Read On! 1939

What turns an expatriate neighbor to an enemy alien?
That's the question underlying 1939, a novel published in 1948.
The story centers on a proud Parisian, Madame Corinne Audal. Years ago she'd married protection, in the form of a French military officer. But she's fled the city to live atop a mountain with her lover, Ferdl Eder, an alpine man from Austria. Initially the Savoyard villagers tolerate the couple. But then war arrives. Ferdl's homeland has fallen under Nazi rule. France soon will fall. Her protection ebbs, and his bid to join the Allies goes terribly awry.
The author is Minnesota-born Kay Boyle (1902-1992). Herself an expat in France throughout the '20s and '30s, the oft-married Boyle (left) wrote often about Europe and the Nazis. Back in the United States during the postwar McCarthy era, she continued her political activism and found herself blacklisted by many magazines, even as her (3d) husband, an Austrian baron, was dismissed from a State Department post.
This is not among Boyle's best-known works. But it's wonderfully written. A sample passage:

So now you'll get out of here where you don't belong, Madame Audal; you'll take your thirty years and your painted mouth and your shameless eye back to where they came from; you, French, or just pretending to be French, but just as much a foreigner as he was because you took up with a foreigner like him; ...

1939's 152 pages provoke considerable thought about national, regional, and ethnic identity, about allegiances, about suspicion and security -- issues as compelling today as they were then.

On June 9

On this day in ...
... 1954, in Washington, D.C., 1954, the tide turned against U.S. Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), who had spearheaded a Cold War Red Scare. When McCarthy (above, at right) attacked a colleague of Army counsel Joseph N. Welch (above, at left), stating that the colleague "had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild 'long after it had been exposed as the legal arm of the Communist party,'" Welch retorted:

'Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?'

Text and audio of the McCarthy-Welch exchange are here.
... 1949, Dr. Kiran Bedi (below right) was born in Amritsar, India. In 1972, she became the 1st woman in India's Police Service, a career she pursued until her retirement last year. The onetime tennis champion earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Social Sciences of the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1993. She has worked extensively with the United Nations, as the Police Advisor to the Secretary-General in the Department of Peace Keeping Operations and as India's representative in forums on crime prevention, drug abuse, police and prison reforms, and women’s issues. Awarded the 1994 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service -- an honor sometimes called the Asian Nobel Prize -- Bedi has founded 2 NGOS, Navjyoti and India Vision Foundation.

On September 13, ...

... 1993, the Oslo Accords on the Middle East were announced at the White House. A "Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank" was signed by Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Liberation Organization foreign policy aide Mahmoud Abbas. Onlookers included their superiors, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasir Arafat, as well as past and present U.S. Presidents. Despite initial successes, the Accords failed to achieve peace in the region.
... 1948, Maine voters elected Margaret Chase Smith (left), then a Republican Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, to the Senate, where she served 24 years, following the death of the incumbent, her husband Clyde. She became the 1st woman to serve in both houses of Congress; her aims were higher, though, as indicated by this note from the website of the Margaret Chase Smith Library:

Senator Smith came to national attention on June 1, 1950, when she became the first member of the Senate to denounce the tactics used by colleague Joseph McCarthy in his anticommunist crusade. Following her "Declaration of Conscience" speech, some pundits speculated that she might be the vice-presidential candidate on the 1952 Republican ticket. The opportunity, however, never materialized. In 1964, Senator Smith pursued her own political ambitions, running in several Republican presidential primaries. She took her candidacy all the way to the Republican National Convention in San Francisco, where she became the first woman to have her name placed in nomination for the presidency by either of the two majority parties. In the final balloting, Smith refused to withdraw and so wound up coming in second to the Republican nominee, Senator Barry Goldwater.