Tornado relief

[Denis Crnkovic]

Esteemed colleagues!

As you may have heard, on Sunday evening, March 29, Gustavus Adolphus
College and the town of Saint Peter, Minn., suffered severe losses from a
strong tornado (F3) that damaged every building on campus. (Fortunately our
students were on Spring break and none of the 40 or so people on campus
were hurt.) Ninety percent of the windows on campus were broken and every
roof on every building was damaged to one degree or another. Among those
structures that suffered water and wind damage were the classroom/office
buildings that house the Russian Studies Department and, more seriously,
most of the dormitories. The "international" dormitory for foreign students
and foreign language majors is structurally unsound  and may be torn down.
While every effort was made to dry out the rain soaked rooms as soon as
possible, the scope of the clean up operation has been so vast that many
rooms were exposed to the elements for almost a week. As students return to
campus in shifts to salvage their belongings and make inventories for their
insurance companies it is becoming increasingly evident that we will need a
small supply of textbooks to replace those that have been lost or hurt
beyond hope. Although it is always humbling to go begging, we would like to
ask our colleague on the list if they could spare a few copies of the books
and textbooks listed below. We don't need new  books; used,
thumbed-through, underlined but otherwise readable copies will help us get
through the semester. Since we have small classes and not every student has
lost every book, we do not need large numbers of these books - certainly a
half dozen of each would suffice.

At this writing, the College plans to reopen for classes on a truncated
schedule on Monday, April 20. If you can spare a copy of some of the books
on the list, please contact me before sending anything (cronk at gac.edu). I
will send details on where to send books. (We are pretty secure in our
assumption that UPS will be able to resume service to the campus this
week.) Let me thank all of you in advance for your generosity and kindness
as we recover from a rather unsettling spring break.


Sincerely,

Denis Crnkovic
Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Literatures
for the Russian Studies faculty

Robin, Henry, Robin,     Golosa 1: A Basic Course in Russian
Robin, Henry, Robin,     Golosa 1: A Basic Course in Russian, Lab
Manual/Wokbook

Robin, Henry, Robin,     Golosa 2: A Basic Course in Russian
Robin, Henry, Robin,     Golosa 2: A Basic Course in Russian, Lab
Manual/Wokbook

Rifkin, Ben     Grammatika v kontekste

Klima, Ivan      My Merry Mornings
Kundera, Milan      The Unbearable Lightness of Being





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Denis Crnkovic'

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