THE WILDCAT BEHIND GLASS, by Alki Zei. Translated by Karen Emmerich.
Of all the genres of the past century of children’s literature, one of the most important is what Polonius in “Hamlet,” per his famous parodic list, might have called the pastoral-idyllical-tragical. In it, kids, or their stand-ins, inhabit a lovingly described paradise, or near paradise, somewhere out beyond the city, until their happiness is marred by a threat from the outer, grown-up world. This is the matter of “Charlotte’s Web,” of the Babar books and of such seeming outliers as T.H. White’s “Mistress Masham’s Repose,” where the pastoral setting is an English orphan girl’s stately home, ruined by her evil guardians.
It is also the matter of Alki Zei’s Greek children’s classic “The Wildcat Behind Glass” — set in the 1930s, published in the 1960s but little known in America, and now available in a new translation by Karen Emmerich.
An Aegean island retreat is threatened in this case not by the butcher’s ax but by the rise of a semi-fascist dictatorship — as though the climax of “Charlotte’s Web” involved Charlotte spelling out, high above Wilbur, not “Some Pig!” but “It Can Happen Here!”
The credibility of such books depends on the tangibility of the pastoral idylls they evoke. Here, in her depiction of the island she calls Lamagari, based on Samos, where she grew up, Zei does not disappoint:
I don’t think there’s a sea in the world more beautiful than the one in Lamagari. Sometimes it’s shaded by the pine trees that grow right next to the water, and then it’s as green as a grape leaf, and sometimes when the sun is shining straight down it’s as blue as the sky. There are patches of soft sand on the bottom, and little colorful pebbles, too, and the water makes the colors look so bright and cheerful, like they’ve just been painted.
The novel is narrated by a young girl named Melia, who summers there with her slightly older sister, Myrto, under the tutelage of their beloved grandfather, with frequent visits from their much-admired story-weaving cousin, Nikos. The wildcat of the title is the pet ornament of the grandfather’s run-down but expansive house — a stuffed cat around which Nikos constructs wild tales of adventure, insisting that it breaks out of its glass case and roams the island when night falls.
