Book Beginnings: No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

Dear Chaya,

    I am sitting with you on my lap, by the window. There are ice crystals on the glass. If I put my ear close enough I can almost hear them cracking and growing. It’s not snowing now, but it has been all morning. Even though you have only been alive a few days, your story, our story, started a long time ago.

Last week I featured the 1998 memoir Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici. The week before it was the 2008 historical novel Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian.  This week it’s Ramona Ausubel’s 2012 historical novel No One is Here Except All of Us. As you might have seen in an earlier post, I recently grabbed this one from my small town public library with Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and The Intrepid Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge in mind. Here’s what the novel’s Amazon page has to say.

In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch.

Library Loot

Just like last time I dropped by the public library for just a few minutes and walked out with four more books. Who cares if I already have a ton of library books by my bed needing to be read! I plan on applying this promising assortment  towards a number of reading challenges including The Intrepid Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and Introverted Reader’s Books in Translation Reading Challenge.  

• The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code by Sam Kean (2012) – Back in 2011 I read Kean’s bestseller The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements and loved it. I’ve been wanting to read his follow-up book for over a decade. 
• Debt: The First 5,000 Years,Updated and Expanded by David Graeber (2021) – This updated version of Graeber’s 2011 book the London School of Economics trained anthropologist takes a revolutionary look at humanity’s 5,000 year history of credit, debit and exchange. The latest selection for my book club.
• No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel (2012) – Set in a remote part of Romania during World War II I’m hoping to apply this one towards  The Intrepid Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge, and Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge.
• Stolen Years by Sara Zyskind (1981) – I’ll be applying Zyskind’s memoir of surviving the Holocaust in occupied Poland towards not just Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge but also Introverted Reader’s Books in Translation Reading Challenge and Book’d Out’s Nonfiction Reader Challenge.

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading to encourage bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write-up your post, steal the Library Loot icon and link your post using the Mr. Linky on Claire’s blog. 

About Time I Read It: Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

When it comes to historical fiction I have a weakness for novels set in Europe during the waning months of World War II, or the period immediately following it. That’s why I couldn’t resist borrowing Chris Bohjalian 2008 Skeletons at the Feast when I came across a copy at my small town public library. Even though he’s an Oprah-endorsed, New York Times best selling author of 20 novels (including The Flight Attendant, now an HBO Max series staring Big Bang Theory’s Kaley Cuoco as an alcoholic flight attendant) I’d never heard of the guy. But after impressing me with Skeletons at the Feast I’m ready to read more of Bohjalian’s fiction.

By the winter of 1944-45 Germany’s days are numbered. As armies of the United States, Great Britain and the Commonwealth continue push westward across the Continent a Soviet juggernaut smashes towards Berlin obliterating everything in its path. Fleeing ahead of the Red Army is a small group civilians and a Scottish POW desperate to reach the American and British lines, even if it means crossing all of Germany. Along the way they must survive Allied airstrikes, Nazi zealots, Soviet advance troops hell-bent on revenge and the ravages of winter.

Kudos to Bohjalian for crafting a diverse cast of characters ranging from the above-mentioned Scottish POW to a 20-something Jewish refugee masquerading as a Wehrmacht corporal to a young daughter of Prussian gentry. Biggers kudos still for deftly weaving their respective perspectives together to produce a bittersweet tapestry.

Skeletons at the Feast is easily one of 2023’s early pleasant surprises. Before the year is over I hope to read more from this talented author.

Book Beginnings: Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

On June 22, 1941 I saw my father for the last time. My parents had divorced a year before, and I had stayed with my mother. That day there was an air-raid alert in Vilnius, a previously announced “alert drill,” and the streets were empty of people. My father, a member of the civil air defense, was checking the quarter for which he was responsible. He was making sure that all the people had gone to the air-raid shelters and had blacked out their windows as required.

Last week I featured the 2008 historical novel Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian. The week before it was the 2007 memoir My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan.  This week it’s the 1998 memoir Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici. Since books representing Lithuania for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge aren’t easy to find, I lucked out when I stumbled across this during one of my recent library visits. Sadly the book’s Amazon page lacks a formal description so here’s what Wikipedia has to say.

Described as “Particularly grim, even for a Holocaust memoir”, Thanks to My Mother was described by one reviewer as “one of the most moving memoirs I have ever read of the Holocaust”. The same reviewer writes that readers whose interest include Holocaust testimonies and are “mentally prepared for the harshness of Rabinovici’s experiences, will come away with renewed appreciation of the extraordinary fortitude required to survive those dire times”. The book gives a rare, detailed view of Jewish life in Vilnius, Lithuania during German occupation and contains gritty descriptions of life in the Vilnius Ghetto and the circumstances of those deported from the ghetto for slave labor in Germany.

Memoirs of the Middle East: My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan

Considering my weakness for Iranian memoirs it’s a no brainer I borrowed a copy of Davar Ardalan’s 2007 My Name Is Iran when I found it prominently displayed by an anonymous librarian at my small town library. Besides that, who can resist anything written by someone named Iran?

Like many of the memoirs I’ve read over the last several years My Name Is Iran the memoir of both an individual and a family. A young woman growing up in rural Idaho around the turn of the century her American grandmother left to pursue a nursing career in New York City. While working at a local hospital she fell in love with an Iranian doctor and after a whirlwind courtship the two get married. Hoping to put their Western medical training to work she follows him to Iran. Years later, the two of them and their children return to America for a period during which their daughter devoutly embraces Catholicism and her son becomes an all-American football player at the University of Virginia.

Iran (the author, not the country) would spend young adulthood in the United States, but after getting married would move with her Iranian husband to Iran. Thanks to her fluency in English she’d find employment as an English-language TV newscaster for theocratic regime’s propaganda service. Later, dissatisfied with both the regime and her marriage she returned to the States.  Putting her broadcasting experience to work she landed a job in radio, working her way up the food chain at National Public Radio and ultimately serving in several high level positions.

Compared to other Iranian authors I’ve read Ardalan is kinda rare. Her grandmother was an American and her father, while Iranian was an ethnic Kurd. Rare still, her great grandfather was a revered Iranian jurist and an inspiration to Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. While the majority of the Iranians I’ve read are members of the diaspora who fled the Islamic Republic never to return Ardalan moved back to Iran after her first marriage only to finally leave for good a few years later.

While it’s hard to find fault with My Name Is Iran I wish I’d enjoyed it as much as I did Firoozeh Dumas’s Funny in Farsi or Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s A Mirror Garden. But it’s left me wanting to read more Iranian memoirs and trust me, that’s never a bad thing.

Book Beginnings: My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan

Not only does Gilion host the European Reading and TBR 23 in 23 on her Rose City Reader blog but also Book Beginnings on Friday. While I’m no stranger to her European Reading Challenge, last year I decided to finally participate in Book Beginnings on Friday. This week I’m back with another post.

For Book Beginnings on Friday Gilion asks us to simply “share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week, or just a book that caught your fancy and you want to highlight.”

MY BOOK BEGINNING

I took my first steps amid the ancient ruins and oil fields of Solomon’s Mosque in Iran. It was the fall of 1964 when my family left the urban bustle of San Francisco and touched down in a tiny airport.   

Last week I featured the 2011 mystery 1222 by Norwegian author and former Justice Minister Anne Holt. The week before it was Lily King’s 2014 historical novel Euphoria. This week it’s the 2007 memoir My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan. 

As I’ve said before, I’m a big fan of Iranian memoirs. Like a number of books I’ve been featuring of late I came across Ardalan’s memoir because an anonymous librarian prominently displayed the library book in hopes it would get noticed. Here’s what Amazon has to say about My Name Is Iran. 

A century of family tales from two beloved but divided homelands, Iran and America.

Drawing on her remarkable personal history, NPR producer Davar Ardalan brings us the lives of three generations of women and their ordeals with love, rejection, and revolution. Her American grandmother’s love affair with an Iranian physician took her from New York to Iran in 1931. Ardalan herself moved from San Francsico to rural Iran in 1964 with her Iranian American parents who barely spoke Farsi. After her parents’ divorce, Ardalan joined her father in Brookline, Massachusetts, where he had gone to make a new life; however improbably, after high school, Ardalan decided to move back to an Islamic Iran. When she arrived, she discovered a world she hardly recognized, and one which demands a near-complete renunciation of the freedoms she experienced in the West. In time, she and her young family make the opposite migration and discover the difficulties, however paradoxical, inherent in living a free life in America.

Library Loot

Once again I dropped by the public library for only a few minutes and walked out with four more books. Who cares if I already have a ton of library books at home needing to be read! I plan on applying this promising assortment  towards a number of reading challenges including The Intrepid Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and Introverted Reader’s Books in Translation Reading Challenge.  

• Napoleon’s Last Island by Thomas Keneally (2016) – A little something by the author of Schinder’s List for the Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.  
• In Praise of Hatred by Khaled Khalifa (2014) – I have a weakness for fiction by authors from the Middle East. 
• My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan (2007) – As you all know I cannot resist a good Iranian memoir. 
• Thanks to My Mother by Schoschana Rabinovici (1998) – A first hand account of the Holocaust in German-occupied Lithuania for the European Reading Challenge. 

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading to encourage bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write-up your post, steal the Library Loot icon and link your post using the Mr. Linky on Claire’s blog. 

About Time I Read It: The Girl From Venice by Martin Cruz Smith

I’ve had pretty good luck with Martin Cruz Smith, beginning with his early 1980s break-out novel Gorky Park. More recently I’ve also enjoyed his 1989 follow-up Polar Star and his 2004 whodunnit Wolves Eat Dogs. I’m embarrassed to admit even though I’ve been wanting to read more of his stuff I haven’t do so. Not long ago however I was rummaging through the shelves at my small town public library and I came across a copy of his 2016 historical novel The Girl From Venice. Looking for a good historical novel or two and needing something representing Italy for Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge I borrowed it.

It’s 1945 and even though Venice and the rest of northern Italy are still controlled by the Germans and Italian Fascists an Allied victory is all but assured. While armies clash across Europe and the rest of the world Cenzo sticks to his simple routine just as he’s done for years and his forefathers before him: spending his evenings catching fish in the waters surrounding Vernice. Then one night everything changes when he spots the body of a woman floating facedown in the water. After hauling her on board his small boat he’s soon shocked to learn she’s really alive. Giulia, a young Jewish woman from a local wealthy family has narrowly escaped capture and is on the run from the Nazis. Usually the kind of guy who keeps his head down and doesn’t get involved, Cenzo must choose between helping her or doing nothing. Either choice will lead to serious repercussions.

I enjoyed The Girl From Venice. It reminded me a lot of the wartime-era thrillers of Alan Furst in which a protagonist, commonly from outside the military or intelligence community is forced by circumstances to act heroically. It’s also rekindled my interest in the novels of Martin Cruz Smith, which means there’s a good chance you’ll see more of his fiction featured on my blog.

About Time I Read It: Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason

According to Wikipedia, Iceland is the most literate nation on earth. It possess the highest number of bookstores per capita in the world, with the highest per capita publication of books and magazines. For county its size, Iceland imports and translates more international literature than anywhere on earth. On top of that, an estimated 10 percent of the population will publish a book in their lifetimes.

Even with Iceland punching well above its weight in literary terms I’ve had terrible luck with Icelandic authors. I struck out with both Bergsveinn Birgisson’s short epistolary novel Reply to a Letter from Helga and Kristín Ómarsdóttir’s rather odd Children in Reindeer Woods. While Ólafur Ólafsson was a step in the right direction with The Sacrament I’ve yet to find an Iceland author I really enjoy. That is until I came across a copy of the 2011 Icelandic thriller Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indriðason. I whipped through the page-turner in no time and was left wanting to read more from this promising author.

It’s 1945 and World War II is almost over when a German transport plane crashes into a remote Icelandic glacier during a blizzard. It becomes apparent this isn’t a routine reconnaissance flight gone bad. A German warplane with requisite insignia, it nevertheless sports an American color scheme. Stranger still, the plane carries a half dozen or high level officers both German and American, and is piloted by an American. Even though it’s rightly assumed there aren’t any survivors the US Army immediately begins searching for the downed plane. Hopes are soon dashed however when the mysterious aircraft is buried in snow, swallowed up by the mammoth glacier.

In the intervening decades American intelligent personnel would pore over mountains of aerial photos and satellite imagery of the glacier, even dispatching several covert teams to the area in hopes of finding the wreckage but with no success. When finally discovered a half century after the end of World War II American intelligence officials at the highest levels would spring into action, committing significant resources to recovering the wreckage with the upmost secrecy. So vital to America’s interest is this mission those entrusted with its execution will let nothing or no one stand in the way. Even if innocent Icelandic blood must be spilled.

This is a fast-paced, clever and entertaining thriller. Like many of the spy novels of Alan Furst it features a resourceful and intelligent protagonist from outside the intelligence community who gets sucked into the action and is forced to act heroically. In this case it’s Kristin, a government attorney who stumbles upon the covert recovery operation and ends up running for her life from murderous American operatives. Operation Napoleon is easily one of 2023’s early pleasant surprises.

About Time I Read It: The Aftermath by Rhidian Brook

It’s been almost 10 years since I read Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II. I believe this superb book is responsible for kindling my fascination with the  early post- World War II period and has inspired me to read a number of books about, or set during this time. Sometimes the books are history like Victor Sebestyen’s 1946: The Making of the Modern World or Ian Buruma’s Year Zero: A History of 1945. Or family memoirs like Svenja O’Donnell’s Inge’s War: A German Woman’s Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler. Or even fiction like Martin Fletcher’s Jacob’s Oath. Thanks to Keith Lowe I can’t read enough about this brief but intriguing period in European history.

I’m sure that’s why I wanted to read Rhidian Brook’s 2013 historical novel The Aftermath when I came across a copy at the public library. I could hardly resist a novel set in British-occupied Hamburg a year after the surrender of Nazi Germany. This made it the perfect book for both Rose City Reader’s European Reading Challenge and Intrepid Reader’s Historical Fiction Reading Challenge.

It’s 1946 and Colonel Lewis Morgan of the British army has been ordered to Hamburg tasked with helping oversee the deNazification and eventual rehabilitation of Germany. From the very beginning his mission is fraught with  challenges. Officially forbidden from fraternizing with the Germans, nevertheless he must still earn their respect. Only then can he enlist them in his mission to build a democratic and peace-loving Germany. Assigned the stately home of a respected architect for his new residence, instead of evicting its widowed owner and his rebellious teen daughter he offers to share it. While this magnanimous act raises skeptical eyebrows among his fellow British officers the house’s owner graciously accepts. But after Colonel Morgan’s wife and young son arrive tensions materialize as the two families, once sworn enemies attempt living under one roof.

This isn’t some flashy page-turner. Nor is it one of those sentimental wartime melodramas currently en vogue. It’s a nicely written and sophisticated piece of historical fiction. (I couldn’t agree more with one review who described Brook’s writing as “precise.”) Who knows, come December I might look back fondly on The Aftermath and include it among the year’s best.