Savage Coast is a posthumously published, largely unedited, coming-of-age autobiographical novel that chronicles Rukeyser's experience as a young reporter traveling to Barcelona at the onset of the Spanish Civil War to cover the The People's Olympiad in protest of the Berlin Olympics in Nazi Germany, 1936.
While my summer in Madrid at the age of 19 was of course nothing like Rukeyser's experience of what it means to be a foreign national in a country at war, confronting questions of neutrality and alignment, political and personal solidarity, the observations and transformation of Helen, Rukeyser's naive but insightful, deep-feeling protagonist, and her amazement while discovering Spain and herself in a country other than her own, was warmly resonant.
The passage in the below image starts with: It was all new and must be important, must be valuable, in the same way that she used to think she must grow to be valuable. It was too much to carry, all this self-consciousness, and it was beginning to relax from her in the heat and adventure here.
It follows:
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