THE WILDCAT BEHIND GLASS

A fresh translation of an acclaimed 1963 novel about the rise of fascism in pre–World War II Greece.

Zei’s tale sensitively chronicles both rising political tensions and general patterns of life on a Greek island in the mid-1930s, when the country was under the dictatorship of Gen. Ioannis Metaxas, as seen through the eyes of 7-year-old Melia. The plot begins with summer idylls in a fishing village and stories about the stuffed wildcat in Aunt Despina’s parlor and goes on to include book burnings, searches and seizures by constables, and a wild emotional meltdown when Myrto, Melia’s naïve big sister, learns that the phalanx of “our dictator’s youth organization” that she proudly joined at school is just a gang of miscreants. There’s something genuinely childlike about the way Melia goes from initially caring far more about the pleasures of rambling along the rocky shoreline with friends than the half-heard conversations of worried grown-ups to a sharp awareness of the growing, pervasive tensions in her world and its ideological causes. Her journey invites modern young readers to see potential parallels in their own times. The book’s original U.S. release won a Mildred L. Batchelder Award for its publisher in 1970; this edition, translated by a Princeton University professor of comparative literature, invites readers in through its conversational tone and vivid details.

At once evocative of times past and more cogent than ever.