Memento Park

Matt Santos grew up in the home of his parents, one generation removed from the horrors of the Holocaust, displaying a Christmas tree and not celebrating Jewish holidays or attending synagogue.  He can recall the three times he entered a synagogue as a child with his grandfather.  Now, as an adult working as an actor and living with his fiancee, Tracy he is as far removed from his Jewish heritage as he can get.  Then a phone call changes everything.  A lawyer is offering to handle a case of Holocaust art restitution for a painting by Ervin Kalman that last hung in his grandparents apartment in Budapest, in 1944.

On the surface this novel, Memento Park, written by Mark Sarvas, seems to be about the process of recovering Budapest Street Scene, the painting that was lost by the Santos family when his grandfather escaped to America and his grandmother was killed in a concentration camp.  But underneath there are multiple interactions that are all ripe for discussion and analysis.  So many different points that different readers will relate to and connect to.

Matt decides to work with Rachel, the Los Angeles attorney and follow the path of the painting back to Budapest and his relatives to discover if it really belongs to his family.  During this journey he tries to come to terms with the charged relationship he has with his father.   He says his father never taught him anything.  Matt and his father have, he says, a relationship of fear and and lies,  "This, I suppose, is my father's legacy, the ease of the lie the comfort of the half-truth.  The actor born in fear, borne by fear."

So many times in this book, Matt describes interactions as scenes, and watches himself from off stage acting a part.  He struggles with emotion and actually showing himself to others.  He remains hidden, the actor performing.  This, he also says, was because of his father,  "He also never taught me the more essential things - right and wrong, how to read a stranger, how to love.  That this omission went unnoticed by me for so long is, in itself, telling."  He comes back to this struggle with his father over and over again.  It informs all of his interactions with other people.  How he gets along with Tracy and Rachel, the lawyer.

He replays the story in remembrances, that he is supposedly telling to a night guard in the art auction house where Budapest Street Scene will go up for bidding in the morning.  He talks about growing up with his father and working with him at toy trade shows.  His father is a collector of toy cars.  Now he is going with his father to another toy show, Matt recounts,   "Once again, I knew the part I was intended to play, had so internalized this character, this first great role, that I knew precisely how to step in and play him.  My father understood, as good actors do.  He'd picked up on my rhythms and responded in kind and , all at once, we found ourselves returned to the roles that made us famous, these earliest portrayals of ourselves."  Such wonderful prose.

Tracy, the fiancee, a model, is struggling with her own demons.  She is working with a lawyer, to help a young man on death row in a Texas jail.  Tracy has been, interceding for nearly a year, helping to underwrite his legal team and coordinating an 'awareness campaign' for clemency.  Each morning Matt still wakes up surprised to see that she is his.  Tracy, he describes her, "..my flaxen goddess... I pursued her hard, proposed early, knowing how rare openings for men like me are with women like her."  This is another plot line that we follow throughout the book.

Another wonderfully descriptive quote about Tracy, that I could relate to in my own personal relationship,  "She was late, always late, I would learn, for her internal clock, set at a permanent forty-five-minute delay.  Even when I used the time-honored technique of padding departure times, Tracy maintained the forty five minute window without fail, some inner gyroscopic mechanism inexorably attuned behind time's flow. "

There is the lawyer, Rachel, and her relationship with her own elderly father, both religiously observant Jews.   There is the Rabbi from Chicago who may also have a claim on the painting.  All these characters help Matt realize his Jewish roots and give him questions and change his interactions with Judaism.

So many complicated characters and choices to make through out the book.  It is a gripping story and even if you think you know what may happen next you will be surprised at the ending.  People and objects are not always what they seem.

The Daughters

This is definitely a book that needs a group discussion when you reach the end.   It is written about four women, Greta, who lives in Poland during the Second World War, her daughter Ada, who is sent to America as a child to escape the fate of war.  Then Ada has a daughter, Sara, who grows up to be a jazz singer in nightclubs and has a daughter Lulu out of wedlock.    Lulu is mainly raised by her grandmother, Ada and told stories of family lore.  Sara is not a good mother, emotionally withdrawn and busy with her own life.  She leaves her daughter and mother behind and disappears in the middle of the night. 

Adrienne Celt weaves all these back stories into the current day plot of Lulu who has just delivered her daughter, Kara.  She is married but admits to the reader that the baby was conceived with someone else. 
Lulu has been raised on Ada's stories of Greta and a supposed family curse.  Lulu is afraid for her daughter.  Worried the curse will continue.  But as a reader I was never really clear on what the actual curse was.  I had plenty of speculation about the curse and Greta's life.  I was confused about why the some of the ideas were presented in the book.  Music plays a large role in the book, mention of Dvorak's Rusalka opera makes me want to find a parallel with the plot, but that will need to be discussed.  The story of Greta and her lost daughters.  The story of the young boy who told the false story of the Jews attacking him.  These, I think are important plot points that area a ripe for conversation and analysis.

Let me know when you finish this book and we can sit down for a chat, I will bering the coffee.

Women of the Castle

What would it have been like to be a German who was not a Nazi supporter.  Before the war began, as the different groups were banding together, the brown shirts, Nazi party, and others are building their coalitions and recruiting members.  Some people supported them and agreed with their ideology.  Others joined as sheep follow a leader.  Others thought it may improve their lives as an escape from an unhappy existence.  But there were those who were opposed from the beginning and fought back based on their strength of their convictions.

XXX was one of those men.  He and his friends meet as they realize the country is on the brink of war and start to build their underground retaliation.  On the surface they are business men leading normal lives, attending dance parties and getting married.  But  YYY marries the girl of his dreams as he is secretly planning to try and murder the Fuhrer.  He tells his childhood friend to look after his young wife if something happens to him. 

With a brief account of the war, we are brought to the end, as XXX goes out from the family castle to find, rescue and fulfill her promise to YYY.  She finds three of the wives of YYY and other members of the resistance and brings them and their children to the castle to live with her and her children.  This book beautifully describes the  Europe after the war.  The devastation, the starvation and all the lost people, permanently changed by the experiences they suffered through.  We meet three women and their children, hear their stories of life during the war and see how they try to put it behind them and move through the horrors to make a life on the other side.

In this book we hear about German women who suffered at the hands of the Nazi party.  A women who made terrible mistakes and joined the Nazi party, now is trying to flee who she was during the war, create a new identity.   Women who want to erase the past and start over for the future.

This is again is a novel based on truth and stories the author was told.  Another one of those books that shares with the reader a different perspective on the horrors of Germany during and after World War II.

The Button War

The Button War is written by the children's author Avi, but it is quite a dark novel and would be hard for a young child to read.   The Button War takes place during the beginning of World War I.  AS the author and many reviews of the novel mention, it is a story of how young boys who start out as friends, can loose sight of the fun nature of a game and contest and become very competitive and threatening to each other.

Avi takes the reader back to a small town in Poland at the start of World War I.  This is a town that is isolated and self sufficient.  We start out with seven boys who spend their days playing and exploring together.  Their town is occupied by Russian soldiers, which displeases the townspeople.  One day the Russians leave and German soldiers arrive moving into some the citizens homes.

Patryk is the narrator and tells about how the boys meet up and sit on a ledge above the water pump.  They are watching as their village changes with the German soldiers arriving.  Jurek is the instigator, daring the others to take risks and he starts the contest to find the best button.  As the boys each try to get a button from the clothing of either a Russian or German soldier, the stakes get higher and more dangerous.   As the boys get caught up in the competition they mirror the fighting between the Russians and the Germans.  It all seems to be fighting without clear knowledge of how to recognize the winner.  The stakes get higher and people start getting hurt and dying, but then who wants to be the first to cry Uncle and admit to being scared?

Avi says he based this dark story on a tale his father-in-law shared with him from his childhood.
The collection of buttons from soldier's uniforms developed into this serious thought provoking plot though Avi's imagination.  His father-in-law's interest in the buttons was much more innocent.  read this book with your child and be able to have a discussion about war and how following a leader blindly can lead to serious trouble.  It is a great message for our present day political climate.  It is also a important lesson to learn for children in general.

All The World Praises You

All The World Praises You is the compilation of beautiful artwork of artist, Debra Band .


Using the wording of the biblical prose of Perek Shira, Band has created wonderful drawings to illustrate each of these writings.  Taking a word that represents each Hebrew letter and a descriptive musing about that word, she has created a wonderful way to enjoy learning new Hebrew words while enjoying the beautiful art creations.  Working with the translations and transliterations of scholar, and Arnold J. Band, and added her colorful and imaginative artwork.

The artwork is brilliant and brightly colored.  Covering all the the Alef Bet with words like Eretz/Earth and Barak/Lightening all the way to Shin represented by the Milky Way/ Shvil hehalav.

In each of the drawings there are dahlias and honeybees.  The author has hidden these two depictions in the drawings following a medieval custom, colophon, where the Jewish scribe included their names hidden in their work at the end of their written work.  Band has hidden dahlias in the pictures for her granddaughter, Dahlia and the word for honeybee is devorah.  At the end there are two paintings with hidden dahlias and honeybees along with Hebrew letters for readers to find. 

There is also a learning guide for teachers to use this book in a classroom setting.  This is a beautiful way for readers of all ages to start learning some Hebrew vocabulary, while enjoying the colorful artwork. 

Death By Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake

OK, so some days I do think enjoying myself and eating all the delicious foods I want would not be such a bad way to go, forget about weight control and healthy diets and all that... but in the end like eating all those high calorie foods where you just feel sick the next morning and regret it, Death By Chocolate Cherry Cheesecake by Sarah Graves, is fun for a while, but in the morning you may wish you had spent the time reading a different book.

If you are sitting in the shade of a big old tree, or under the umbrella at the beach, dive right in.  Enjoy the light entertaining mystery for an afternoon.  In this first in a new series of Chocolate Mysteries, author Sarah Graves, takes her amateur detective, Jacobia, "Jake" Tiptree from her previous series of Home Repair is Homicide mysteries, and brings her to a new career as the owner of a small bake shop.

Jake lives in a waterfront, tourist location in Maine and though she has had many run-ins with murder while fixing up her old home, now she and her friend are starting up the chocolate shop and have already found a dead body.  Of course, they feel pressure to solve the crime because they feel the local police are busy elsewhere and will not be able to clear their names in time.

 The most clever thing that Graves has accomplished with this novel, is that she has taken her characters from one series that must have outlived its plots and moved them into a new arena that will open up the possibilities for trouble.  But otherwise, this is not a compelling mystery novel.  The plot is very typical and the dialogue repetitive.   They describe the details of making the cheesecakes over and over. They keep running between the house and the bakery, sometimes it seems needlessly just for some action.  The clues become too obvious as the author keeps repeating them which makes them so clear you know what will happen next before it does.  Finally the characters are flat.  The suspense never really feels authentic.  So though it is a light read for an afternoon, when your book pile is very tall and precariously balanced, this may be a book or series that can be used to at the bottom so the rest of the pile does not tip over.