Book Review: The Good Master

Title: The Good Master

(The 1945 reprint shown above has an especially pretty cover. What I have is the 1935 first edition, though unfortunately a library discard. What you'll get, if you don't ask for a collectible early edition, will be a more recent reprint.)

Author: Kate Seredy

Date: 1935

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: none

Length: 210 pages

Illustrations: many black-and-white drawings, two-page color drawing as frontispiece

Quote: “My dear daughter Kate...is more than delicate. She is the most impossible, incredible, disobedient, headstrong little imp. And she needs more than fresh air—she needs a strong hand!”

When authors share their own given names with their fictional characters, the stories are likely to be autobiographical. Although this book doesn’t explain the precise points of resemblance, Seredy dedicated it (emphasis original) to “the wise, kind, and tolerant good master DR. WILLIAM MANNINGER...to say: Thank you.” Whether that means Dr. Manninger was her uncle, that Seredy’s own father sent her to live with her uncle (and aunt and cousin) after her mother died and Seredy did so well on their farm that her father was willing to move back to the farm for her sake, she doesn’t say (in the book).

The story is, in any case, about a child’s happiest memories of a year on a small farm in Hungary around the turn of the twentieth century, when she’s allowed to wear something like culottes at home but is told, for special occasions, that “all nice girls wear” skirts—plural—every skirt in their closet, all at once. “Only eighteen...I have thirty-six, but I am a married woman,” her uncle’s wife complacently explains, filling the doorway with the thirty-six skirts she’s managed to stretch over each other at one time. (As a matter of historical record, some Hungarian women who lived in town, at this period, expected themselves to show off how many skirts they owned every day, and admitted that they gave themselves backaches.)

Hungary was a Catholic country at this period, but (as the Pagan writer known as Zsuzsanna Budapest later discussed at length) some old Pagan customs survived, including the family-filtered Pagan ritual in which the fictional Kate meets her uncle’s neighbors: Per village custom, on Easter all the male villagers throw water on all the young women, who are expected to reward them with a decorated Easter egg apiece as well as a snack. During the following week the girls get to slosh water on the boys in revenge, but there’s no mention of their collecting any reward. Why would there be? In real life, as the older women undoubtedly explained to ten-year-old girls like Kate when they asked questions, only women produce “eggs”...

Why Kate’s name looks English (though in some parts of Europe the name “Kate” appears to spell the name English-speakers recognize as “Katya”), but her cousin’s name doesn’t, also remains unexplained. Mainly because the token Slav in my family was christened Johnny (in his case “John” was the short “pet” form ), if I’d been the editor of this book, Kate’s cousin and new best buddy would have been called Johnny. When English-speaking children see “Jancsi” on a page, we read “Janx-ie,” not “Yahn-chie.” One of my memories of being an early-reading Child Prodigy involves reading the story of the roundup in which Kate and “Janxie” let their horses take control of the stampeding wild herd.

It’s a good story, though, even if your memory of reading it is clouded by knowing that you read it all wrong, and even if a favorite term of endearment by which adults call Kate comes out in English as...a word that, in 1935, the editor really should have realized was no longer interchangeable with “kitten.” It did originally mean a female cat, and Kate obviously understands it that way, but in the U.S. other little girls who were encouraged to read this book, as children, would grow up to have a character explain “common” as “the worst word I knew, worse even than ‘pussy’.” (That’s in Katie Letcher Lyle’s more young-adult novel, I Will GoBarefoot All Summer For You, 1973.) Presumably Seredy got away with explaining her own use of that word as a literal translation, like the rather awkward scene in which Kate is bribed to drink fresh warm milk for breakfast with the title to a white horse whose name is translated as “Milky.”

Arguably Kate’s other adventures include more cautionary tales of her scrapes than happy scenes of her triumphs. She dives off the ferryboat and nearly drowns in the current, but Jancsi happens to be already riding a horse that can wade in to the rescue. She follows a band of cheerful thieving Gypsies with the intention of helping recover the things they’ve stolen from her uncle, but panics and flees when she smells the fumes of herbs thrown into the fire, perhaps to “enchant” her into sleeping and losing the way home, and has to be rescued by her uncle instead. On the other hand, she learns to ride horses, milk cows, cultivate flowers, spin, sew, and...teach! Not only do Kate and Jancsi live too far out in the country to go to school regularly, but Jancsi hadn’t even learned how to read and write until Kate started teaching him and the laborers what she knew.

For a community to need a ten-year-old “teacher” is obviously a disaster, and Seredy moves quickly past that scene...Does it count as a spoiler if every adult reader saw the happy ending coming, probably earlier than page 112? This is not a novel of suspense; it’s a teaching story, commemorating the nicest things the Slavic immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century hoped to bring to North America.

Read as lightly fictionalized nonfiction, it’s quite a pleasant child-sized “story.” It won a Newbery Award and therefore, like other Newbery winners, has been kept in print. Reprints cost $5 per book, $5 per package (you could probably fit six books this size into a package, and Seredy wrote several), + $1 per online payment. To order a doll dressed like the cover drawing on your copy, add $10. For the European Folk Art style binding shown in the picture above, send $20 per book. Amazon isn't even showing collectors' prices for first editions that were not used and discarded by libraries.