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Don’t Talk To Me About the War by David A. Adler

Jul11

Thirteen year old Tommy Duncan isn’t interested in the news from Europe, news of war. It’s May, 1940, and it just might be the year the Brooklyn Dodgers win the series. And that’s the kind of news that interests Tommy. His friend, Beth, however, talks about the war in Europe all the time, and Tommy doesn’t understand half of what she’s talking about. But he still likes her a lot, even if she does try to get him to read the war news with her when they meet at Goldman’s Coffee Shop to walk to school together.

Tommy and his friends are seventh graders, but they act and feel younger. I think that’s because the story is set in 1940, before the U.S. entered World War II. Even though the kids in the story seem younger than thirteen in some ways, the story feels right, maybe because children didn’t take on a psuedo-sophistication as young as kids do now. They did take on responsibility, however. Tommy’s friend, Beth, does all the cooking and shopping for her family because her mother is dead. And Tommy takes more and more responsibility as the story progresses because his mother is dealing with a mysterious illness that makes her more and more dependent on Tommy and his dad.

The voices of the kids, especially Tommy the narrator, work well and help to set the story in another era. But today’s thirteen year olds and older may become impatient with Tommy and his straightforward way of thinking and talking and behaving. There’s not a lot of nuance or worldly sophistication here. I found it refreshing.

My Enemy’s Cradle by Sara Young

Jul3

I picked this book up at the library, and I had no idea until I finished it and read the author blurb at the back that Sara Young is Sara Pennypacker, author of the Clementine books. My Enemy’s Cradle is nothing like Clementine, aside from the fact that a talented author is responsible for both the light-hearted Clementine series for kids and this serious WW II adult novel.

Cyrla is beautiful Anneke’s half-Dutch, half Jewish cousin from Poland. When Anneke becomes pregnant, and her boyfriend, a Nazi soldier, refuses to take responsibility for the baby, she seems to have no choice but to apply for admission to the Lebensborn, a maternity home for girls who are giving birth to German, Aryan babies to fuel the Nazi war machine.

However, Anneke does have choices, and when she makes a tragic one, Cyrla must decide what to do next, how to protect herself, and how to protect her family. Cyrla takes her cousin’s place in the Lebensborn, probably the most dangerous place in German controlled territory for a half-Jewish girl with even more secrets than that of her heritage. The question is whether she can escape before the Germans find out who she really is, and can she trust anyone to help her?

Unlike the Spanish Civil War/World War II book I read earlier this week, My Enemy’s Cradle has a happy ending. Although the characters in the novel suffer terribly, there is an optimistic thread that runs through the novel to the very end. Cyrla is a true heroine, although young and naive at the beginning of the book. Because Cyrla is just a teenager dealing with very adult decisions, I think My Enemy’s Cradle would be perfect for older teens as well as adults, although there is some sexual content, not too graphic.

Really good stuff. Suspenseful and surprising and recommended.

The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman

Jun18

Jan Zabinski was the Polish director of the Warsaw Zoo in 1939 when the Nazis invaded and subjugated Poland. His wife, Antonina, was his helpmate in runing the zoo and the mother of a young son. During the German occupation, she gave birth to a daughter as well.

This nonfiction book tells the story of how Jan and Antonina worked with the Polish Underground to hide Jews, stockpile arms and ammunition, eventually participate in the doomed Uprising of August 1944 when the Russians halted outside Warsaw and allowed the Germans to destroy the Polish Underground that had come out of hiding to support the Allies in re-taking Poland and driving the Nazis out. A lot of the story tells about the animals in the zoo and what happened to them and how Antonina survived pregnancy-related illnesses, inadequate rations, and providing secret hospitality for fifty to seventy people at any given time throughout the course of the war and the German occupation.

Something about the way the story was told made me admire these people, but not like them very much. I’m not sure what I didn’t like, but I felt uncomfortable in their company. Jan seemed very controlling, and Antonina like a wife making excuses for an authoritarian husband. Maybe that’s not the way it was at all since Ms. Ackerman derives her story from written accounts, Antonina’s diary mostly, and from interviews with people who knew the Zabinskis during the war. Both Jan and Antonina Zabinski died before this book was conceived. Their son, Rys, did contribute his memories of a childhood filled with animals and with war.

I don’t know. I’m ambivalent. If you like nonfiction about animals and and about World War II, you should try it out.

Tamar by Mal Peet

Apr11

I discovered that Grandfather’s world was full of mirages and mazes, of mirrors and misleading signs. He was fascinated by riddles and codes and conundrums and labyrinths, by the origin of place names, by grammar, by slang, by jokes —although he never laughed at them— by anything that might mean something else. He lived in a world that was slippery, changeable, fluid . . . ” p. 111

Tamar by Mal Peet is a story about spies and undercover espionage and the underground during World War II. It’s the story of a man who became so enmeshed in his world of subterfuge and code and disguises that he could no longer trust anyone or even function in a straight forward and honest manner.

What a scary, insecure sort of world to inhabit! And, to some extent, it is the world we live in. We live inside a cosmic joke, and if there is no central, unchanging, organizing Principle or Answer—if this world is completely “slippery, changeable, fluid”— the joke is not really very funny. There is no Standard from which to deviate, no center.

But with God at the center, the joke becomes at least bittersweet. We are promised a happy ending, and all of the riddles, conundrums, mazes and codes make sense because there truly is an answer, not just endless, chaotic, meaningless, perpetual change. We may not find all the answers or decode all the messages, but we are assured that the answers do exist, that all will be revealed in God’s time. And in the meantime, we can enjoy the Joke.

Tamar isn’t really about all these spiritual questions or about God or meaning in life. It’s a story about a family dealing with the aftermath of horrific events that happened during World War II but continued to shape the family and their relationships up through today. The sins of the fathers, or grandfather, are visited upon the third generation.
Nevertheless, the book made me think about change and deception and mirage and reality. So, I share those thoughts and recommend Mal Peet’s Tamar to anyone who has an interest in family dynamics and family secrets, the after effects of war, and the mysteries of ethics and forgiveness and repentance.

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

The Devil’s Arithmetic by Jane Yolen

Apr3

Organizer Daughter and a friend and I watched the movie version of this book by Jane Yolen this afternoon in conjunction with the urchins’ study of World War II. I read the book a long time ago and didn’t remember much about it. Hence, the ending quite shocked me, as I vaguely remember it shocking me when I read it.

If you’re not familiar with the story, it’s a tale of sixteen year old “typical teenager” Hanna Stern who, when she is forced to attend the annual family Seder, tries to avoid hearing the interminably long stories that her elderly relatives tell about their WW II experiences. However, during the Seder, a mystery intervenes (or is it a dream?), and Hanna is somehow transported back to Poland in the year 1940. She attends a Jewish wedding with some of her relatives who think she is a cousin who has been ill with a fever, and at the wedding, tragedy strikes. The Nazis come to take the Jews to “work camps”, and because Hanna has ben completely inattentive to her family’s history and heritage, she has very little idea of what will happen next to her and to her Polish, Jewish family.

I wouldn’t recommend the movie for any children younger than 13 or 14. Even my high schoolers were, I think, shocked by some of the scenes of brutality and horror that took place in the concentration camp. And that’s despite the fact that I think the movie sort of understates and even misrepresents the reality in some ways. The inmates of the camp are a lot more free to interact and a lot more warmly dressed than I would think was the true state of affairs. Anyway, this movie is for mature teen and adults, and I think it did my teens some good to see enacted some historical facts that they had only read about until now.

The movie stars Kirsten Dunst as Hanna and Brittany Murphy as her friend Rifka.

Advent: December 7th

Dec7

Every year on this date, my mom would ask me, “Do you know what today is?”

“Christmas? Almost Christmas? The beginning of Christmas?”



I eventually learned that December 7th has nothing to do with Christmas. Go here for an article by Maggie Hogan on commemorating this “date which will live in infamy” in your homeschool.

The book Early Sunday Morning: The Pearl Harbor Diary of Amber Billows, Hawaii, 1941 by Barry Denenberg is one of the Dear America series from Scholastic. Go here for more information on the book and some activities to accompany it.

Other books for children and young adults:
Air Raid–Pearl Harbor!: The Story of December 7, 1941 by Theodore Taylor

A Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor by Harry Mazer

World War II for Kids: A History with 21 Activities by Richard Panchyk

Links:
Phil at Brandywine Books: The Last Survivors of Pearl Harbor.

Michelle Malkin: Remembering Pearl Harbor.

George Grant posts Franklin Roosevelt’s December 8th “Date Which Will Live in Infamy” speech, broadcast on radio worldwide.

From Hawaii, Palm Tree Pundit comments and links to a few others who remember this date.

Children’s Fiction of 2007: Someone Named Eva by Joan M. Wolf

Oct29

There’s probably more than one reason that I enjoy reading fiction written for children, but one of those reasons is that even the best of children’s fiction is somewhat simple and straightforward. Children, and adults like me, want a story, a beginning-to-end, satisfying, well-written story that gives us something to think about in the process. Someone Named Eva was such a story.

The novel is appropriate for any child who’s mature enough to deal emotionally with the essential plotline: a Czech child is stolen from her home and sent to a school for training young Aryan Nazis to serve the Fatherland. Milada qualifies for this “honor” because she is blonde, blue-eyed, and her nose is the right length. Before she leaves, her grandmother tells her: “Remember who you are, Milada. Remember where you are from. Always.”

Easier said than done. Milada, whose named is changed to the German Eva, hears so many lies, repeated so often and so convincingly that she begins to lose her grip on truth and her sense of her own identity. Her German teachers tell her that her parents died in an air raid, and even though she knows that they were arrested by the Germans themselves and that she was taken away from them, Eva begins to doubt her own memories. Could such “brainwashing” really happen? Of course, it could; Someone Named Eva is based on a true story of a Czech village burned to the ground for supposed collaboration with the the Allies and Aryan-looking children given in adoption to German families during World War II. Many of those children did forget their own native language and their family and cultural heritage.

I was reminded of Hitler’s famous dictum (not actually formulated by Hitler, but attributed to him anyway): “people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.” I thought, too, of Satan, and how his colossal lies are repeated over and over again throughout our society and of how we eventually begin to doubt the truth in favor of the oft-repeated lie:

Money will make you happy. Lots of money and stuff will make you supremely happy.

People and relationships can wait. Pursue the urgent rather than the eternal.

God can be mocked. You will not really reap what you sow.

You are not loved. God cannot be trusted. Live for the moment because that’s all you’ve got.

We believe the lies, act upon them, and lose our own souls in the process.

I’ve gone a bit far afield from the book Someone Named Eva, but a book that can make me think about such important issues is only simple in the sense that it is honest and direct. Oh, the power of a simple story.

Someone Named Eva was nominated for the Cybil Award for Middle Grade Fiction. Read more about author Joan M. Wolf here.

Other reviewers write about Someone Named Eva:

Elizabeth Bird at A Fuse #8 Production.

Multicultural Soldier Boys of World War II

Aug19

Eyes of the Emperor by Graham Salibury. A Japanese-American boy in Hawaii, Eddy Okubo, experiences the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, lies about his age, and joins the Army. Because of his ethnic background, Eddy is given a special assignment that tests his commitment, patriotism, and endurance.

Code Talker by Joseph Bruchac. A Navaho boy, Ned Begay, hears about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, disguises his age, and joins the Marines. Because of his ethnic background and fluency in the Navaho language, Ned is given a special assignment that tests his commitment, patriotism, and endurance.

I read both of these in quick succession and found them to be similar in tone and in plot, but I liked both anyway. I would imagine that if you know any boys who are WWII buffs, these would be great to recommend.

Marika by Andrea Cheng

Jun8

A few months ago I read another book by Andrea Cheng, Eclipse, the story of precocious eight year old Peti, the talkative son of Hungarian immigrant parents. Marika, the book I just finished, is narrated by a girl character, a little older than Peti, eleven rather than eight, but it has the same feel of a very serious story about adult problems being told from a child’s point of view.

I’m not sure, judging from the two books I’ve read, that Ms. Cheng is really a juvenile author. I think she writes adult or young adult books with child narrators, told in a child’s voice. The subject matter in the two books includes child abuse, adultery, genocide, and rape (mentioned), and I’m just not convinced that elementary school children would appreciate the rhythm or the content of either book.

That said, however, Marika is a great novel. The blurb in the back of the book says that Andrea Cheng is the daughter of Hungarian immigrants and that Marika, the character and the book, are loosely based on her mother’s story. Marika, the character, is a young Hungarian girl who happens to have three Jewish grandparents. Her family is culturally Catholic, but they can’t escape their Jewish ethnic identity in World War II Budapest. Marika’s struggles to understand this identity and what it means to be Jewish even though you don’t believe in the Jewish religion, even though you don’t want to be Jewish, from the core of the story.

Here’s a sample of Marika’s voice, on the day she is rescued by her father from confinement in a Jewish prison:

“I sat by the window and looked down at the Danube below, flowing so peacefully along its banks. Lots of people wrote poems about the Danube. We had to memorize one in fifth grade about the wind blowing off the water. I recited it to myself, and when I was done, I sobbed.”
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That’s the tone of this book: serious, sad, flowing, yet childlike. Marika does mature over the course of the novel, and that growth is reflected in the way she writes about her experiences. However, as the novel ends, and the reader finds out how the war ended for each of the characters in the story, the feelings continue to be mixed. Some survive the war and the Holocaust, and others, of course, do not, a very adult and true lesson to learn about life.

Resurrection Reading: Night by Elie Wiesel

Apr7

No, I’ve never read this account of Mr. Wiesel’s experiences during the final days of World War II as he is enslaved in first Birkenau, then Auschwitz, then Buna, and finally Buchenwald, not until this week. It’s not a long book, only a little over a hundred pages, but it’s about the most powerful indictment of the evil that lies deep inside every man that I’ve ever read. If you don’t believe in “original sin,” Night will change your mind. It’s a very, very dark story, and the fact that it’s true and told in a quite factual manner makes it even more disturbing. The Nazi persecution and near-extermination of the Jews happened; it’s depressing, but unavoidable. And as Mr. Wiesel shows in his book, even those who were enslaved and murdered were not able to remain pure; he tells over and over again of how son turned against father, how friends fought each other for a scrap of bread, and of how he found himself doing and thinking things that would have been unthinkable before his captivity.

So why is this “Resurrection Reading”? Well, despite the “night” that pervades this book and despite the death that is its constant theme, the book points me, as a Christian, to resurrection. Jesus said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” By extension, only the dead need a resurrection, and only he who is aquainted with both the depravity of man and the evil that is within his own being is aware of his need of a saviour.

As the book ends, Mr. Wiesel has been liberated from Buchenwald, but he looks into the mirror and sees a corpse. Only a resurrection can help this particular patient.

Night is definitely appropriate and powerful reading for a Holy Saturday of darkness.