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The Envoy by Alex Kershaw

Aug26

The Envoy: The Epic Rescue of the Last Jews of Europe in the Desperate Closing Months of World War II by Alex Kershaw.

On Saturday morning, I went to this protest at Planned Parenthood, Gulf Coast, the site of the largest and most lucrative abortion facility in the United States. On Saturday afternoon and evening, I read The Envoy, the story of the final months of World War II in Hungary and the genocide organized by Adolf Eichmann as a “final solution” to the “Jewish problem” in Hungary. Even though, as Jen Fulwiler writes in this piece, the analogy between the Jewish Holocaust of World War II and the abortion holocaust of the United States (and much of the developed world) is not complete or tidy, the parallels are obvious and undeniable. In both cases, a class of people were/are “dehumanized”, spoken of and then treated as less than human, unworthy of basic human rights and protections. (Bob DeGray on The Christian Response to Dehumanization)

The more I read about World War II or about Hitler’s Holocaust, the more I realize that I have huge swaths of ignorance about what took place during that time. Did you know that during the summer of 1944, when it was becoming clearer and clearer that the Germans were losing the war and that the Russian army was headed toward Budapest, Eichmann insisted upon continuing his program of exterminating the Jews of Hungary? During that summer, from May to August, over 500,000 Jewish men, women and children were transported to Auschwitz, mostly from Hungary’s provinces, outside of Budapest itself. The deportations were suspended in late August because the Romania had surrendered, putting the Russian army only weeks away from Budapest. However, after the Germans blackmailed Hungary’s puppet regent, Miklas Horthy, into resigning by kidnapping his son and holding him hostage, the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s viciously anti-Semitic Nazi party, took over the government. “The pogroms began that evening. Hundreds were pulled from their homes or off the streets and slaughtered in plain sight in the first hours of the Arrow Cross regime.” (p.160)

Then, Eichmann returned to his pet plan for liquidating the Jews of Budapest. When he couldn’t get trains to transport the Jews to Auschwitz, he forced them to march to the Polish border on foot, by the thousands. Many died on the way, and others were killed as soon as they reached Poland. Even though Eichmann (and everybody else) knew that the Russians would soon take Budapest, he was intent on killing as many Jews as possible before the Nazis were defeated.

All these details were things I didn’t really realize about the Holocaust, not set in context as they are in The Envoy. I had heard of Raoul Wallenberg; I read an account somewhere of his using his Swedish diplomatic immunity and his ingenuity to save Jews. However, The Envoy puts Wallenberg and his heroic work to rescue the Jews of Budapest into perspective. I was amazed at Wallenberg’s courage and that of many others during the latter half of 1944, and I was surprised and saddened to learn of Wallenberg’s fate after his work in Budapest was over. Probably, Wallenberg never knew that many of the Jews he rescued with fake diplomatic protection did survive the war, and he may very well have thought that no one knew or cared about his attempts to rescue at least a remnant of Hungary’s Jewish population.

Reading the story of Raoul Wallenberg and the Jews of Budapest made me remember that many of us, maybe most of us, will never know in this life the results of our attempts at kindness, courage, truth-telling, and goodness. Sometimes those actions bear fruit many years later. Sometimes Satan deceives us into thinking that our actions don’t really matter, that no one is listening, nothing is changing, no one cares, and evil wins. But God wins, and goodness outlasts and extinguishes evil, and our actions, for good or for ill, do matter. One man, or even a group of men, may not have been able to save all the Jews from the evil that was Hitler’s and Eichmann’s final solution, but one man and his co-conspirators made a difference. And I am determined to use my one voice and my one life to do whatever I can to make a difference for truth and justice, too.

Events and Inventions: 1944

Mar18

January 27, 1944. The Red Army (Russian) relieves the German siege of Leningrad, pushing the Germans back beyond artillery range. Leningrad has been under German guns for 900 days, and over one million people have died of hunger, cold, starvation, disease or from direct warfare.

January 22, 1944. Allied troops land on the beaches of Anzio in southern Italy.

March 18, 1944. Mt. Vesuvius erupts for last time in modern times.

June 4, 1944. The U.S. Fifth Army under the command of General Mark Clark enters Rome, freeing the city from German occupation.

June 6, 1944. Allied troops storm Normandy in northern France. Operation Overlord brings over 100,000 U.S., British, and Canadian troops to the beaches of Normandy under the orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied troops in Europe. See the movie, The Longest Day, for a dramatization of the invasion of Normandy.

June 13, 1944. Hitler unleashes Germany’s flying bomb, the V-1, on southern England. The deadly V-1’s are launched from catapult ramps at Pas de Calais in northern France, and they have already made direct hits on several buildings, including a convent, and hospital, and a church.

June 20, 1944. An attempt by German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler fails. See the movie, Valkyrie, for a dramatization of this event, with Tom Cruise playing Colonel von Stauffenberg, the main conspirator and assassin. Hitler takes his survival as a sign that fate has intervened to preserve his life for the further glory of the German people.

August 25, 1944. Paris is liberated by Allied troops, led by the Free French. General de Gaulle marches in triumph through the crowds down the Champs Elysees.

October 26, 1944. General Douglas MacArthur and the American Navy return to the Philippines after the Japanese are defeated in a three-day battle off the coast of the island of Leyte.

December, 1944. Civil war breaks out in Greece in the aftermath of the country’s liberation from Nazi occupation. British troops fire on a demonstration organized by the EAM, made up of Communists and other leftists. The People’s Liberation Army (Communist) seizes part of Athens, but they are defeated and dispersed for now.

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages

Sep10

I didn’t know until the very end of this book what the title “the green glass sea” meant, but it turned out to be an appropriate name for a particularly enjoyable book. The Green Glass Sea was the winner of the 2007 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, an award presented to a children’s or young adult book published in English by a U.S. publisher and set in the Americas. I certainly concur with the award committee and with several reviewers who liked the book a lot, including Kelly at Big A Little a, Bookshelves of Doom, and Betsy Bird at Fuse #8 (that last review is where I think I heard about this book and put it on my TBR list several years ago.)

Published in 2006, the book’s setting is World War II, 1943-1945, in Los Alamos, NM. I learned a lot, painlessly, about the Manhattan Project and the background to the development of the atomic bomb just from reading this book. I didn’t know that Los Alamos didn’t even appear on the map during the mid-1940’s, and that the project was such a secret that the scientists who were working on it had to live in a place called the Hill (Los Alamos). In the book kids and adults were told, “Off the Hill, you can’t tell anyone where you live, or who you live with, or what you see or hear.”

The setting and the characters drive the plot in this rather quiet story about an eleven year old girl, Dewe Kerrigan, who comes to I’ve with her scientist father on the Hill. Dewey is delighted to live in this math and science town as she gets to question famous scientists such as Enrico Fermi and Dick Feynman and scour the town dump for cast-offs for her mechanical projects built out of spare parts and ingenuity. However, Dewey’s scientific and mechanical interests make her something of a misfit with the other children in Los Alamos who call her “Screwy Dewy,” and when tragedy strikes, Dewey is not sure where she can turn for help.

The author makes some odd choices about verb tenses. The book starts out in third person, but told from Dewey’s point of view, in present tense, and continues that way for the first 37 pages. Then, it switches to third person, another girl named Suze’s point of view, past tense. The story alternates between Suze’s thoughts and feelings and Dewey’s, staying in past tense. Then later in the book, the author throws in a couple of pages here and there where we’re watching Dewey again, and her story is told in present tense again. I’m not sure what the point was. Maybe someone else can explain?

Such a great story, though. Dewey, and later the other main character, Suze, are very real characters with quirks and changes in attitude and demeanor throughout the book. There is some cursing in the dialogue in the book, which may bother some young readers, but it wasn’t overdone, just enough to be true to the times and the atmosphere. Suze’s mother smokes like a fiend, and the adults all indulge in the occasional beer or other alcoholic beverage of choice, again very true to life. I enjoyed getting to know all of the characters in this book, and I didn’t want it to end. So I’m glad to find out that there’s a sequel called White Sands, Red Menace. Dewey is a young lady I really want to know more.

Oh, and by the way, I loved the ending—very realistic in the characters’ obliviousness to the import of the news they hear on the radio about some place in Japan called Hiroshima.

D-Day: Books for Children and Young Adults

Aug11

D-Day: The Invasion of Normandy, 1944 by Rick Atkinson.
The Story of D-Day: June 6, 1944 by Bruce Bliven, Jr. (Landmark Book #62)

Mr. Atkinson’s story of the events of D-Day was “adapted for young readers from the #1 New York Times–bestselling The Guns at Last Light, D-Day.” Guns at Last Light is the third in a trilogy of books by Mr. Atkinson called the Liberation Trilogy. The three books in the trilogy chronicle the history of the liberation of North Africa, Italy, and Western Europe, respectively. This children’s version of a portion of the third book was published in 2014 by Henry Holt and Company. Rick Atkinson won Pulitzer prizes in both journalism and history, so he would seem to be well-qualified to write on the subject.

I found the book somewhat appealing, especially the photographs, but it was heavy on the details and statistics. I got lost in some sections of the book because of my lack of military expertise in general and my lack of knowledge about World War II and D-Day in particular. The book felt like what it was: a compilation/abridgement of details from a narrative that probably flowed much better and was more understandable in the original, adult version. Young readers (and I along with them) would need both more explanation and less detail in a narrative written just for them.

Mr. Bliven’s Story of D-Day is a part of the classic Landmark series of books on U.S. and World History. Bliven tells the story of D-Day as a story. He fills in background about the war, the troops, and their weapons as the narrative progresses, and the tension and force of the story are preserved in a way that includes plenty of statistics and details, but doesn’t become entangled in them.

Mr. Bliven’s narrative flow is just better than that of the newer book by Mr. Atkinson, probably because Mr. Bliven wrote his book as a whole book for young adults while Mr. Atkinson’s book is an abridgment of a longer work for adults. Also, Mr. Blivens had the advantage over Mr. Atkinson; Bliven was a part of the Allied force that landed in Normandy on D-Day.

“Mr. Bliven wrote briefly for a newspaper in Stroudsburg, Pa., and for The Manchester Guardian, the British paper, before graduating from Harvard in 1937. He then wrote editorials for The New York Post, leaving to serve in World War II.
‘I was a lieutenant in the field artillery and took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy and wrote a children’s book about it a dozen years later to find out what happened,’ he said. That book was ‘The Story of D-Day, June 6, 1944’ (Random House, 1956). ~From a NY Times obituary article about Bruce Bliven, January 14, 2002.“

Even though, as Blivens makes clear in his book, most of the men who were in the first wave of soldiers on the Normandy coast on D-Day had no idea about what was going on in the overall invasion, or even what the plan was for the entire operation, Bliven was able to reconstruct the story of D-Day and make it clear for young readers and for adults like me who need lots of “hand-holding’ background and explanation embedded in an absorbing narrative story.

I highly recommend the 1956 The Story of D-Day, or possibly (I haven’t read it) the updated version of Bliven’s classic account, Invasion: the Story of D-Day, which was published by Sterling Publishers in 2007.

The Port Chicago 50 by Steve Sheinkin

May12

The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights by Sheve Sheinkin, National Book Award Finalist and Newbery Honor Winner for Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon.

I’ve never heard of Port Chicago or the Port Chicago 50. So Mr. Sheinkin’s tale of 50 black seamen who defied orders to load dangerous munitions onto ships during World War II and who were subsequently tried and convicted of mutiny was a revelation to me. It’s a story of the civil rights movement before there really was a civil rights movement, or at least before the part I knew about.

I knew about Truman’s order to integrate the U.S. armed forces. I knew about Dr. Martin Luther King and the civil rights struggles of the 1960’s. But way back in 1944, at the height of World War II, when the outcome of the war was still in question, a massive explosion on the docks at Port Chicago in San Francisco killed 320 servicemen, many of them black Navy men who were segregated and assigned the dangerous job of loading bombs and ammunition onto ships for the war effort in the Pacific. These men, both the ones who died and the ones who escaped, were never trained to handle explosives. They were ordered to load and load fast, and their white officers made bets on which division or work group could load the most cargo in a day. Almost all of the stevedores who were handling this ammunition under very unsafe conditions were black.

A few weeks after the explosion, the men were ordered to go back to the very same work of loading ammunition under the very same conditions. When they refused the order, they were tried for mutiny, a crime which in the naval code carried a possible death sentence. Most of the men who were “on strike” backed down when they were threatened with the firing squad, but fifty of them did not.

The author’s sympathies are completely on the side of the alleged mutineers, with good reason. They do seem have been mistreated and subjected to unnecessarily dangerous working conditions. Their crime, disobeying a direct order, didn’t really rise to the level of mutiny. (Mutiny: “an unlawful opposition or resistance to or defiance of superior military authority, with a deliberate purpose to usurp, subvert, or override such authority.”) The defense argument when the men came to trial was that there was no plan to subvert or override authority, just a refusal by a bunch of traumatized men to return to loading ammunition under the very same conditions that caused the original explosion.

I found myself in sympathy with the Port Chicago 50, too, even as I could see the reasons that impelled the Navy authorities to bring the men to trial. The United States was at war. The military was a segregated force, wrong but true. Even though the black seamen who were loading the ammunition were treated abominably and the working conditions were hazardous, their work was a necessary part of the war effort. No member of the armed forces can be allowed to disobey orders from a superior officer with impunity. However, the Port Chicago 50 were right about the stand they took, and they were brave to take it. So, I stand conflicted and confused as to what I think about the entire episode.

Joe Small, unofficial leader of the group called the Port Chicago 50: “I realized that I had to work. I wasn’t trying to shirk work. But to go back to work under the same conditions with no improvements, no changes, the same group of officers that we had. . . . Improve working conditions this is what I, personally, was after. And desegregation of the base.”

Steve Sheinkin also wrote Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, a book I reviewed last year when I was reading and reviewing Cybils nominees for YA nonfiction.

QOTD: Who is a person from history that you respect? Why? Is there any historical figure that you admire while at the same time you acknowledge the person’s faults?

The 5th Gift of Christmas in Room 13, Oliver Street School, 1944

Dec5

51Z3YQ1adYL._SX258_PJlook-inside-v2,TopRight,1,0_SH20_BO1,204,203,200_From The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes:

Dear Miss Mason: How are you and Room 13? Please tell the girls they can keep those hundred dresses because in my new house I have a hundred new ones all lined up in my closet. I’d like that girl Peggy to have the drawing of the green dress with the red trimming and her friend Maddie to have the blue one. For Christmas. I miss that school and my new teacher does not equalize with you. Merry Christmas to you and everybody. Yours truly,
Wanda Petronski

“The teacher passed the letter around the room for everybody to see. It was pretty, decorated with a picture of a Christmas tree lighted up in the night in a park surrounded by high buildings.”

Since bullying is the topic du jour these days in children’s books and school assemblies, a retrieval of this classic story about Polish immigrant Wanda Petronski and her encounters with the girls of “Room 13” would certainly remind us that the problem of the strong pushing around the weak is not a new one. And the story gives some keys to the solutions: empathy developed by understanding, distance sometimes, and inner strength. Art helps, too.

Today’s Gifts from Semicolon
A song: In the Bleak Midwinter, lyrics by Christian Rossetti, music by Gustav Holst.

A booklist: Biographies of the U.S. Presidents (books I’m planning to read)

A birthday: Christina Rossetti, b.1830.
Walt Disney, b. 1901. The movie, Saving Mr. Banks, about Walt Disney and author P.L. Travers and the making of the movie version of Mary Poppins opens in theaters December 20th.

A poem: Love Came Down at Christmas by Christina Rossetti.

YA Nonfiction: Two Holocaust Memoirs

Oct15

The Boy on the Wooden Box: How the impossible became possible . . . on Schindler’s list by Leon Leyson with Marilyn J. Harran and Elisabeth Leyson.

Helga’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Account of Life in a Concentration Camp by Helga Weiss, translated by Neil Bermel.

Both of these accounts, written by Jewish Holocaust survivors about their teen years in Nazi-occupied territory, were quite absorbing and harrowing, each in its own way. Mr. Leyson’s book has a two-fold purpose as evidenced by the dedication: “To my brothers, Tsalig and Herschel, and to all the sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, parents and grandparents who perished in the Holocaust. And to Oskar Schindler, whose noble actions did indeed save a ‘world entire.'” There has been some controversy over whether the hero of the movie Schindler’s List was really a an unequivocal hero since he was something of a contradiction, a womanizing Nazi businessman who nevertheless saved the lives of perhaps more than one thousand Jewish workers who were slated for extermination by the Germans. Leon Leyson has no doubts about the heroism of Oskar Schlindler since Leon was one of those workers who was on Schlindler’s famous “list”. The memoir begins with Leib Lejzon, now known as Leon Leyson, living in the rural village of Narewka in northeastern Poland. Leon says that when he was a boy “[l]ife seemed an endless, carefree journey.” First, Leon’s father moved to the city of Krakow to work, and then in 1938 when Leon was eight years old, his father sent for the family to join him in Krakow. In 1939 the Leysons’ idyllic and upwardly mobile life came to an abrupt halt when the Germans invaded Poland.

The Boy on the Wooden Box is an excellent story for young adult readers about the Holocaust and about the survivors, particularly the work of Oskar Schlindler in saving many of the Jews who worked for him. Leon Leyson’s mantra for survival could be useful to anyone who is going through suffering and hard times, even if they never have to survive something as horrendous as the Holocaust:

“a new phrase surfaced: ‘If this is the worst that happens.’ My father and mother also adopted this saying as a tool of survival, perhaps as a way of keeping darker thoughts at bay. . . . Whenever a German was near, we whispered to ourselves, ‘If this is the worst . . .'”

Helga’s Diary is the story of the Czech/Jewish Helga Weiss’s childhood spent in the concentration camp of Terezin, and then later at Auschwitz. The Terezin portion of the diary was written at the time of the events and edited later for clarity by the author. Helga’s uncle hid the diary for her at Terezin when Helga and her mother were sent on a transport to Auschwitz. Then, after the war, Helga retrieved the diary and added the details of events that happened to her and her mother at Auschwitz and on their final journey through Poland and Czechoslovakia on a “death train” as the war was drawing to a close.

Helga’s childlike confusion over what was happening to her family and to the rest of the Jews in Czechoslovakia, and then her growing understanding and horror, lend her story an immediacy that pulls the reader into the story in a way that Mr. Leyson’s story is unable to do, written as it was long after the events took place. At the same time there are questions left unanswered in Helga’s account, as there must be in any child’s view of the war. An interview with Helga Weiss in the back of the book brings her story up to date and answered a few of those questions. Other uncertainties in the story simply must be left open since we are reading the story from young Helga’s point of view.

Finally I leave you with Helga Weiss’s words on why her book (and by extension Leon Leyson’s book, too) is important and should be read:

Why should we read another account of the Holocaust?

Mostly because it is truthful. I’ve put my own sentiments into it as well, but those sentiments themselves are emotional, moving, and most of all, truthful. And maybe because it’s narrated in that half-childish way, it’s accessible and expressive, and I think it will help people to understand those times.

The Boy on the Wooden Box has been nominated for the Cybils Award in the category of Young Adult Nonfiction. Helga’s Diary, although eligible in the same category, has not yet been nominated. The thoughts in this review are my own and do not reflect the thoughts or evaluations of the Cybils panel or of any other Cybils judge.

For Freedom: The Story of a French Spy by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

Dec23

“This book is written as fiction but tells a true story.”

Suzanne David Hall was thirteen years old in 1940 when the Germans invaded France, and she later became a spy for the French resistance. While training to become an opera singer, she relayed messages that helped bring about the Allied invasion of Normandy. The 2003 novel For Freedom: The Story of a French Spy by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley is based on interviews with Hall.

The novel is quite exciting, and the tension builds as Suzanne is called on to deliver her messages more and more frequently and as the spy network in which she works becomes smaller and smaller when the Germans capture the spies one by one. Suzanne is a brave girl, and she continues her work even though she knows the Nazis will torture or even kill her if she is found out. The prose in the story is simple and straightforward, and the pacing is mostly good, although the novel does start out a little slowly. The book is halfway through before Suzanne’s spy adventures start.

For Freedom is a good introduction to so many World War II topics: Dunkirk, Vichy France, the French Resistance, German occupation of France, daily life under German occupation, the Allied invasion of Normandy. But it’s not just a nice “salad” accompaniment to the main course of the history of World War II. The story carried me along and made me feel how difficult it must have been to be involved in the Resistance, never knowing from one day to the next whether this day would be the last before you were captured by the Germans.

Isn’t that what courage is? Courage: to keep doing right, to persevere in the face of uncertainty and even valid reasonable fear. If I were doing something that I knew would lead to disaster, if I were certain that I would be caught and killed and unable to complete my mission, it would be foolish and useless to persist. But if it’s only very likely that I might be arrested and if what I was doing was likely to help many people if I could continue, then bravery would be required. Suzanne was a brave young woman, “a hero of France.”

Christmas in Belgium, Bastogne, 1944

Dec8

From Band of Brothers by Stephen Ambrose.

On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the men received General McAuliffe’s Christmas greetings. “What’s merry about all this, you ask?” was the opening line. “Just this: We have stopped cold everything that has been thrown at us from the North, East, South, and West. We have identification from four German panzer Divisions, two German Infantry Divisions and one German Parachute Division. . . . The Germans surround us, their radios blare our doom. Their Commmander demanded our surrender in the following impudent arrogance.” (There followed the four paragraph message, “to the U.S.A. Commander of the encircled town of Bastogne” from “the German Commander,” demanding an “honorable surrender to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation,” dated December 22.)

McAuliffe’s message continued: “The German Commander received the following reply: ’22 December 1944. To the German Commander: NUTS! The American Commander.’

“We are giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a Merry Christmas. A.C. McAuliffe, Commanding.”

The men at the front were not as upbeat as General McAuliffe. They had cold white beans for their Christmas Eve dinner, while the division staff had a turkey dinner, served on a table with a tablecloth, a small Christmas tree, knives and forks and plates.

On the day after Christmas, Patton’s Third Army broke through the German lines relieving the siege of the American troops at Bastogne.

While We’re Far Apart by Lynn Austin

Sep27

I read this book because it’s one of the many novels that has been nominated for the INSPY Award in the category of General Fiction. Also, I like historical fiction,and this book set during Word War II sounded interesting. In fact, I gave it to my mom to read first, thinking she might like the time period setting; she actually remembers the end of World War II. She says she remembers marching around her front yard banging with a spoon on an old pan to celebrate VE Day or VJ Day, one of the two.

However, for my mom the book was a non-starter. She read a few chapters, but since the main characters, or at least one of the main characters, is a twelve year old girl, the book felt too juvenile to her. She suggested I give it to Betsy-Bee who is also twelve years old.

However, since it’s classified as adult fiction, I thought I should read it myself. I’m glad I did. There’s not much in there that a mature 13 or 14 year old wouldn’t understand and appreciate, but the book, especially the pacing, is probably more suited to adults. It doesn’t move too quickly, but rather it’s what I would call a character-centered story. Esther, the twelve year old, is a love-starved little girl who’s just on the edge of adolescence and growing into adulthood. Her mother has died in a car accident, and her father is so absorbed in his grief that he has little or no emotional strength to give to his children. Esther’s brother, Peter, is just as confused and needy as Esther, but he expresses his suffering by becoming mute. The two children are further traumatized when their father decides to volunteer to go to war in order to escape from his memories and from the pain of his wife’s death.

Then, the most interesting character enters the story. Penny Goodrich is the girl next door who’s always, unbeknownst to him, had a crush on the children’s father. When their grandmother refuses to care for the children (she’s a hoarder and has her own issues), Penny steps up, hoping to make Eddie Shaffer, the dad, fall in love with her as she cares for his children. I thought at first Penny was going to be border-line mentally impaired, but as the story progresses, Penny is only very sheltered and a bit slow on the uptake because of her peculiar background and discouraging and over-protective parents who have always told her that she is as “dumb as a green bean.”

I liked figuring out Penny, and then the Jewish characters who show up in the story are also intriguing. Mr. Mendel, the Shaffers’ friend, neighbor, and landlord, is waiting to hear from his son who was trapped in Hungary at the beginning of the war. Mr. Mendel also lost his wife in the same accident that killed Esther’s mother, and he is quite bitter towards “Hashem” the name he uses to speak of God. The book includes lots of questioning about the goodness of God and His role in suffering and evil. “If God is good, why does He let bad things happen?” No easy answers are given, but Mr. Mendel eventually realizes that he cannot leave his faith, or else his faith in God and community will not leave him.

I liked it. If the setting and characters sound like somewhere you would like to visit and people you would like to get to know, if only briefly, check it out.