February 2023 – Ann S. Epstein Writer

Leap Year in Literature

Although 2023 is not a Leap Year, I was curious about literary references to this quadrennial event. A search turned up surprisingly few. Here’s a calendrical listing of what I found. Can you cite more?

“For leap year comes naething but ance in the four.” (Robert Shennan, “Leap Year,” Tales, Songs, and Miscellaneous Poems, Descriptive of Rural Scenes and Manners, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 1831)

“This being Leap Year the signs of the Zodiak are all on the rampage. There is no cause for alarm. Once in four years this frolic occurs, and is said by the doctors to be necessary for their health.” (Josh Billings, Farmers’ Almanac, 1872)

“In Leap Year the weather always changes on a Friday.” (Belgian proverb quoted in Rev. Charles Swainson, A Handbook of Weather Folk-Lore, 1873)

The while you clasp me closer,
The while I press you deeper,
As safe we chuckle,—under breath,
Yet all the slyer, the jocoser,—
“So, life can boast its day, like leap-year,
Stolen from death!”
(Robert Browning, “St. Martin’s Summer,” Pacchiarotto, and How He Worked in Distemper, 1876)

“So it was that on the twenty-ninth day of February, at the beginning of the thaw, this singular person fell out of infinity into Iping Village.” (H. G. Wells, The Invisible Man, 1897)

“Surely this was a sign on Leap Year night! It’s the 29th. Go in and win. Don’t be afraid.” (A. A. Milne, Lovers in London, 1905 )

“For jaywalkers every year is leap year.” (Bill Holman, “Auto Suggestions,” The Travelers Insurance Company, Thou Shalt Not Kill!, 1935)

Hobbits observe twelve 30-day months every year, including Solmath, equivalent to February. Five days are added to make 365 per annum. (J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, 1937)

Leap Year: A Novel by Steve Erickson (1989)

Leap Year: A Comic Novel by Peter Cameron (1990)

Other Leap Year Trivia

People born on leap year are called leaplings.

The first arrest warrants in the Salem witchcraft trials were issued on February 29, 1692.

Sweden and Finland added an extra Leap Day to February in 1712 to synchronize their outdated Julian calendar with the new Gregorian calendar.

British-born James Milne Wilson, who became the 8th premiere of Tasmania, was born on Leap Day 1812 and died on Leap Day 1880, his “17th” birthday. The rarity of the date aside, it’s not unusual for people to die on their birthday.

In 1928, bartender Harry Craddock invented a Leap Day Cocktail at London’s Savoy Hotel:

1 dash lemon juice
2/3 gin
1/6 Grand Marnier
1/6 sweet vermouth
Shake and serve, garnished with lemon peel

Cheers leaplings. Next year is yours!

What I’m Reading: Black Licorice

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Black Licorice by Elaina Battista-Parsons (Rating 5) – The Soundtrack of Friendship. Tune into Black Licorice by Elaina Battista-Parsons and listen to Freddi, whose flute-playing talents are prodigious. She also excels as the creator of the Black Licorice blog. Alas, Freddi’s skills at friendship are zilch. She’s made one friend at ARTS high school — Court, a viola prodigy — but her confidence is shaken when he disappears without reason or further contact. Freddi is at a loss to figure out what she did to drive him away. Reeling from that broken friendship, and sent to an ordinary high school as “punishment” for an angry outburst, Freddi stumbles onto the treacherous path of a potential new relationship. Her parents and peers warn her that this new friend, Lorna, is not suitable given her own (unspecified) “bad girl” behavior. Freddi pursues the friendship anyway, but every (mis)step threatens to sabotage her progress. The book is aimed at a YA audience, but even readers and writers of adult fiction, including myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), will admire Battista-Parsons’s ability to get inside the head of her adolescent protagonist and explore the complexities of friendship at any age with empathy, insight, and humor. Freddi keeps getting knocked down but readers root for her to get up, pick up her flute, and play on.

A teenager finds friendship and discovers herself

Why writers read: “Reading brings us unknown friends.” – Honoré de Balzac

Survivor Story: Blue and Yellow Bras

“The Swedes were very generous, considering that their own food and clothing were strictly rationed. Women could receive only one dress, one pair of shoes, and two pairs of stockings a year. No bra. One day the Swedish flag was stolen from the flagpole. The crime was solved when blue and yellow bras appeared on the camp’s clothesline.” Read about two Holocaust survivors, German Jewish newlyweds sent to America by their parents to have children to “save our people,” in One Person’s Loss. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

Swedes were generous to the concentration camps survivors they cared for after the war

Berlin, 1937. Jewish newlyweds flee Germany for Brooklyn on the eve of the Nazi slaughter

Survivor Story: Huddled for Warmth

“When the capacity of Dachau grew from 5,000 to 50,000, I had to share my narrow bunk bed. First my bunkmate and I hated each other, but we soon realized that sleeping pressed together helped warm our emaciated bodies.” Read about two Holocaust survivors, German Jewish newlyweds sent to America by their parents to have children to “save our people,” in One Person’s Loss. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

Prisoners huddled together in narrow bunk beds for warmth

Remnick Interviews Rushdie

“Rushdie went on, ‘I just thought, There are various ways in which this event can destroy me as an artist.’ He could refrain from writing altogether. He could write ‘revenge books’ that would make him a creature of circumstances. Or he could write ‘scared books,’ novels that ‘shy away from things, because you worry about how people will react to them.’ But he didn’t want the fatwa to become a determining event in his literary trajectory” (“Defiance” by David Remnick, The New Yorker, 02/13&20/23). Writing takes courage, vision, and sometimes, heroic single-mindedness. For more literary thoughts, see REFLECTIONS.

Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie writes fiction and nonfiction

Why writers read: “People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” – Saul Bellow

What I’m Reading: Better to Have Gone

My Goodreads and Amazon review of Better to Have Gone: Love, Death, and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Rating 5) – (Un)Holiness and (Dis)Harmony. Better to Have Gone by Akash Kapur is a biography of both a family and a community, Auroville, where the author and his wife grew up. The memoir is at once sympathetic to the visionaries who flocked to build this utopia in 1968, the heyday of intentional communities, and a heartbreaking critique of how idealism can succumb to fanaticism. The sprawling landscape of Auroville, in southern India, was conceived as a “reverse Tower of Babel,” where people from different corners of the world, speaking a multitude of languages, would live together in “concord and harmony.” Their shared tongue would be the yoga of Sri Aurobindo, the commune’s namesake, and the teachings of his anointed disciple, called “The Mother.” Initially, this utopia did not fare any better than the biblical edifice whose demise it proposed to reverse. While Auroville survived, it endured years of chaos, riven my factions that proved tragic for many well-intentioned people. Among them were the parents of the author’s wife, whose deaths Kapur sets out to investigate. It is noteworthy that he and his wife, attracted to modern-day ideals of escaping the American rat race, decided to move back to Auroville with their own children in 2004. While some members of the deceased families are eager to assign blame, Kapur is more motivated by a desire to explain and understand. We hear from people who could rightly be demonized but also from those who tried their best to help, and those who didn’t want to take sides but were nevertheless caught up in the hostilities. A writer myself (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I appreciate Kapur’s urge to humanize behavior that readers would otherwise be quick to condemn. As a cautionary tale, Better to Have Gone recognizes the inevitable destructiveness of human nature — in the way that many Bible stories can be read. But it also acknowledges the triumph of faith, a belief that this time, in this (other) way, we can aspire to do better and achieve a higher harmony.

Why writers read: “Reading is an exercise in empathy; an exercise in walking in someone else’s shoes for a while.” – Malorie Blackman

Survivor Story: Hands Like an Angel

“Our mother, said to have ‘hands like an angel,’ attended the Vienna Fashion Institute, and passed on her sewing skills to my sisters and me. It saved our lives. We became seamstresses in the camp, pulling threads from the confiscated clothes of dead prisoners to reuse in uniforms.” Read about two Holocaust survivors, German Jewish newlyweds sent to America by their parents to have children to “save our people,” in One Person’s Loss. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

Prisoners’ discarded clothing outside the Dachau crematorium

Learn History Through Fiction: Calls From Jewish Leaders Unheeded

Pleas from Jewish leaders to help save Europe’s Jews were largely ignored. Many members of the U.S. State Department, led by Cordell Hull, were anti-Semitic. History shows America failed to end WW2 sooner or admit those fleeing Nazi persecution. Read about a German Jewish family who tries to escape to the U.S. in the novel One Person’s Loss. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

Anti-Semitic officials in U.S. State Department ignored pleas from Jewish leaders during Holocaust

Berlin, 1937. Jewish newlyweds flee Germany for Brooklyn before the Nazi slaughter begins

Survivor Story: The British Are Here!

“The SS marched us for hours until they began running away. Finally all the German soldiers disappeared. We came to a soccer field where soldiers in jeeps threw us chocolates, cookies, and cigarettes. People yelled, ‘The British are here, the British are here.’” Read about two Holocaust survivors, German Jewish newlyweds sent to America by their parents to have children to “save our people,” in One Person’s Loss. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.

British soldiers gave sweets and cigarettes to liberated survivors

Learn History Through Fiction: Black Papers Reported the Truth

Unlike the mainstream white press, Black newspapers put the killing of Europe’s Jews on the front page, likening Nazis to southern white racists. History shows America failed to end WW2 sooner or admit those fleeing Nazi persecution. Read about a German Jewish family who tries to escape to the U.S. in the novel One Person’s Loss. Learn more about the book in NOVELS.