It’s what we have in common that makes us unique. 

    I’m not sure whether that’s a quote from somebody or my own thoughts as I read “The Arrogant Years: One Girl’s Search for Her Lost Youth, From Cairo to Brooklyn” by Lucette Lagnado.

    Beginning with a vivid reconstruction of life in prewar Cairo, the story unfolds against a background of international events: Egypt at war with Israel, France, and Britain over the Suez Canal, Nasser taking control of Egypt, scattering the once-vibrant Jewish community, including the Lagnado family, forcing them to replant themselves in America. Critics have praised “The Arrogant Years” for its story of courage and ambition that animated mother and daughter, Edith and Lucette, to find a way through their confusing, unwelcoming new country, despite the ravages visited on the family by “the evil eye.”

    A child myself of Jewish refugees, for me “The Arrogant Years" is an ancient Jewish refugee story — the flight from Egypt — but also a contemporary one spreading daily through Asia, Africa, and Europe, a local story of globalization, politics, and climate change contained in the universal story of deracination, dispossession, and exile. Our families’ stories — Lucette Lagnado’s and mine — are two of the varieties of Jewish experience.

“The Arrogant Years”

Lucette Lagnado

Ecco, $25.99

    Three themes shape the Lagnado story: The first, the “arrogant years” of the title, refers to that time in a young person’s life when she stands at the peak of her powers. Lucette’s arrogant years were cruelly shortened by catastrophic illness. Her father, Leon’s, arrogant years were spent as a Cairene boulevardier, jaunty in the white sharkskin suit he never wore again after leaving Egypt. Edith knew her arrogant years in Cairo, as librarian of the magnificent pasha’s library, a life she somewhat recaptured in the Brooklyn Public Library’s catalog department.

    With Leon diminished by illness and more absent than present, the Lagnado family functioned without a man, as before her marriage Edith and her mother, Alexandra, had lived in Cairo without father and husband.

    It’s been much told, this refugee story of sic transit gloria mundi, of how are the mighty fallen! My Jewish parents, two newly minted doctors, fled Hitler’s Europe in 1937, setting sail for India, where a six-year spell in British-Indian internment camps terminated their arrogant years. Unfamiliar with the evil eye, my father interpreted his misfortunes as spiritual tests. Sometimes, arrogant years return: Released from internment, my parents rebuilt their medical practice in Lahore among the welcoming Muslims of Pakistan. While the Lagnado family suffered neglect and maltreatment at the hands of Egyptian and American doctors, in my story my parents were the doctors. It was their good fortune to land in a place where physicians were greatly valued, where being European mattered and being Jewish didn’t.

    Rebuilding the hearth is the book’s second theme and the anthem with which Edith urges Lucette to pull together their fragmenting family. But in truth, how much Lagnado hearth was there? More man about town than homebody, Leon’s Cairo habitat was defined by Judaism and Arabic, while his wife, Edith, was defined by all things French.

    Arriving in America, Lucette’s older siblings detached from their immigrant home to seek a place in secular, capacious America. Lucette gives us only a sketchy glimpse inside the family’s Brooklyn home, as if she was never fully there. Instead, we follow mother and daughter bonded in a world unto themselves as, holding hands, they dart all over New York, restless and uprooted, sharing a hearth of books, libraries, and schools. Deeply ambitious for her daughter, Edith is shattered when the French lycée in Manhattan rejects Lucette’s application.

    Similarly driven to educate their children, my parents sent us to faraway boarding schools into cultures that were neither theirs nor ever entirely ours. Whether we wanted it or not, we became independent. The Lagnados resisted unpacking their Egyptian suitcases, leaving Cairo inside them, time-warped and intact. Growing up, I was forever packing and unpacking suitcases, shuffling from one temporary address to another. Our hearth was portable and virtual, its bricks and mortar constructed from letters, airline tickets, a network of friends, relatives, and strangers, held together by my parents’ stubborn vigilance. Perhaps a hearth means the most when the years are their least arrogant — as our parents approach the end of their lives. I know the sorrow at the heart of Lucette’s story.

    Separation is the third theme of “The Arrogant Years,” symbolized by the carved wooden divider, the mechitza, that separates the sexes in conservative Jewish synagogues. For Lucette the child, the divider was a provocation, a barrier for her to dismantle, ending the separation. My mind goes to the massive wall the Israelis have built to separate themselves from the Palestinians and the Palestinians from their lands and one another, and I realize that separation lies at the core of every refugee family — it is part and parcel of the broken hearth, dividing and blocking the flow of continuity.

    Beyond the synagogue’s wooden barrier, separation runs throughout Lucette’s life: between affluent and poor Jewish neighbors in Brooklyn, between Ashkenazi and Sephardic synagogues, public and private schools, the separation from her siblings, between her and the other Vassar girls, the separation between her parents’ French and Arab cultures. In a nursing home at the end of their lives, her parents sit side by side in wheelchairs, not speaking to each other. Years later, Lucette visits her former synagogue, shuttered now, the divider merely a pile of sticks. With the barrier gone, she feels a loss of security and identity: She understands that the mechitza did more than separate men and women worshipers. Released from the barbed wired of the internment camps, my father, suddenly too free, was afraid.

    Two among millions of Jewish refugee families — it’s what the Lagnado family and mine have in common that makes us unique.

—

    Lucette Lagnado is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. She has a house in Sag Harbor.

    Hazel Kahan is writing a memoir about growing up Jewish in Pakistan. She lives in Mattituck.

    The dear dog of it, the garden, never halts, never rests unless it be December, when it seems determined to nap, to jump less, to be without surprise, to be a bit less demanding, indifferently nose an old bone. Yet bulbs keep coming, late bulb sales tempt and daily postings bring next season catalogs. Houseplants need turning in the light, grooming, and feeding, and some, like daturas and tibouchinas, a goodly cut-down and may join pails of alocassia and caladium in peat and the cool dark cellar for a winter of rest. One of the giant cycads after a summer spurt in the garden has come down with mealybugs and is sprayed with an alcohol solution and will need the tending again. Around the mind goes the question of winter feeding. Does one slack off, stop entirely while light is slant and weak, or continue as before? A bit less is my decision but just as frequently and this gives me unease and I look for signs of rejection although husky plants should not remind one of fat children in highchairs flinging oatmeal. Plants do not evince dudgeon or malice.

    The double-flowered Christmas cactus, so very like a hose-in-hose primula, is a candidate for a double dose of food as is any plant in floral position. Fish emulsion is the best. Nothing for the clivia. Neglect is their nutrition and drought as well until they, in February or early March, begin sending up flower stalks. For the nonce, pot-bound is their joy and away from strong sunlight their preference. Rewarding, nutritious quaffs would be their ruin, loving as they do unforgiving ground under trees. The long spout of the Haws watering can must pass them by. Another undemanding performer, oxalis, goes on and on, crew cut after crew cut, flooded, starved, to it all is the same. I always keep one ebony-hued alocassia in a Siebert and Rice rolled-rim pot on the dining table where, evening and morning, a bead or two of indoor dew will collect on the foliage, clear, shining, a bit of indoor climate inevitable and a bit awesome.

    The last of orange-cupped daffodils are to go in tomorrow, next day, definitely this week (there will be rain one day, wind the next) edging the main pond where two sorts of liriope are, margined Solomon’s Seal too as well as blue camassia. Last week two big sacks of praestans fusilier, a favorite scarlet species tulip, went into the primula bed, there to be munched by squirrels, squirrels up to a point, squirrels rapidly tiring of such fare so that I expect to lose a quarter of them before squirrel peace is declared and they turn to other ruinations.

    An elderly weeping mulberry near the aforementioned pond is getting too much shade from nearby magnolias and will be moved this same week to the terrace next the potager in front of a latticed screen as a handsome offsetting frame. It is a mule and doesn’t bear and that is all to the good. I recall sitting under a fruiting one for a sweet old Russian aristocrat’s name day, in white, as we all were until catbirds began feasting and digesting.

    Quiet December will begin the setting out of bird feeders. And pruning. And plotting the coming season. It is then I can admire the stranvaesia and begin peering under stephenandra incisa for the sight of earliest snowdrops.

    The photographs in the Spanierman catalogue say it all. There she is with Hans Hofmann in his Provincetown, Mass., studio, then with Willem de Kooning in Springs, in a photo shoot with Ad Reinhardt, arm in arm with Lee Krasner, or standing confidently with her hand on her hip on an East Hampton beach with some of the greatest artists of the period in a 1962 Hans Namuth photograph.

    Perle Fine was an artist who mattered, not just here, where she made a home and studio in Springs from 1954 until her death in 1988, but everywhere. A retrospective that was shown on Long Island in 2009 will still be making its way around the country in small venues through next year. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery of Art, among many others.

    No one ever said she never got her due. She was respected by her colleagues and her work was exhibited often during her life in solo shows at the places that mattered: Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, Betty Parsons, and Tanager. She was one of the few women — invited by de Kooning no less — to join the club, a group of artists who gathered at Eighth Street in New York to discuss and debate the tendencies in art beginning in 1949.

    By the late 1960s the Archives of American Art was interviewing her and asking to borrow her papers to microfilm for future research. The quotes included in this article are from that interview.

    Her “Cool Series” of Color Field paintings made from 1961 to 1963 in Springs is the subject of an exhibit in New York at Spanierman Modern. Cool is a good name for them. Geometric, linear, boldly colored, the hard lines are anything but timid, yet not over showy either. They are the work of an artist confident in who he is and in her message of balance and purity.

    Fine noted that in all of her work, “Color is always a motivation. Mixing color, you know, is a very joyous occupation for me because there was so much excitement at what would happen when one color was placed next to another . . .  there was so much more than just what came out of the tube.”

    For the artist herself, there was so much more. She could be alternatively minimal and maximal, geometric and gestural, a weaver in and out of styles with amazing fluidity. Seen in her Springs studio or out and about in East Hampton with a bandanna hair kerchief and jeans or in the city in a skirt, sweater set, and pearls, she had an equal balance of bohemian and classic metropolitan style.

    She was born in Boston but moved to New York in 1927 to study art at the Grand Central Art School and the Art Students League. By 1933, she was in one of the first classes at Hans Hofmann’s school, following him to Provincetown for summers as well. Although she considered studying illustration, “what I found out very quickly was you can only be a painter and nothing else if you’re going to be a painter.” From the beginning, she was respected for her work, yet lost out on Works Progress Administration commissions because she had a phone, considered a luxury at the time.

    She was already married to Maurice Berezov by this time, having met him at Grand Central Art School. They had two cold-water flats in the city, living in one and painting in another.

    Although she took classes at the Hofmann school and was friendly with many artists, she said that from her childhood she considered herself an isolationist. “I never like working with a group, in a group at all. I just couldn’t think.”

    Before Hofmann, Fine was an academic naturalist. “I felt that one should have a grounding in academic painting,” which is why she attended the Art Students League, “at least one had to know what it was in order to overcome it.”

    At the same time, once she became an abstract artist the transformation was complete. “For a thing to be abstract meant to me that you had to feel strongly enough about it to turn your back on realism and do everything necessary in an abstract way to put across a feeling which meant being totally abstract or non-objective.” Her very first solo show in the 1940s was a group of paintings of amorphic forms floating in space that critics at the time likened to work by Joan Miro, but that she said were more akin to that of Alexander Calder.

    Fine met Krasner through Hofmann’s classes and through her met Jackson Pollock. They all became well acquainted, first in Provincetown and then in East Hampton. As much as she admired Pollock’s work, she continued to explore her forms in space subject matter for some time, “space, movement, form, and with always the big question of keeping, maintaining the first plane of the picture” were her preoccupations at the time, she said.

    Back in the city, Fine and her husband, who had been based in the uptown gallery world, moved down to East 10th Street in the midst of all of the artists with studios there. “Bill de Kooning next door, and Esteban Vicente above him, and [Landes] Lewitan and Milton Resnick. . . . Resnick had the largest studio in the neighborhood. I think it was one inch larger than Elaine de Kooning’s, or it might have been the other way around — I don’t know. There was all that kind of discussion. But it was a lot of fun. People were painting for the fun of it. And there was a certain release there that I didn’t get anywhere else. And I think it had to do with these people dropping in that I found were real people.”

    She was aware that she was painting with a frame of reference that differed from the psychological and Surrealist themes of many of these painters. It made her want to try it. “What I mean by trying it was painting with complete release as if I’d been through a session with a psychiatrist. So I really did that and had great fun doing it.” Still, she found she could not let go of her underlying structure to be fully Abstract Expressionist. “I couldn’t paint a picture that was a scribble.”

    The painterly surface that resulted was something that stayed with her after her experiments, as did using house paint. It was “the only way to get the brush to flow in a certain way and to get enough pigment in there,” she said.

    At her first meeting at the Club, Lewitan, who was known for being strident and difficult, told her that he was the only member who voted against her membership. “It was supposed to be unanimous, whoever was brought in, but they allowed me to come in anyway.” She found those years and the talks exciting, but tired of the city by 1954, when she decamped to a one-room house and studio in Springs for eight years, apart from her husband, who came out on weekends.

    Even with the return of figuration in the 1960s, she was resolute in her devotion to abstraction. “There’s so much that’s still unexplored in the realm of the non-objective and the abstract. And I feel that I sort of owe it to myself because I know quite a bit about it and I think because I do I want to know a little bit more. I want to know what I don’t know.”

    Fine died at the age of 83 in a nursing home in Southampton and was buried at Green River Cemetery in Springs along with several of her artist friends.

New Show at Firestone

    Beginning Saturday, the Eric Firestone Gallery in East Hampton will present “Vincent Longo: Selected Works, 1960s and 1970.” Mr. Longo is a painter and printmaker who has been making art for almost six decades.

    The exhibit will include early paintings and works on paper influenced by Wassily Kandinsky and Abstract Expressionism and grid works inspired by Piet Mondrian.

    Mr. Longo taught at Hunter College for several decades and retired in 2001. A 2003 retrospective at the school included work from a half-century of his career.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 2 to 5 p.m. and the show will be on view through Jan. 15.

Firestone at c/o the Maidstone

    Eric Firestone will be showing another group of works farther down Main Street at c/o the Maidstone beginning Saturday.

    The show is titled “I’m an Artist Living in New York” and includes photography by artists who examine New York as a nexus of culture and excess in the 1970s and 1980s.

    The artists include Tseng Kwong Chi, Bob Colacello, Burt Glinn, Michael Halsband, Eric Kroll, and Anton Perich.

    The images will be on walls throughout the main floor lounges and restaurant. On Tuesday Mr. Firestone was interviewed by Heather Buchanan as part of the inn’s Art and Dine series.

    Future Art and Dine dinners will be on Dec. 20, Jan. 10, Jan. 24, Feb. 7, and Feb. 21. Reservations can be made with the Living Room restaurant at c/o the Maidstone.

Its glossy, heavy stock and appealing, even sexy, Hollywood set-worthy pictures may have some mistaking the Main Street Historic District Guide for a more commercial endeavor.

Although one section of Main Street is devoted to transient high-end consumerism, this booklet, produced by East Hampton Village and the East Hampton Historical Society, is a paean to Main Street’s permanence. Paid for by grants from the National Park Service and the state’s historic preservation offices as well as the historical society, the guide commemorates the tradition of preservation in the village and its more formalized efforts with the creation of historic districts.

The Main Street District, formed 25 years ago, stretches from Woods Lane to Huntting Lane. The guide highlights buildings that have been placed under public or nonprofit stewardship and residences still in private hands. These houses have had renovations or additions that have been completed since the historic district was established. The guide’s illustrations show how houses can be brought up to modern standards, the addition of pools and decks included, while still maintaining the traditional appearance of the streetscape.

    “We wanted to show how you can have a modern life in a historic building,” said Robert Hefner, the director of historic services for the village and the co-author of the booklet. In the quarter-century that the district has been in existence, there have been 150 projects approved. Only 18 properties out of 75 have remained unchanged, Mr. Hefner said. Yet, the streetscape remains consistent.

    According to Mr. Hefner, the applicants have been understanding. “Those who are attracted to Main Street are aware of the history and want to be part of that. They’ve tried hard to do the right thing.”

    The population of East Hampton continues to change. Mr. Hefner said that the book, which was sent to every village household and has been given to village inns for visitors, is an educational tool. “People who live here are no longer growing up in East Hampton and knowing its history.”

    The guide comes at a good time. The historical society, which has had a walking-tour pamphlet for many years, just ran out of copies. That tour is now included in the guide, with thumbnail full-color illustrations next to each description.

    Richard Barons, the historical society’s director and the guide’s other author, said the tour would soon become a cellphone app as well, with additional text and photos.

    Mr. Barons said that buildings we now take for granted — the windmills, Mulford Farm, and Home, Sweet Home, for instance — were all in peril at different times, and had it not been for the efforts of individuals and groups like the Ladies Village Improvement Society, they might all exist only in the 19th and early-20th-century prints and paintings made of them by artists such as the Morans and Childe Hassam.

    A painting by Thomas Moran of his house in East Hampton, called the Studio, and a photograph from when he lived here are included in the guide. The house is now being restored to the way it was when he lived in it. Mr. Hefner said the painting was included as a reminder of the artistic heritage of Main Street and the inspirational qualities that have attracted artists to it over the centuries.

    The simple saltbox structure at the Mulford Farm is one the earliest surviving homesteads in the village and the country. While many families visit the “old country” of their ancestors, here, Scottish Mulfords of recent vintage came to visit the new land of their 17th-century ancestors this fall.

    Mr. Barons showed the visitors around and told them of the background and history of several buildings and objects associated with the family. These included a high chest recently acquired by the historical society that was made in Connecticut and purchased by the Mulfords during the time they spent there during the Revolutionary War.

    The family members were thrilled to see the houses and objects associated with the Mulfords and how they had been preserved by a caring community, Mr. Barons said.

The Main Street guide includes interior photographs such as those above, of the frame of the Pantigo Windmill, left, and the ceiling of the living room of the J. Harper Poor Cottage, now known as the Baker House 1650.

    Thomas McGonigle’s “Going to Patchogue” is a slight, basically plotless metafictional novel of loss, identity, and discovery. First published by the Dalkey Archive Press in 1992 and out of print for a number of years, it has recently been reissued in a paperback edition. The Dalkey Archive is a small publisher known for its interest in less traditional literary works.

    “Going to Patchogue” is more unconventional in terms of style than subject matter. The novel is first and foremost a meditative and reflective story about how one’s sense of self is determined by one’s relationship with and understanding of the past and the place one grew up. The novel shares some characteristics with the tradition of the road novel, even if the road here is no more than the 60 miles of Long Island Rail Road between Manhattan and Patchogue and may be more metaphorical than actual. The book is what Kerouac termed a “true-story novel,” and Mr. McGonigle’s sustained use of stream of consciousness, free association, unpredictability, and spontaneity to tell his story seems to embrace Kerouac’s advice that the writer “sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind.”

    Stylistically, he stretches the narrative boundaries by including a few dull photographs, a railroad schedule, newspaper clippings, and a play segment, although none of these items particularly benefit the story.

    The protagonist, age 40, depressed and disheartened, and also named Tom McGonigle, decides to return to his hometown of Patchogue in the hopes of discovering or rediscovering who he is. He is motivated, in part, by his memory of Melinda, his distant and unrequited love from Patchogue High School. Whether Tom actually returns to Patchogue is not completely clear and not necessarily important because his trip is less geographical than it is emotional and intellectual. As he proclaims, “I don’t have to travel to Patchogue to be there. I am always in Patchogue.” His descriptions may be literal but the viewpoint is shaped wholly by his imagination, “avoiding the sterility of facts.”

“Going to Patchogue”

Thomas McGonigle

Dalkey Archive, $15.95

    Tom attempts to work through his extensive list of longings, memories, disappointments, and missed opportunities as he tries to come to some understanding of who and what he is by way of where he has been. How is his identity — his sense of who he is (or is not) — connected to his life experiences growing up in Patchogue? Can he move beyond them to arrive at, if certainly not paradise, at least some better place? He speaks (endlessly) of going back to Patchogue as well as traveling to Bulgaria, Istanbul, Venice, and Dublin. He is in a constant state of traveling somewhere but never arriving, always caught in between and short of a destination he cannot ever satisfactorily identify.

    As he looks back and reflects on his years in Patchogue, the people, places, and events become him. He tries to understand himself by understanding them, by “marking out the territory to be explored.” That territory comprises both inner and outer landscapes, and the autobiographical identity is constructed (if at all) in relation to the actual or imaginary people and places he remembers or encounters.

    Although the novel is not so much about Patchogue as it is about Tom McGonigle and his idea of Patchogue, the local chamber of commerce will be in no hurry to endorse its errant son and the portrait of the village he presents. As Tom remembers it, the “old home town” is racist, insular, ugly, small-minded, and welfare-ridden. The people live marginalized lives within strict social and racial hierarchies. Patchogue is best defined by its excessive number of parking spaces. The depiction is an amalgamation of the subjective mind and actual fact. But if what he says is true about Patchogue, that it is a place “where nothing is forgiven, learned, or remembered,” then is it also true about him who seeks to define and understand himself by his experiences there?

    Mr. McGonigle directly alludes to a number of writers, including Dante (Melinda is his Beatrice, Patchogue his hell), Thomas Wolfe, Thoreau, and Celine. He evokes Melville’s “Moby-Dick” at the beginning by merging and paraphrasing the brief introductory passages of Melville’s “Etymology” and “Extracts.” He offers up an accumulation of purported facts about Patchogue to establish the verity of the village to serve as his book’s ballast as Melville defines and affirms the whale to serve as his. The factual provides the foundation for the philosophic. Ahab has his whale, and Tom has his excessive pursuit of himself.

    “Going to Patchogue” contains passages of intelligence, humor, and insight. These individual pieces, however, do not coalesce into a sustained and successful narrative. One can admire much of what Mr. McGonigle is attempting to do here without necessarily recommending the whole. Tom’s tiresome journey ends in a greater sense of despair, emptiness, and persistent unawareness. He admits, “I have brought nothing back from this journey.” It is a conclusion the reader may share.

—

    Thomas McGonigle is the author of “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov.” He lives in New York City.

    William Roberson, who lives in Mastic, taught literature at Southampton College for 30 years and is now at the Brentwood campus of Long Island University. His book “Walter M. Miller, Jr.: A Reference Guide to His Fiction and His Life” came out earlier this year.

    Japan has an early start in commemorating next year’s centennial of Jackson Pollock’s birth. Its Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya has opened an exhibit of some 60 of his works.

    On loan are works from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs along with a key drip painting, “Mural on Indian Red Ground,” from the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art in Iran. It was acquired under the shah’s regime in the 1970s and has not been seen outside that country since the revolution. Other works come from Japanese collections and other prominent international lenders. The show will travel to Tokyo in February.

    Helen Harrison, the executive director of the center, said last week that the museum had recreated in its galleries Pollock’s studio, complete with its floor. It did so based on photographs and borrowed some paint cans and brushes from the house to lend some verisimilitude. “They really pulled out all the stops,” Ms. Harrison said. The museum also borrowed a broken anchor and some other accessories from the house and studio.

    Included in the show are “Birth,” from the Tate Gallery, “Totem Lesson 2,” from the National Gallery of Australia, “Number 7, 1950,” from the Museum of Modern Art, and “Number 7, 1952,” from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

    Ms. Harrison was among the 500 guests who attended the opening on Nov. 10. She is planning a number of events next year, including two summer exhibits, one examining Pollock’s formative years and the other looking at his enduring influence on contemporary artists. The center is also launching a campaign to build an endowment and has a $1 million challenge grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to start the process.

    What was the greatest discovery of all time?

    Attributed to Albert Einstein, it was compound interest. To the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, it was the discovery of the method of discovery. To Mel Brooks, it was Saran Wrap, because it’s transparent and it keeps food fresh. According to my wife, Celia, the greatest discovery (actually an invention) was the thermos jug, because when you put hot stuff in, it stays hot, and when you put cold stuff in, it stays cold, and, what’s more, it knows when to do what!

__

“A More Perfect Heaven”

Dava Sobel

Walker & Company, $25

__

    But my candidate for the greatest discovery is gravitation. Gravity is a bit like religion: It’s always here, always there, always everywhere, and it’s always “on.” But, unlike religious belief, you can’t shut it off, and it doesn’t cause war. It’s here to stay whether you believe in it or not.

    The notion that the Earth was the center of the universe pervaded much of human history, philosophy, and religious thought — except for a few brave souls. Copernicus (1473-1543) was able to present cogent reasons why the Earth moved: “That the Earth is not the center of all revolutions is proved by the apparently irregular motions of the planets and the variations in their distances from the Earth. . . . Any apparent motion of the Sun can be better explained by the motion of the Earth.”

    Not only was this courageous thinking at the time — and punishable by the powers of the church — but it was also dangerous for a Roman Catholic Church administrator, a canon, in northern Poland to utter public statements that departed from accepted wisdom and theology of that era.

    The Copernican revolution ushered into popular sensibility a teaching, called the Enlightenment, that all subjects, indeed everything, was open to rational examination, observational data, and logic — instead of merely received wisdom and tradition.

    Dava Sobel, in her lively and charming new book, “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos,” chronicles and pays homage to someone the church’s Edict of 1616 called “a heretic.”

    Not every heretic dies as happily as did Copernicus. Ms. Sobel plants within her historical narrative a play with imagined scenarios and conversations among the dramatis personae — the factually correct events and characters that truly existed. In the play, and based on the facts, she richly invents conversations that might make an excellent PBS or History Channel docudrama.

    Thus, when Joachim Rheticus, a brilliant young mathematician, acolyte, and collaborator of Copernicus’s, delivers to his mentor the manuscript of their work together, he envisions Copernicus this way: “[He] tries to speak — the words ‘May God be w-w-w-w’ — clutches the manuscript to his chest . . . as he sinks into the chair.” She inserts a dramatic “blackout” at this point in her play.

    The melodrama also depicts an erotic scene between Joachim and 14-year-old Franz (a Bishop’s spy) based on a real accusation directed at Rheticus of “the shameful and cruel vice of sodomy.” I could see Robin Williams as Copernicus, dying as he receives the first printed copy, and thus beyond the reach of the Inquisition-minded authorities. Maybe Penelope Cruz as his mistress-housemaid-harlot, and Tommy Lee Jones as the bishop. But what do I know about casting?

    Ms. Sobel has Rheticus praising Copernicus: “There has been no greater human happiness than my relationship with so excellent a man and scholar as he . . . [who] solemnly charged me to carry on and finish what he, prevented by old age and impending death, was unable to complete himself.”

    Ms. Sobel tells a great story very well, as she did in her previous books “Galileo’s Daughter” and, especially, “Longitude,” a brilliant tale of a great invention and duplicity.

    The story of gravitation is yet to be told in full, but Copernicus’s successors are important heroes as well, in their own dedication to its understanding and the brave inferences they drew from observation. Tycho Brahe’s data together with Johannes Kepler’s calculations following Copernicus led to the laws of elliptical orbits and of equal areas (1609) and to the nexus between planetary periods and their semimajor axes (1619).

    Galileo was able to view the satellites of Jupiter with a crude telescope and to realize that their existence supported the Copernican heliocentric theory.

    It was left to Isaac Newton in 1692 to guess how the Sun and fixed stars might be formed by the universal gravitational force acting as attractive force upon matter assumed to be evenly dispersed throughout an assumed infinite space: “. . . some of [the mass] would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses scattered at great distances from one another throughout all that [assumed] infinite space.”

    No wonder Newton famously said, “If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” Certainly, Copernicus would have been one of those giants.

    Today we know, courtesy of another giant, Einstein, that “space tells matter how to move, and matter tells space how to curve.” But that’s another story.

—

    Dava Sobel lives in Springs. She will talk about “A More Perfect Heaven” at the East Hampton Library on Dec. 3 at 3 p.m.

    Stephen Rosen worked as a research physicist at the Institut d’Astrophysique in Paris and the Centre Nucléaire de Saclay. He lives in East Hampton and New York.

    John Chimples sat before two large screens at his house in Ditch Plain, Montauk, one day last month. He clicked a link and one of the screens came alive with the image of an older man wearing a wry smile and wrinkled features earned in ways that most human beings can barely imagine.

    He fixed the camera lens with blue eyes that were warm, perhaps a bit wary, and began speaking the West Virginia dialect that sounds as close to America’s mother tongue as one is likely to hear. Down to earth might be a good description of his demeanor if Chuck Yeager, combat pilot, test pilot, first man to break the sound barrier, had been able to stay on the ground during his 88 years.

    “The Right Stuff” was how Tom Wolfe defined the brash, understated can-do of a man whom Mr. Chimples has been filming for over a year now. Although he said the documentary was about a year away from completion, the filmmaker and recent candidate for a spot on the East Hampton Town Trustee board seemed hardly able to contain his excitement over what he already has in the can.  

    Last month, Mr. Chimples traveled to Edwards Air Force Base in California on the occasion of the 64th anniversary of Mr. Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier while piloting Glamorous Glennis, the Bell X-1 jet he named for his wife. The sonic boom was first heard on Oct. 14, 1947. To celebrate the achievement, Mr. Yeager broke it again, this time in a F-106. He had a co-pilot in the double-seated warplane, but was at the controls at Mach 1.

    Mr. Chimples filmed him retelling the story of how he broke the barrier — a feat that engineers were not certain either the plane or Mr. Yeager could survive. He succeeded despite the pain of having fractured several ribs the day before while goofing around on horseback, and after fashioning a lever out of a broomstick handle — unbeknownst to higher authorities — that enabled him to overcome his handicap enough to close the X-1’s hatch.

    The story is dramatically told in Tom Wolfe’s book, but Mr. Chimples said the famous pilot added a few wrinkles on film.

    He clicked on another link and Mr. Yeager appeared again, this time filmed in the countryside about 50 miles southeast of Bordeaux, where he had parachuted from his P-51 fighter during World War II after losing a dogfight with a German aircraft on his ninth mission. The filmmaker has archival film of aerial battles shot from airplane gun cameras.

Holiday Show

    The Romany Kramoris Gallery has a holiday exhibit on view that includes the work of Shey Wolvek, Isabel Pavao, Jude Amsel, Christopher Engel, George Wazenegger, Laura Rozenberg, and Maria Orlova. It focuses on small works of art, and there will be special pricing on artists of the week. The show is up through Jan. 8 at the Sag Harbor gallery.

“Painter of Long Island”

    The Suffolk County Historical Society in Riverhead will show “Charles Henry Miller: Painter of Long Island” beginning with a reception tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. Organized by Geoffrey K. Fleming, the director of the Southold Historical Society, the exhibit will include paintings, sketchbooks, and other historical memorabilia relating to the life and career of the artist, who lived from 1842 to 1922. It can be seen through Feb. 11.

Drew Shiflett Talk

    On Sunday at 12:30 p.m., Drew Shiflett will discuss her work that is on view at Guild Hall. The artist’s “constructed drawings” resemble painted fabric and use handmade paper as their support. She applies graphite, ink, watercolor, and conté crayon to sections that she then layers and places together.

    Guild Hall is bringing back its “cafe” on Fridays, beginning tomorrow, with free admission to the museum, free coffee, and free Wi-Fi access. They will continue through March.

“Suddenly December”

    Photos from the East End Photographers Group will be at the 4 North Main Gallery in Southampton beginning Wednesday with a reception on Dec. 10 from 5 to 8 p.m. “Suddenly December” will include works by Virginia Aschmoneit, Gerry Giliberti, Pamela Grienke, Kathryn Odell-Hamilton, Joel Lefkowitz, George Mallis, Ron Nicoletta, Sean Noblett, Rosa Hanna Scott, Marilyn Stevenson, Christina Stow, Jarret Stretch, Nick Tarr, Mary Trentalange, and Alan Weinschel. It will remain on view through Dec. 14.

Trip to Crystal Bridges

    The LongHouse Reserve’s spring trip is to Bentonville, Ark., to visit the new Crystal Bridges Museum, founded by Alice Walton, the daughter of the founder of Wal-Mart, Sam Walton.

    Ms. Walton has caused some controversy with her recent acquisitions, which include a seminal Hudson River School painting from the New York Public Library. Nonetheless, the collection is a singular representation of American art from colonial times to the present.

    The trip, from May 3 to May 7, will also take in the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks, a chapel designed by a pupil of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Italianate Peel mansion, and Eureka Springs, an entire town listed on the National Register of Historic Places. More information is available at longhouse.org.

Whale Sculptures

    Wooden sculptures of whales by Randy Kolhoff of Sag Harbor will be on view at Black Swan Antiques in Bridgehampton through New Year’s. The artist uses local history, folklore, and nature as inspiration for his carving and painting. A reception will be held on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m.