The Day of Atonement

Author David Liss once again has made history come alive.  The Day of Atonement is a quick moving, suspenseful story of life in Lisbon during the Inquisition.  His ability to write about historical facts interwoven with a personal story makes the time period feel realistic and immediate.

This is the story of what it was like to be a New Christian living and doing business during the 1700s in Lisbon, Portugal.  When Sebastiao Raposa finds himself an orphan of the Inquisition at the age of 13, he escapes to London.  There he is taken in by a benefactor, the notorious bounty hunter, Benjamin Weaver.  He apprentices under Weaver for ten years and then returns to Lisbon disguised as a English businessman.  He is anxious to have his revenge on the men who imprisoned his family.

Sebastian has become a practicing Jew in London even though his family had been "New Christians" Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity generations before but are still the subject of focus by the Inquisition.  Foxx wrestles with atonement and sin.  He goes to Lisbon with the intention of making the priests atone for their sins, but as he begins to exact his violence he is concerned that it will make him as evil as the Inquisition priests.  "Yesterday I had killed in self-defense.  Could I truly kill a man in cold blood?  I had always believed that when the moment came, I would be equal to the task.  Now here it was, and it was no longer simply a matter of rebalancing the scales of justice.  A child's life, a parent's love, hung in the balance, and yet I found that murdering a man, even the most hated of men, was a harder thing than killing in the heat of conflict."

Of course all is not what it seems, as Sebastian Foxx, as he is now known, finds out.  He is ruthless and unafraid, feeling he has nothing to lose.  But as time goes by and he becomes embroiled in many different business plots, his feelings change and his hardness softens.  This could be either an impediment to his success in exacting revenge or it could be his opening up to feelings of vulnerability again.  He indeed has a conscience that guides him through life.

This is a book of suspense, subterfuge and romance.  The reader is pulled in from the beginning and is left sitting on the edge of his chair till the final page.  Characters who seem loyal may turn on you to save their own skin and fill their personal coffers.  Foxx learns he cannot trust anyone until the final ship has sailed.

All the Light We Cannot See

All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr is an incredible book.  It has won a few awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  It is well deserved.  The author has created a story that describes life in France under the occupation of the German Nazis in such a realistic way.  His characters are so believable and the reader can see why people acted and reacted to the war in the many ways they did.  Each character shows a different style of personality and how people could either stand up to the tyrannical leaders that were demanding allegiance to the war effort or were caught up in the war machine and did not know how to break free.

This is the story of two children and their families and how in their parallel worlds their lives are affected by the war.  First there is  Marie-Laure LeBlanc, a young girl blinded by cataracts at the age of six.  Her father works for the Museum of Natural History of Paris.  When his daughter becomes blind he spends his time carving replicas of all the buildings in their neighborhood.  Marie-Laure learns how to travel through her neighborhood by touching those models and memorizing their layout.  This is the first literal definition of "light we cannot see".  

In the country, lives Werner Pfennig, a young boy who has been orphaned by the mines that are the mainstay of income for the town.  He and his sister live in the orphanage and he dreams of escaping the life ahead of him in the mines.  The outbreak of war becomes his light out of the tunnel, but he cannot see where it will lead him.  He has a gift of understanding how radios work and while in the orphanage, he and his sister, Jutta, listen to someone broadcasting on the radio late at night in French.   Broadcasting on radio waves, another light that cannot be seen.  The person on the radio talks about the brain's power to create light in the darkness.   about science: “What do we call visible light?” the Frenchman asks. “We call it color. But . . . really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.”

Doerr creates Werner as such a believable character.  He gives the reader wonderful insight into how a young man could be swayed to follow the army officers directions, building an angry man ready to fight against even an unarmed civilian. The Nazi military commander tells the boys, “You will all surge in the same direction at the same pace toward the same cause. . . . You will eat country and breathe nation.”

 In this way Doerr makes the reader realize how Germans could turn in their Jewish friends and neighbors and how the soldiers in the German army could torture and send so many Jews and others to the concentration camps.

Marie-Laure and her father leave Paris for the small town of Saint Malo on the Brittany coast.  Her father carves her another set of buildings for this small village and gifts her with braille copy of  Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.  Her father is arrested and Marie -Laure shows her true strength of character through her ability to survive in the home of her great uncle and to join the resistance, again learning her way around the town by memorizing the replica her father built her.  

Doerr has built a story here that covers so many of the different situations that were faced throughout the war by people on many different sides of the conflict.  His descriptions are realistic and you become so attached to the characters that you can feel what they are struggling with as they grow and change through out the novel.

The Book of Aron

The Book of Aron, author Jim Shepard points out, on the book's cover, is a novel.  Though at the end when you read through the acknowledgements he does write that he used factual material about Janusz Korczak's Ghetto Diary; The Selected Works of Janusz Korczak among other sources about living in the Warsaw ghetto during the Holocaust.

The Book of Aron is the story of life in Poland as Germany starts its march on Poland and its containment of Jewish citizens into smaller and small ghetto areas that become known as the Warsaw Ghetto.  We start with Aron, also known by family and friends as Sh'maya, narrating the story of his life.  He lives with his family, two older brothers and one younger brother, and his parents in the Polish countryside.  His father gets a job at a fabric factory in Warsaw and the family moves to Zamenhofa Street in the city.  There at the age of eight he makes his first real friend Lutek.  By the time he is ten  the war has started.  Aron and Lutek find that they have a knack for sneaking around unnoticed.  They can bring home some stolen food for their families.  They can sneak out through a hole in the wall, out of the Ghetto, and bring back items to trade for food and other necessities.  He and Lutek meet Boris, Adina and Zofia and become a small gang of bandits, smuggling and trading contraband to help their families survive.

This story describes from Aron's point of view how as life slowly changes, the children and adults living in the Ghetto slowly adapt to the new routines.  You feel like you are there suffering with the sickness, lice and starvation the people are experiencing.  You can understand how Aron feels and reacts to the circumstances of the hand he has been dealt.  As the walls of the Ghetto squeeze in tighter and more and more of the area is quarantined for typhus, Aron is approached by the Jewish Yellow police, who want him to work as an informer.  Aron has to wrestle with his conscience and work to stay alive and one step ahead of the blackmailers, Jewish, Polish and German Police.

Aron ends up in the orphanage, with Dr. Janusz Korczak, his childhood changed forever by the war, "We were eating less at meals and everyone was frantic about it.  If we finished our portions too soon we had a longer wait until the next meal and our torture grew.  All anyone could think about was the table's next loaf of bread.  In the isolation ward when the soup kettle went round a forest of little hands rose from the beds.  We had soupy oat flour cooked in water and horse blood curdled in pieces and fried in a pan.  It looked like scraps of black sponge and tasted like sand.  On Sabbath a broth of buckwheat and lard."

Shepard has written this novel in such a convincing voice that the reader will much more clearly understand the dilemmas and choices people had to make to survive these horrific times.

The Travels of Daniel Ascher

Deborah Levy- Bertherat has written this short but fascinating story.  It has been translated from the French by Adriana Hunter.  What a wonderful story of a great uncle who travels around the world and writes adventure stories for children.  Great-uncle Daniel is the life of the kids table at family holiday meals.  All the children in the family are reading his books and following the heroic journeys of Peter Ashley-Mill, in the Black Insignia series.  All the children except Helene.  She never liked the books as a child.  She also was very critical of her uncle, who wrote under the pen name H.R. Sanders.  Now she is living in the upstairs apartment owned by Great- uncle Daniel Roche  or is it Daniel Ascher?

Helene meets a fellow student, Guillaume who is quite enthusiastic about the Black Insignia series of books and thrilled to meet the author.  Guillaume can quote from the books. He encourages Helene to read the books and they discuss them in detail. As Helene gets to know her uncle better she starts to see similarities between him and his character.  She also begins to question the memories of her childhood when Uncle Daniel would come to visit and the stories she heard at home about his childhood.

When a postcard he sends her from one of his trips turns out to be false, she starts to search for her uncle and uncover his past.  This book takes a very subtle approach to the Holocaust and the Jews escape or capture from Germany.  Without too much detail of the atrocities of war this beautiful story makes clear what happened to Jewish families and how some people were able to escape while others were not.  The book also shows how their war experience can affect them for the rest of their life.

Safekeeping

OK I get it, life is not all peaches and cream.  There is not always a happy ending in real life.  But, when you are reading a book, can't there be just a little bit of an suspension of disbelief???  Many times when you delve into a great novel, you are looking for that escape from all the real world problems and hoping that for these characters, in this one instance, this time there may be some chance for a different outcome.

Author, Jessamyn Hope has written just that type of novel.  Set in Israel during the peace talks of 1994, between Yasser Arafat and Menachem Begin, Hope has written a wonderful multi layered story of life on a kibbutz.  taking the reader back to the Holocaust and the birth of the State of Israel and the beginning of kibbutzim, she has created characters than span the generations.

Together for one summer are six diverse people thrown together to work through their various problems and escape their pasts.  On Kibbutz Sadot Hadar their lives intersect and each plays off the others as they attempt to the trajectory they were on.  Adam, a young drug addict, trying to rectify his past crimes and honor his Holocaust refugee grandfather comes to the kibbutz to find a woman his grandfather loved fifty years before.  He is trying to track down the mystery woman and return a brooch to her for his grandfather, but she seems to elude him.   Also volunteering on the kibbutz are a few other lost souls trying to turn their lives around.  Ulya, an ambitious, Soviet emigre who wants to see New York City; Farid, the lovelorn Palestinian farmhand; Claudette, the French Canadian Catholic with OCD; Ofir the Israeli teenager who wants to escape to America and become a musician; and Ziva, the old Zionist Socialist firebrand who help found the kibbutz.

As we get to know each of the characters we learn about their background and how they ended up on the kibbutz and where they wish they were going.  Then we see how the interactions between people and the experiences that happen to them in every day life and dramatically change the course of their
plans.  In this novel you need to be careful you get attached to because just like in real life, things don't always end up  perfect and happy for everyone.  Just when you are routing for a character, they can take a downward spiral and change course and even if you are hoping they will straighten themselves out, just like a real friend, sometimes it seems they cannot save themselves.

The book is fascinating and keeps you glued to the page all the way through.  The characters are beautifully developed and as a reader you do begin to like and root for some and some you are not so attached to and hope maybe they will not succeed in their endeavours.   Jessamyn Hope also does a wonderful job with her description of the kibbutz and the lifestyle there.  She brings to life the idea of all for one and one for all spirit that was there at the beginning.  She also brings it full circle and shows how that atmosphere is not as important today as it was for the pioneers.

As the kibbutz goes through a vote to change from everyone working for the common good to a place where each is paid according to their position, Ziva, the original organizer of the kibbutz feels betrayed, "Greed egotism, corruption, have always won out in the end, always except...Here.  The kibbutz.  The kibbutz is the only long lasting, completely voluntary, socialist utopia in the world.  If you want to own a private home or SUV or climb a corporate ladder - fine, by all means, go ahead.  Move to Tel-Aviv.  Or New York.  London, Tokyo, Bombay.  Anywhere in the world.  But, please, leave this one small corner of the map alone."

Hope also describes the Jews escape from Germany and the refugees coming to Israel in historical detail.  She recreates the feelings they had as they developed the farms and planted the orchards and created community.  She recounts the feelings also as the United Nations voted to make Israel a state.

Jessamyn Hope has written a wonderful first novel that stays with you long after you have finished the last page.

Kizmino Chronicles: Memoirs of Teenage Holocaust Survival

Author, Nathan Moskowitz has captured both his parents Holocaust experiences and recorded them as a book for posterity.  This is very important in terms of historical narratives so the world not only does not forget the atrocities of World War II but also so we have as many of these stories to share with future generations as possible.  As the generation who lived through the Holocaust leaves us, we need the first hand written accounts for our grandchildren and their future children to read and share.  This is a historical event that should not be forgotten.  The documents of the survivors of the Shoah are a tribute to those who did not survivor.  Books like this honor their memories.

Gizella, or Gitelle in Yiddish,  Moskowitz and Lieb Moskowitz both tell their stories of growing up in Kuzmino, Czechoslovakia.  They describe the lives of their families and their town.  How people lived and worked in the part of the world.  Then they describe their childhoods interrupted by intrusion of the war.  Worked into each of their stories are the statistics and facts that have been gathered by Yad Vashem and other historians supplying the background information that puts the personal experiences into historical perspective.

Lieb Moskowitz was born into a modest family living in Kuzmino, a small town.  His father was a tailor.  They also had their own animals, cows egg laying chickens and geese.  Their farming life revolved around the Jewish holidays.  Starting at Purim the family starting fattening up the goose and fermenting beets.  Then for Passover the goose was eaten and the fat was rendered with enough schmaltz for Passover.  The beets were made into borscht.  There were fruit trees and a garden with vegetables and potatoes.  There was a milk cow that gave them milk, butter and cheese.  The family was very self sufficient.  Lieb was born in 1928 and went to two schools in his childhood, both a cheder to learn Hebrew and prepare for his Bar Mitzvah and public school for general studies.
The first sign of unrest is that his father is conscripted in the Hungarian army, then he taken away for forced labor and Lieb never sees him again his family receives a postcard from his father reporting that he is being sent to the Russian front.   In April 1944, the Hungarian police come and take everyone from the town to a ghetto.  Their neighbors who they have lived side by side with ask for their valuables, because they know there will be no return.  They are marched to a town three miles away to Munkatch to a brick factory.  From here everyone is split up and some are sent by cattle car to Auschwitz.

Gitelle's life follows a similar path.  Growing up in the same town she is the second oldest of eight children.  She also grows up in as she describes it, "an average house".  They have a garden with all kinds of fruit and nut trees.  They also have a stable with cows, chickens and geese.  In addition they have a vineyard and make their own wine.  Her father makes a living buying and selling fields and property.

It is always amazing to me how the stroke of luck or timing is what saves one person and not another during the Shoah.  Gitelle explains that when they got out of the cattle car at Auschwitz you were directed to the right or to the left, to die or to live and work.  Gitelle's mother and sister were each holding a younger child, they were sent one way and Gitelle and her sister Leah were sent in the other line.  They were sent to work.  Gitelle describes in detail her memories of the time she spent in hard labor and moving from camp to camp till she was liberated in 1945.  Then she tells of her traveling, trying to go home and then to England before coming to America.

Lieb also goes into detail of his memories of life in the concentration camps, of his work details and being moved from to camp to camp.  He also tries to go back to Kuzmino, but finds out that cannot be home anymore.  He also shares his account of traveling to America.

Also included in this book are all the papers, travel documents, concentration camp arrival and transfer logs, liberation papers and manifestos of inmates.  To have all these papers including birth certificates is also impressive.  These add historical weight along with the historical documentation from Mauthausen Museum and other places including International Tracing Services and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Even though seventy years have passed and Lieb and Gitelle Moskowitz have had a life filled with children and grandchildren the both have never forgotten the experiences of the dark days of the Shoah.  This is an important documentation of their stories.  Reading this book is like listening to someone recall their experience first hand.  It is almost like you are sitting at the table while they tell you the story, you can hear their old world speech patterns and accents.

Snow Island

Beautifully written by Katherine Towler, this is really a parallel story of the life of Alice Daggett and George Tibbits.  We follow Alice as she grows up on Snow Island, a remote community of the New England coast.  It is a solitary place in winter, a busy vacation location in the summer.   Alice is 16 years old, as the reader watches her learning about the good and bad things that can happen in life.   She has lost her father when the story opens and she is helping run a small store on the island to support her mother, brother and herself.  She and her friends are discovering love and relationships as become teenagers.  Then World War II breaks out and America is pulled into the fighting.  As people come and go on the island, Alice matures and finds out about life.  In a parallel story, George Tibbits grew up on the island and left to fight in the first World War.  He has also learned a hard lesson about love and loss and he comes back to the island every year in a effort to make peace with his past.  As their lives intersect, two very awkward souls may be there to help each other.

The descriptions in this story are wonderful.  The reader can picture the scenery of the island and feel the solitude of the place.  The feeling of sadness and isolation of living on such a desolate place are palpable.

This is a coming of age novel where we watch Alice grow into a woman as she experiences love and loss and the reality of life in times of war.  Alice takes on the responsibility of the family store when her mother is not capable of handling it.  She discovers her first love and grows up when the effects of war come to the island.  The words paint a picture that is easy to visualize and we are in the end still thinking about Alice and George long after we have closed the book.