write 1984, beginning his novel with the “clocks… striking thirteen”. In 1947 too, after the UN votes to divide Palestine into independent Arab and Jewish states (“with joint government of Jerusalem”), violence against Arab residents of Deir Yassin foreshadows the massacre and Al-Nakba the next year.
A personal story
The year 1947, it becomes clear as the book progresses, is also of personal importance to Asbrink. Interwoven in the book is the story of her Hungarian father, a Holocaust survivor. He is 10 years old in 1947, and in a Zionist camp in Germany, when in March his mother comes to visit him. She brings him Hungarian sausages and tells him he has a choice: to return home or to set off for Palestine with his fellow camp members, who, as it happens, will board the Exodus . Later in an interlude in the month-by-month narrative, halfway through, Asbrink breaks off for an interlude (“Days and death”) to present an intriguing symmetry — in 1974, 27 years after his big decision in 1947 (’47, ’74), when his only child is now on the verge of turning 10, he places in a bank vault a letter to be given to her “in the event of his death”. It has 19 sentences, with the last line containing the exhortation that she imagines he gave himself back in 1947: “Never pity yourself.”
