![]() ![]() ![]() She is grateful to be domesticated - but the animals retreat, and The Besieged City ends with their surrender: “the last horses had already emigrated, surrendering the metropolis to the glory of its mechanism.” The settlement’s “civilization” makes its formerly humble denizens slick and chatty and as São Geraldo expands, words, possessions, and marriage progressively dehorse Lucrécia. The Besieged City tells of a girl’s transformation into a woman, and a township’s transformation into a city. Twenty-five years later, “dehorsification” would provide the most poignant metaphor in a book Chaya-by then a Brazilian named Clarice-was writing. ![]() ![]() Now, that indispensable creature was gradually being replaced by motors. As he followed the cavalry, he was also chronicling the travails of the animal that, for millennia, had accompanied every aspect of human work and warfare. He was chronicling the horrors of the war, including the anti-Semitic pogroms that caused Chaya’s family to flee. In 1920, at the time of Chaya Pinkhasovna Lispector’s birth in a Ukrainian village, Isaac Babel-born just down the road a generation earlier-was traveling with the Bolshevik army. ![]()
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