I am the child of refugees from the Holocaust, so displacement and the effects of war and violence have been part of my personal experience. My book, Only the River, is loosely based on my mother’s story. She and her family escaped from Vienna in 1938 and spent the war years in Bolivia, the only country that would give them visas. I am also a high school teacher who works with immigrant students, who have fled violence and poverty. It is my vocation to offer them hospitality and help them find a sense of home here, in an environment that is often hostile. These books bring the stories of the displaced and dispossessed alive.
I wrote...
Only the River
By
Anne Raeff
What is my book about?
Fleeing the ravages of wartime Vienna, Pepa and her family find safe harbor in the small town of El Castillo, on the banks of the San Juan River in Nicaragua. There her parents seek to eradicate yellow fever while Pepa falls under the spell of the jungle and the town’s eccentric inhabitants. But Pepa’s life—including her relationship with local boy Guillermo—comes to a halt when her family abruptly moves to New York.
As the years pass, Pepa’s and Guillermo’s lives diverge, and Guillermo’s homeland slips into chaos. Guillermo’s daughter transforms into an accidental revolutionary. Pepa’s son defies his parents’ wishes and joins the revolution in Nicaragua, only to disappear into the jungle. It will take decades before the fates of these two families converge again.
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The Books I Picked & Why
Go, Went, Gone
By
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Susan Bernofsky
Why this book?
This is a beautiful book about a retired academic and widower who finds himself embroiled in the lives of young African refugees trying to seek asylum in Berlin. What I love about this book, besides the beautiful writing, is that neither the widower nor the refugees are portrayed as saints and neither really finds redemption. It is, rather, a very real story of fragile yet real connections between people who, for entirely different reasons, are very much alone. I love this book because it holds us all accountable as human beings and asks us how we can retain our humanity, our moral center when power is so unequally distributed.
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After the Parade
By
Lori Ostlund
Why this book?
This book is for all of us who escaped the small-mindedness of the world in which we were raised and about the places that took us in. The book’s hero is Aaron Englund, a gay, bookish, and much-misunderstood boy who grows up in a small town in rural Minnesota. It is about his struggles in that hostile world and the other outsiders he encounters as he tries to figure out who he is. It is about saving oneself and finding one’s place, and it is in some ways a homage to my adopted home, San Francisco. It is also a book about love, about falling in love and falling out of love, and is full of humor and compassion.
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Aftermath: Life in the Fallout of the Third Reich, 1945-1955
By
Harald Jähner,
Shaun Whiteside
Why this book?
This is my non-fiction choice. Aftermath is a brilliant book that describes the destruction and displacement in Germany caused by World War II. Although I have studied this topic my whole life and written about it in my fiction, there is always more to learn, and this book taught me so much. It is full of rich details and top-notch scholarship. Despite the terrible destruction and misery that the author describes, the book provides us with some hope in the ability of human beings to survive the unimaginable and even to create new meaning out of the rubble.
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Further News of Defeat: Stories
By
Michael X. Wang
Why this book?
Further News of Defeat is a collection of loosely connected short stories about the realities of life in China, especially for people from the countryside who find themselves in the alien world of China’s cold and materialistic cities. The stories are heart-wrenching and the images in them will seep into your dreams, stay with you forever. What I love about this book is that, though all great books are fundamentally political, it is not politically motivated, not a diatribe against communism or even totalitarianism. The characters are not romanticized victims but real people with flaws and passions. This book will make you cry and think and laugh.
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Good to a Fault
By
Marina Endicott
Why this book?
This book by Canadian writer Marina Endicott is quirky in all the best ways—smart, tender, heart-wrenching, and quietly hopeful. It is about a lonely, divorced accountant who takes in a homeless family after crashing into their car. The book is gorgeous on the sentence level and the way Endicott writes about the connections and lack of connections between the characters in the book is full of wisdom and pathos. Though the premise is quite simple, the book is full of surprises.
