Lublin

Finished September 4

Lublin by Manya Wilkinson

This short novel is the story of a journey and a coming-of-age in early 20th-century Poland. Three Jewish teenagers set off from their Polish village for the town of Lublin. They carry with them a case of brushes to sell. Elya is the instigator of the journey. He is fourteen, and his father Usher was a shoemaker. Elya knows that his mother depends on him now that his father has died, and he also has a betrothal commitment to Libka. He is the one with a hand-drawn map of their journey, which, instead of town names designates places by attributes, such as Village of Lakes, Village of No Lakes, Prune Town, and the to-be-avoided Russian Town. 

Accompanying Elya on his journey are Kiva and his cousin Ziv. Ziv would like to organize the workers for better conditions and pay, and Kiva spends a lot of time reading religious texts and worrying about his health. 

As they travel they tell stories, horse around, and play pranks on each other. Enya often tells jokes, but the other two never laugh at them. They fear Cossacks, and hide if they think they are coming. They refer to God as Adoshem. 

The case of brushes is heavy, about eight kilograms and they argue sometimes over who should carry it. Kiva has brought luxurious items along with him, such as a pillow, extra shoes, and his father's gold watch. 

The narrator often makes references to the future of the boys as well as others from their village, other things happening in the world at the same time, as well as references to things that would be useful to them, but haven't been invented yet, or have but haven't arrived in their country yet. For example, when they camp for the night, the narrator references the Boy Scouts which are just forming at the time. Examples of things not invented are zippers and ball point pens. 

There are also many references to getting lost, and often they find themselves further from their destination than they were when they set out. 

This is a story of youth out in the world for the first time, not understanding the real dangers or opportunities, hoping for a better future, but sometimes waylaid by unexpected events along the way. This was a very different read, sometimes reminding me of Waiting for Godot in the sense of them never getting anywhere. 

A Meal in Winter

Finished March 18

A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli, translated by Sam Taylor

I came to this book through a new book subscription service I decided to try out. It's from a shop in Wales called Mr. B's and they have a long form to fill out to get a sense of what books you like, and since I teach Readers' Advisory, I found it really related to the interview aspect that's a part of RA work. So this was the first book I got in the subscription, and I'd never heard of the author before, which was great. I love discovering new authors.

Because this book was somewhat dark in subject, I took my time with it, dipping in now and then over a couple of months to read it. It is beautifully written and translated, and really spoke to me emotionally. There are extremely touching passages, and elements of humour in their thoughts and conversations, and all the time there is the shadow of their task and its outcome hanging over them. 

The story is about three German soldiers in World War II in Poland. The camp that they live it looks for Jews and then the soldiers that are based there shoot them in a formal event every morning. These soldiers absolutely hate having to do this, and so they ask to go wander about the countryside and search for the Jews, a task they would rather do than shoot them. 

When they unexpectedly find a Jewish man, they go through a process where they are torn between their natural bent to let him go, and the expectations of their superiors. They know that if they prove successful in bringing someone in, they will be allowed to go out again and skip the actual execution task. 

As the title indicates, it is winter and very cold and even in the camp food supplies are low, so the men are constantly hungry. When they find an abandoned house and break in, they find a single room with a stove and decide to light it and make a meal with the food they have. 

Another interesting part of this book is that one of them, Emmerlich, is a father who worries about his son. The first time he does so here is when the men have stopped to smoke a cigarette and he worries that his son will start smoking. The worries about his son are ongoing, and the other two men talk him through them, and give their input on the situation. This is one way the author humanizes the men. This discussion also includes a foreshadowing of a future event that provides an eerie echo to what the men are doing now. 

A moving story, beautifully told. 

Marrow and Bone

Finished September 6
Marrow and Bone by Walter Kempowski, translated by Charlotte Collins

This novel was released in 1992 in German and only recently translated into English. The main character here, Jonathan Fabrizius, is a freelance writer who mostly lives on an allowance sent to him by his uncle who runs a furniture company. Jonathan lives in Hamburg in a room in an apartment. His girlfriend of six years, Ulla Bakkre de Vaera has a part-time job at a museum, a fascination with cruelties enacted and represented in art, and lives in another room in the same apartment. Their landlord is a older widow of a general that they have little interaction with.
Jonathan was born in 1945 as his mother and uncle fled East Prussia ahead of the Russian advance. His mother died as a result of the birth and her body was left in the small town that he was born in, with his uncle taking a young peasant woman who had lost her own child along on their flight to nurse the young baby. Jonathan's father, a Wehrmacht lieutenant had also died in East Prussia, on the Vistula Spit, when a bomb hit him.
As the book opens, it is 1988 and Jonathan receives a letter from a motorcar company offering him a trip to scout out a planned journalist event to launch a new vehicle. Jonathan would be writing the publicity article to draw the journalists to participate. The trip would be in East Prussia. Jonathan has never returned to the land of his birth, but this opportunity intrigues him with the possibility to see it. He would travel with a driver and a PR person from the motorcar company, and work with them to identify places to see and make note of.
As Jonathan decides to do this, he also holds back a bit from Ulla, not sharing with her this information until after he has committed, but there are also things that Ulla is hiding from him, and this is a turning point in their relationship.
Jonathan's experiences in East Prussia, his interactions with local people, the visiting of historic sites from churches to bunkers also lead him to make peace with his personal history of this place and the losses he suffered from the death of his parents.
Jonathan has an active mind, and we see his thoughts throughout as his mind wanders from the matters at hand and into reflection and supposition. I really enjoyed these thoughts and how varied they were and how he looked at his life and the world around him. Visiting a country that had been settled by Germans in the past, changed hands several times, and is now part of Poland is touched with the relatively recent history of the Second World War and the Nazi presence there. This too is a part of how the characters interact with the people as they visit this area.

The Dead of Winter

Finished May 27
The Dead of Winter by Rennie Airth

This book is part of a series featuring retired London policeman John Madden. Here, it is World War II, and a young Polish refugee, working as a land girl goes up to London to visit her aunt. But she is murdered before she can get there, and in a very quick and professional manner. Nothing seems to have been stolen from her, and she hasn't been violated, so what is behind it?
The farm that she worked on was owned by John Madden and his wife Helen, and so he gets drawn into the story. Rosa was a quiet girl who played the piano beautifully and the Maddens had been trying to draw her out about her past, hoping to ease her sadness. But they really know very little about her other than that she escaped first to France before coming to England.
As they follow the trail and look for more clues, more people die, and they realize that Rosa was killed for what happened sometime in the past.
This is a story of greed, of a cold-blooded killer, and of extreme danger, all occurring in the height of a London winter, just a Christmas is approaching.
I love this series, and really liked the way the plot unfolded here.

The Dream Stitcher

Finished May 26
The Dream Stitcher by Deborah Gaal

This book moves back and forth between World War II in Poland and the present day. A young Jewish teenager shows an aptitude for needlework that is uncanny, as she is inhabited by an old soul. She is taken on as an apprentice by a Polish fabric store owner and tailor, and she begins to make a name for herself as well as providing for her family. But when the war comes, the tailor talks to her parents and insists she live in his house and call him uncle and us a name that will not seem Jewish. She reluctantly agrees and yet works with the resistance in an interesting and unique way.
When the local German commander takes an interest in her work, things get more dangerous, and she also must be careful about the man she works for and cares about like her own family.
There is an interesting tie in to the Bayeux Tapestry that occurs in both timelines.
In the modern day, a woman who has recently lost her husband is in dire financial straits and must take in her older ailing mother and her single pregnant daughter and get a job. Her mother inexplicably comes from the nursing home with a huge tapestry that she is told her mother has made over the past few year, although she's never seen her mother sew, and was discouraged from doing so herself. She tries to get her mother to give her information about her past, and about her father, but it is only through another source that she finds the answers she is looking for, and they are a big surprise.
I really liked the embroidery shown here, and the role it played in the story. There is a touch of magic realism as well that was unexpected.
A very different book.

Lilac Girls

Finished June 1
Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

This book is based on real women in history. It is told around three women, with each of them taking turns in telling her story. One of them is the real-life New York socialite Caroline Ferriday. Caroline had worked as an actress, but by 1939 was acting as a liaison to the French consulate in New York City. Herta Oberheuser was also a real person, a young female German doctor who worked at Ravensbrück concentration camp. The third woman, Kasia Kuzmerick, along with her sister Zusanna, are based on real life women Nina Iwanska and her sister Krystyna, who were both operated on at the camp. The author did a lot of research, looking at letters, diaries, testimonies, and visiting the sites of the story. She includes an author's note that details her work, and where fiction varied from fact.
In the story, Caroline efforts are towards French people in the United States, and orphans homes in France. She tries to locate relatives of people who come into the consulate, and sends clothes, supplies, and money to the orphanages. She has a relationship with a well-known French actor, whose Jewish wife is still back in France, and after the war, when she finds out about a group of Polish women victimized by their Nazi jailors she takes on their case.
Kasia is a teenager in Lublin, Poland. Her older sister Zusanna is trained as a doctor, and their father is head of the postal office. Their mother is of German heritage, but that doesn't matter when Kasia and the other women of the family get caught up in a German sweep of the town and taken to Ravensbrück concentration camp for womn near Furstenberg. A number of the Polish women in her group were subjected to experipents related to sulfa, with doctors injecting their legs with bacteria and foreign agents. The became known as Rabbits, as they often hopped about on their good leg after the operations, and were experimental subjects, like rabbits had often been.
Herta came to Ravensbrück around the same time as the Polish women, and was the only female doctor at the camp. She was put on trial and imprisoned after the war, but was released early and went on to practice medicine afterwards.
As this novel tells the story from these three points of view, we see the motivations, and the blind spots for each of them. I love history and found this a fascinating story of an atrocity of war that I knew little about before.

The Lullaby of Polish Girls

Finished July 2
The Lullaby of Polish Girls by Dagmara Dominczyk

This novel follows three young Polish women through their adolescence and young womanhood. Anna emigrated to the United States with her family when she was seven, refugees due to her father's involvement with the Solidarity movement. She first returns to Poland at the age of thirteen, and befriends Justyna, a girl her own age, whose mother was friends with her own mother. Another young girl Kamila, also friends with Justyna begins to write her, and for several years after Anna returns to Poland for the summer, a time of year where she is the envied one, stylish and well-off. The rest of the year she wears her mother's hand-me-downs and works part-time jobs to raise money for her summer holidays, definitely not the cool girl at school, Justyna is promiscuous and uninterested in school, dropping out early to work, marrying young and having a child soon after. Kamila is, early on, the fat friend, but soon overcomes that. She never regains the confidence she should have however and falls in love early with another friend, a boy himself conflicted about his sexuality. The three young women connect, grow apart and reconnect repeatedly due to their personalities and the summer only link to Anna. The story moves back and forth over the years, so their stories are revealed in excerpts, with background getting revealed after following events, and links between events coming to light later. The story reveals the lives of young people in Poland as it emerges from the Iron Curtain, showing both the uncertainty of these characters lives, and the strong links between them. A fascinating tale.

The Spies of Warsaw

Finished May 7
The Spies of Warsaw by Alan Furst, ready by Daniel Gerroll

This novel takes place in the months just before World War II and Germany's invasion of Poland. The action is centered around a French miliary attache and spy, Colonel Jean-François Mercier. Mercier had fought beside Polish forces in World War I and was decorated for his actions then. He regularly meets with Polish military intelligence, and has been running a spy, an engineer in a tank facility, out of Germany. His social obligations in Warsaw bring him into contact with German, Russian, and Polish diplomats and spies and involve him in some interesting situations. It is through these social functions that he meets Anna, a native to Paris whose heritage is Polish and who works as a lawyer for the the League of Nations. The novel has romance, intrigue, danger and a strong sense of history. Thoroughly enjoyable with moments of suspense and foreboding.

War Story

Finished June 28
The True Story of Hansel and Gretel: a novel of war and survival by Louise Murphy
Two young children, brother and sister are left in the woods by their father and stepmother who are fleeing from the Germans in the last months of World War II. To hide their identity as Jews, the two are told their names are now Hansel and Gretel.
On their travels through the woods, the two eventually encounter a house lived in by Magda, an eccentric old woman known to local villagers as the witch. Despite the urging of others, Magda takes in the two children as her grandchildren. She receives help from family members in hiding the real identity of the children, and trying to give them a normal life. When a new German General comes to town with his own agenda for some of the children, things become even more difficult for the villagers.
With a close look at the difficult lives of villagers during this time period, history comes to life. But the added element of the Hansel and Gretel story adds another dimension to the story.
A fascinating and engrossing novel. This book was a San Francisco Chroncile Best Book of the Year.

Suspenseful Audiobook

Finished September 25
Blind Eye by Stuart MacBride, read by Stuart MacBride
Polish men are turning up with their eyes gouged out and the sockets burned. None of them is willing to tell the police anything about the attacks. They are always found abandoned on building sites. Letters telling of the attacks arrive at Police Headquarters, telling of more attacks if the police do not take action.
DCI Finnie is in charge of the investigation, and DC Logan McRae is kept on his toes trying to please both the DCI and his own DI, a lesbian who is trying to make her wife happy by getting them a child.
When DC McRae and his DI come upon an attack before the perpetrators have left, they finally have a witness, but he's on the run and trying to stay safe himself.
Logan isn't sure who to trust and ends up being shot at, threatened, blown up, kidnapped, and threatened some more before he finally comes to the end of the case.
This book is fast moving and the author's reading of it is engaging and kept me gripped.
A great adrenaline-pumping read.

World War II Novel

Finished June 21
Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian
This story begins in Poland at the estate Kaminheim, owned by the Emmerich family. The Russians are advancing and due to the stories being told of their brutality against civilians, most people are fleeing in advance of them. The Emmerichs, consisting of Irmgard and Rolf and three of their children, Anna, Helmut and Theo. They also have with them Callum, a POW from Scotland who was working on their farm and whom Anna is having a secret relationship with. They must cross the frozen Vistula river and keep moving west from there. Part of the reason they are travelling with Callum is that they hope the might meet up with British forces eventually and that he will vouch for them.
We also follow Uri, a German Jew who escaped from a train travelling to the camps and has since been taking on various identities, often of German soldiers, to survive. He is looking for his sister Rebekah who was also taken to the camp and whom he is not sure still lives.
The third story is that of Cecile, a French Jew who had been working in a factory attached to a camp and is now being moved west with the rest of her camp to an uncertain destination. She feels close to Jeanne and tries to keep her motivated to live and hope for rescue from their situation.
As they all work their way west, they encounter each other and play roles that influence the direction of each others' lives.
This is a story of strong characters, particularly Anna and Uri, and the feelings that underlie their actions. The situation is constantly changing, but always somewhat desperate and none of them are really sure what they are ultimately hoping for.

History from World War II

Finished October 7
The Zookeeper's Wife by Diane Ackerman
This history of Jan Zabinski (the zookeeper) and Antonina Zabinski (his wife) is of Polish Christian zookeepers in Warsaw, and their experience of World War II. The animals do not figure as intimately as I expected, mainly because German zoos took most of the animals they wanted after occupying Poland. Some animals were killed in the battles between the Poles and the Germans before this, as well as some that were killed due to their enclosures being damaged. After the Germans had taken what animals they wanted, many more were killed for sport by the soldiers.
Despite this, the affinity for animals by Antonina comes through and her strong feelings of care for those persecuted by the Germans. Jan comes across as more reckless and less feeling than his wife, but that may be due to the author's sympathy for her main subject.
This book would have been better if the author had stuck to a narrative over time instead of going down distracting sidelines. It would also have been more meaningful to animal lovers if she had shown more clearly what happened to specific types of animals in a more complete way.