Strangers Arrive

"None of us had the faintest idea where we were going [but] during 1938–39 . . . the town [Christchurch] was made strangely interesting for anyone like myself, [with the] scattered arrival of ‘the refugees'. All at once there were people among us who were actually from Vienna, or Chemnitz, or Berlin . . . who knew the work of Schoenberg and Gropius." —Anthony Alpers, 1985 From the 1930s through the 1950s, a substantial number of forced migrants – refugees from Nazism, displaced people after World War II and escapees from Communist countries – arrived in New Zealand from Europe. Among them were an extraordinary group of artists and writers, photographers and architects whose European modernism radically reshaped the arts in this country. In words and pictures, Strangers Arrive tells their story. Ranging across the arts from photographer Irene Koppel to art dealer and printmaker Kees Hos, architect Imric Porsolt to writer Antigone Kefala, Leonard Bell takes us inside New Zealand's bookstores and coffeehouses, studios and galleries to introduce us to a compelling body of artistic work. He asks key questions. How were migrants received by New Zealanders? How did displacement and settlement in New Zealand transform their work? How did the arrival of European modernists intersect with the burgeoning nationalist movement in the arts in New Zealand? Strangers Arrive introduces us to a talented group of ‘aliens' who were critical catalysts for change in New Zealand culture.

“It makes no sense. You would be strangers / if not for this.” In Strangers, Rob Taylor makes new the epiphany poem: the short lyric ending with a moment of recognition or arrival. In his hands, the form becomes not simply a revelation in words but, in Wallace Stevens' phrase, “a revelation in words by means of the words.” The epiphany here is not only the poet’s. It’s ours. A book about the songlines of memory and language and the ways in which they connect us to other human beings, to read Strangers is to become part of the lineages (literary, artistic, familial) that it braids together—to become, as Richard Outram puts it, an “unspoken / Stranger no longer.”

"What began as a response to a random bulletin board posting would ultimately challenge Sister Marilyn Lacey's life - and the life of countless refugees. Nhia Bee, along with his wife and five children, had been placed for a few weeks at [her] convent upon arriving in California from a refugee camp in Thailand. When the family was moved to permanent housing, Sr. Lacey realized, to her own surprise, just how much the family had lodged itself in her heart. Not long after, she had a dream that changed the course of her life. ..."--Back cover.

Once again, Tom Lutz takes us to seldom-traveled corners of the world—the small towns of western Madagascar, the terraced rice fields in northern Luzon, the scattered homesteads on the Mongolian steppe, the hilltop churches on Micronesian islands, the riverside docks of Dhaka, Ethiopian weddings in Gondar, funeral pyres in Nepal, traditionalist karaoke bars in Bhutan—to bring us random reports of human kindness. You may never visit these places, but Tom Lutz will do it for you. And while global media may serve up a steady diet of division, violence, oppression, hatred, and strife, The Kindness of Strangers shows that people the world over are much more likely to meet strangers with interest, empathy, welcome, and compassion.

Grippe / Epidemie (1889-1890).