By Diana Brement,
JTNews Columnist
Harry Rutstein’s book, The Marco Polo Odyssey: In the Footsteps of a Merchant Who Changed the World, recently won the independent publisher’s association prize for best travel book.
Harry is the only person to travel Polo’s route from Italy to China (others have traveled sections of the route or modified the route).
Three expeditions were mounted in 1971, 1981 and 1985. The first covered Italy up to the Pakistan border. The second, only 300 miles long, covered the most difficult terrain over the four mountain ranges that comprise Pakistan’s “roof of the world.”
Harry’s heart’s desire was to complete Polo’s route through China, but the political situation made getting permission impossible.
“I had been approaching both the Chinese delegation to the UN and also the Chinese government,” he explains (there was no Chinese embassy in D.C. until 1979).
It’s a long and complicated story involving repeated contact with Chinese and American officials, including then-Vice President George H. W. Bush. He even started doing business in China, importing high-technology products (computers, microwaves), which gave him access to Chinese officials.
But still no luck.
“It took 14 years to get permission,” says Harry, and then it really did come down to luck. (You can read more on the Web site, www.marcopolofound.org.)
Around 1982 he met a Chinese photojournalist who was very interested in his project and very well connected. She made just one phone call — to her father, third in command in the Chinese government.
So in 1985, with said photojournalist along, Harry fulfilled his dream, a two-and-a-half month journey across some of the most remote parts of China.
Then it took more than 20 years for him to write this book because he was so busy running the successful business he had created in order to get permission to travel across China! (A volume about the first two expeditions — In the Footsteps of Marco Polo — came out in 1980, coauthored with cultural anthropologist Joanne Kroll, who was on the expedition.)
“I finally sold my business, which gave me time to write the book,” Harry says.
It also means the book is more up-to-date politically. “A lot of places I visited [including Afghanistan and Iran]…had either disappeared…or things had happened,” he says (a slight understatement).
Choosing an independent publisher got the book published a lot faster. Traditional publishers told him the book would take two years to get into print. Now approaching 80, Harry didn’t feel he had the luxury of time. “I don’t buy green bananas,” he told me, though he says he feels 23.
Originally from Baltimore, Harry met his wife, Nancy, in D.C. She is from Seattle and they soon settled here. Harry has five grown children, two with Nancy and three from his first marriage. (His son, Richard, was a member of the first expedition.) He and Nancy belong to Temple B’nai Torah and Harry is also a member of the Sino-Judaic Institute.
In addition to describing his adventures, Harry enjoys educating people about Marco Polo, who wasn’t Jewish, by the way, but wrote about Jewish traders he encountered on his trip and Jewish merchants of Kaifeng, China.
Polo introduced the concepts of “about 168 other technologies” to the west, including charcoal, asbestos and paper money. However, he did not bring noodles from China to Italy. “The Romans had noodles, the Greeks had noodles,” Harry assured me.
Information about both Harry’s books are at the website mentioned above.
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Earlier this summer, Elliott Appel of Lacey found out he was one of 10 winners of a national Holocaust essay contest. He heard about the contest through Fast Web (a college scholarship Web site) and as one of 7,000 entrants he was “a little taken aback” to find out he’d won.
The winners were treated to a week in Chicago in late June, where they visited the new Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center and other memorials. They heard a panel discussion on the 1970s legal conflict between the Village of Skokie and a neo-Nazi group that wanted to march there, met with Holocaust survivors and with Clemantine Wamariya, a Rwandan genocide survivor.
“It was great,” says Elliott. The opportunity to hear survivors’ stories and ask questions was “a different experience [than any] I’ve ever had.”
A recent graduate of North Thurston High in Lacey, Elliott will be at Seattle University this fall.
“They have great diversity,” he says of his reasons for choosing the school, and “small classes.” He also likes the self-contained but urban campus also and, of course, it’s “not too far away from home, but just far enough.”
He plans to study business and to work and travel internationally. As you read this, he is in Nicaragua teaching a photography workshop for the “voluntourism” organization, Communidad Connect.
The Holland & Knight Charitable Foundation was established to bring students and survivors of genocide together and is a project of the international legal firm Holland & Knight. A selection of winning essays may be read at holocaust.hklaw.com.