The Wind Knows My Name

After hearing Isabel Allende interviewed on TV about The Wind Knows My Name, I knew this was a novel that I wanted to read.

In this novel, Allende connects the plight of Jewish youth on the Kindertransport for England during WWII with the current family separation crisis at our southern border.

The story starts out pretty disjointed and as a result, I had a very hard time getting absorbed in the novel. We first meet Samuel in Vienna. After his father disappears on Kristalnacht, her mother is convinced that the best bet for Samuel is to put him on a Kindertransport with a small suitcase, some large clothes (for him to grow into), his violin, a photo of his parents, and a bravery medal from his neighbor.

Next we meet Leticia who comes to the United States in the 1980s with her father after the town they lived in in El Salvador was massacred and they had nothing else left.

Finally, we meet Anita who also flees from El Salvador after her mother feels like their lives are in danger. The trip to the north is a difficult one and they arrive in Nogales at the time when the family separation policy was being enforced. Anita and her mother are separated.

We get a glimpse of each of these characters' stories, but it wasn't until the stories got connected that I found the book absorbing to the point that I couldn't put it down. This is a novel that I will be thinking about long after reading the last page.

The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights.

I liked Kitty Zeldis' latest historical fiction novel, The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, but I only liked it. It was set in Brooklyn! I should have loved it!

I went back to see what type of rating I'd given to the first Kitty Zeldis novel I'd read, Not Our Kind, to see if I'd felt similarly. I did. But not for the same reasons.

I can't think of a concise way to describe what this novel is about. Bea is an "older" woman who has had to start over in life several times. First in New Orleans after she needs to leave Russia when things got tough for the Jews there. Then from New Orleans when her business is no longer practical. And then from Brooklyn, when all the secrets she has kept over the years start to unravel.

Bea moves north to Brooklyn with Alice, an orphan whom she'd taken in back in New Orleans. The two open an unique dress shop in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn. (Hence the title of the book.)

Catherine is a woman living down the street from the dress shop. She's happily married and longing to have a baby.

The lives of the three women intersect and that's when the secrets start to be revealed.

What I enjoyed most about this book were the references to locations that I'm familiar with in Brooklyn and Manhattan. I loved reading about Alice and Bea's creative approach to designing dresses. What I didn't love was the character development. That combined with the way conflicts were addressed and resolved left me wanting for more.

I'm also not sure what relevance there was to Bea being Jewish. It was an integral part of the beginning of the story, it was brought up once or twice towards the middle of the book, but then never addressed. She could have been a displaced immigrant from anywhere.

Not a bad book, but nothing I'd strongly recommend. 

Four Treasures of the Sky

Jenny Tinghui Zhang's Four Treasures of the Sky is a beautifully written novel about a decidedly ugly period of United States history. This novel is set in Idaho during the 1800s.

Main character Daiyu's life does not go as planned. When she's a fairly young girl, her parents get arrested and her grandmother feels that it's safer for Daiyu to life as a boy in a large city rather than staying in their little fishing village. Life isn't easy on the street, but eventually Daiyu, living as a boy, finds a place in a calligraphy school. That's where she learns many of the life lessons that will help her survive many other hardships that come her way.

Eventually, she finds herself in Pierce, Idaho. This is where the story that Zhang's father stumbled upon on a trip out west is told.

Zhang's use of language is so beautiful and the connections to calligraphy throughout the novel are incredibly thoughtful.The story of prejudice, injustice and violence towards the Chinese throughout USA history as recently as, well, now (think of anti-Asian acts of violence during the early days of Covid). It can be a very difficult to story to read, but it's well worth making the attempt.

I listened to Four Treasures of the Sky. My edition of the audio book came with an interview with the author. That's where she talked about her father coming across an historical marker in Idaho that started her quest to tell this story.

 

The Takeaway Men

A girlfriend recommended The Takeaway Men by Meryl Ain. She said it was a nice change of pace for a Holocaust book. Rather than focusing on the atrocities of the Holocaust, it deals with several Jewish families in Northern Queens (New York City) in the 1940s thru 1960s. Of those that lived through the Shoah in Europe, there were some who preferred to keep all their memories and feelings bottled up inside and there were some who felt that it was important to share what they experienced so something so horrific won't happen again. That is very much like real life.

The problem with this novel, though, is that it attempted to cover too much (Holocaust, immigration, religious observance, marital relationships, sibling relationships, death, mental illness, the Rosenbergs trial, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some other things that Ain includes in this relatively short novel. Because it is a short novel, nothing was covered deeply enough for me to feel satisfied. Many of the stories that Ain started to share weren't resolved or were dropped midstream.

I think that Aron, Judy, and their twins, Bronka and JoJo are considered the main characters, but other characters, a whole host of characters, got nearly as much attention. I would have loved to have more to a few of the stories than these relative shallow stories.

I also had a problem with the title, "The Takeaway Men." Unless that was a common phrase used in the 1940s and 1950s, it surprised me that two children, an ocean apart, would use  the same phrase. And while "the takeaway men" make the two appearances in the novel, that's not what the story is really about.

The is Ain's debut novel, and it read like a debut novel. The writing was simplistic and descriptive in a way that doesn't add much to the story. I'm sure there's a phrase to describe this type of reading, but I can't place my finger on that right now.

I'm not sure if I'd recommend The Takeaway Men, and the next time I speak to my friend, I'm going to probe a little deeper to ask her what she thought about different aspects of the book.
 

Waking Lions

Often, after finishing a book, I need to take a moment... or a few hours... or even a few days to think about what I've read and to process it. I suppose the same is for Waking Lions by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Except for the fact that as I was finishing the book, my head was exploding. What a story!

Waking Lions was suggested for our Jewish book club because it is set in Israel, (originally written in Hebrew), and because the story is so current and universal.

Dr. Eitan Green takes a detour on his way home from a shift at the hospital. He needs to burn off some steam. When he's finally ready to go home, he hits an African migrant in the road with his Suv. He  believes the man is beyond salvation and continues on his way home. He wonders how he, who has spent his adult life saving lives, is able to just drive away. The next day, the wife of the dead man who witnessed the accident (because it was an accident) shows up at Eitan's house and as if the accident hadn't changed the course of his life already, her showing up and making demands of him brings him into a world that he never could have imagined. Ever.

Titan's wife, Liat, is a detective. She is tasked with finding the killer of the African migrant, not knowing that she is sleeping with him on the nights that he comes home to sleep.

The book is about the "immigration crisis" in Israel but could easily take place almost anywhere else in the industrialized world right now.  It could easily be a story taking place in today's United States. The book is about race relations and the invisibility of the underclass. The book is about moral decision making and choices. It's about introspection. It's about knowing another person. The book is about testing the true character of individuals.

Gunnar-Goshen knows how to create a compelling storyline, full of twists and turns. Just when you as the reader think you understand a character and his or her motivations, some new information is revealed that makes you question what you know. Towards the end of the book, you are compelled forward to complete the book, wanting the know how the author will bring this to conclusion.

I'm not sure how I feel about the ending of the book. I won't go as far as saying that it was a surprise ending, but it was not an ending I would have predicted. Now, I can't imagine it ending any other way.

I really look forward to discussing this book with my Jewish book club or with anyone who wants to discuss it. There is so much to talk about.

As an aside, when I looked for an e-book in one of my libraries, I saw that they also had the original Hebrew language version. I took that one out, too. My Hebrew was never great, but I was surprised at how many of the words I did understand. Of course, the words didn't combine into sentences that made sense. I do wonder, though, how true the translation is. I think that translator tried to mimic the author's lyrical language. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes I think that it did not. I still have the Hebrew novel on my iPad and might look at it again to see if it makes anymore sense now.