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: Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

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

The girl—a young woman, really, eighteen, hair the color of corn silk—had been hearing the murmur of artillery fire for two days now. Everyone had. A rare and peculiar winter thunderstorm in the far distance. Little more. The sconces in the living room hadn’t twitched, the chandelier in the ballroom (a modest ballroom, but a ballroom nonetheless) barely had trembled.

Last week I featured the 2007 memoir My Name Is Iran by Davar Ardalan. The week before it was the 2011 mystery 1222 by Norwegian author and former Justice Minister Anne Holt. This week it’s the 2008 historical novel Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian. 

In keeping with my unannounced goal of reading more historical fiction I decided to borrow a copy of Skeletons at the Feast from my small town pubic library. Here’s what Amazon has to say about it. 

In January 1945, in the waning months of World War II, a small group of people begin the longest journey of their lives: an attempt to cross the remnants of the Third Reich, from Warsaw to the Rhine if necessary, to reach the British and American lines.

Among the group is eighteen-year-old Anna Emmerich, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. There is her lover, Callum Finella, a twenty-year-old Scottish prisoner of war who was brought from the stalag to her family’s farm as forced labor. And there is a twenty-six-year-old Wehrmacht corporal, who the pair know as Manfred–who is, in reality, Uri Singer, a Jew from Germany who managed to escape a train bound for Auschwitz.

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.

About Time I Read It: A Man and His Ship by Steven Ujifusa

We’ve all been told not to judge a book by its cover but after taking one look at Steven Ujifusa’s A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States I simply had to read it. Usually, biographies of naval architects aren’t too high on my list, but luckily for me I took an immediate liking to this book. I’m even happy to say it’s one of this year’s early pleasant surprises.

William Francis Gibbs was born to design ships. This fascination began in childhood with him pouring over nautical articles and blueprints. After leaving college without graduating he embarked on a long career helping design countless ships, starting with redesigns of captured German ocean liners seized after the conclusion of World War I. Over the next several decades his ultimate goal was to create of the world’s fastest, safest and most luxurious ocean liner. Ultimately, that ship would be the S.S. United States.

Designing the world’s premier ocean liner would be no easy task. The first concern was safety. If The Titanic taught us anything, it was that watertight compartments needed to keep stricken ships afloat even if damage was catastrophic. (And there needed to be enough lifeboats for all.) After the Morro Castle disaster in the 1930s fire prevention became another safety priority. In response Gibbs made sure his ship would be constructed out of 100 per cent fireproof materials. (Legend has it the only things made of wood onboard the SS United States were the pianos.)

While safety might have been the first priority speed was second. While the era’s state of the art turbines delivered unprecedented speed, they also also created turbulence. For such a ship to be successful engineers needed to find a way to ensure a smooth ride at high speeds.

Lastly, political obstacles needed to be overcome. The flagships of European nations like France, Great Britain and Italy all received government subsidies. Some influential government and elected officials in America were hesitant to provide financial support even if national pride was at stake. Complicating all of this was the tacit agreement such a vessel would be commandeered as a troop carrier during wartime. But in the end Gibbs was able to deliver his dream ship. It make the trans-Atlantic crossings in record time, besting its European rivals in both speed and luxury.

But the S.S. United States’s reign was a brief one. By the end of the 1960s commercial jet liners were the preferred mode of trans Atlantic travel and soon the era of stately ocean liners would come to an end. Her once formidable British rivals The Queen Mary and sister ship Queen Elizabeth were sold off, never again to sail the Atlantic. (The former would live on as a hotel and tourist attraction anchored in Long Beach, CA. The later caught fire and burned under mysterious circumstances while under renovation in Hong Kong Harbor and was subsequently scrapped.)

Billed as a biography A Man and His Ship is also a history book. With a life spanning from 1886 to 1967 you see America’s history unfold through Gibbs’s eyes. Born at the tail end of the Gilded Age, Gibbs experiences  World War I, the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the rise of affordable long distance commercial air travel. His life is an almost exact parallel of the rise and fall of the modern commercial maritime industry.

A Man and His Ship is easily one of the early surprises of 2023. It might even make my year-end list of Favorite Nonfiction.

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.