Sometimes Cruel: Short Stories

Does war excuse domestic violence? Does it encourage it?  If people are cruel to each other in a war society, are they more prone to abuse their children? Some stories occur in World War II Greece and involve family and non-family violence in an environment where the author witnessed Jews hauled like cattle. The author presents vivid accounts of his childhood and ponders the role of war and culture in our lives. He offers insightful ways to cope with our feelings toward one's parents that may help settle long-standing psychological trauma. They display a life's rich cultural voyage unfolding in Greece, Belarus, Russia, Canada, Chile, and the United States.

EDITORIAL
¨A collection of stories illuminates Koubourlis’ travels, beliefs, and experiences with love and pain in this memoir.
Buried within the self-described “eclectic” author and academic’s collection of intimately autobiographical stories are the truths that have made him “fortunate in many respects.” The physical violence he and his brother endured at the hands of his punishing father, whom he dubs “my family’s beater-in-chief,” inspires the difficult opening story (“The Beating”), in which he describes the abusive episodes that occurred with regularity throughout their youth and the “profound effect” it had on them both, mostly in the form of “undesirable cultural baggage” carried into and throughout early adulthood. Despite this enduring trauma, Koubourlis remains compassionate and forgiving, openly admitting that he is “incapable of holding a grudge.” Instead, he offers absolution and exoneration with descriptions of the negative effects of war and his father’s own childhood status as an orphan as probable explanations for his parents’ harsh, stern child-rearing style. A series of “first-times” lifts the collection with vivid history and a touch of levity as the author shares experiences such as the first awakening of his consciousness (at age 3) when Italian biplanes bombed his Greek city in 1940. Other firsts include the discovery of his very own toy balloon, which he excitedly discovered at the beach. His first experience with youthful, unbridled, amorous infatuation in his hometown of Rio-Patras in 1953 is also luminously realized. The stories progress to the 1970 in “Ephemeral Fame,” which takes place when Koubourlis was a young (and homesick) university professor in North Carolina, he reconnected with a favorite childhood musician who, by happenstance, was performing at a Greek restaurant in Chicago. The love of a stray cat in the resonant and sentimental “A Message from Afar” ends up inspiring a deeper connection between the author and his female companion, Lena. Other stories have more contemporary settings yet still enchant as Koubourlis strums a guitar melody to a garden snake before concluding with a lyrical meditation on the messages found in dreams.  

The collection’s strength lies in its diversity. The stories move from early incidents of scarring pain and sadness to memorable experiences with love, animals, partnership, music, and death. The author takes care to embed his opinions and seasoned perspective into each story, framing and informing them with personal insights and life lessons, all placed in historical context; “My First Memory” describes the harrowing bombing of his hometown in “war-soaked Greece” at the opening of World War II and how the citizens of the area scattered in horror. Koubourlis also offers considerations of the nature of evil, the dynamics of “what a civilized society should be,” and our propensity to cater to the forces of outside control. Thoughtful, lucid, and emotionally aware throughout, this assemblage of cathartic stories is a powerful testament to memory and meaning, written with passion, intensity, dark humor, frank honesty, and immense heart.

A memoir in stories contextualizes the author’s striking experiences throughout his adventuresome life. ¨-- Kirkus Reviews
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Koubourlis (author of A Concordance to the Poems of Osip Mandelstam) offers a thought-provoking collection of auto-fiction stories drawn from a childhood that found him bearing witness to violence both intimate and epochal. The opening pages contemplate a father whipping his son—it’s the narrator’s father wielding the belt, and the narrator’s brother on the receiving end—and also the “60,000 Greek Jews” who “were herded cattle-like for shipment to forced labor or extermination camps.” At times it can be difficult to tell if these accounts are memory-based essays or works of fiction fortified by memory. But it’s their urgency and spirit of restless moral inquiry that matters, as Koubourlis contemplates complex questions of culture, parentage, violence and more.

Growing up in World War II and the Greek Civil War, and crediting his “life's first horrific memory to Mussolini,” Koubourlis was raised by strict parents who did their best to...