In my work as a news reporter and war correspondent, I met people on the worst day of their lives. I always wondered: What now? How will they get on with life? My own parents faced that dreadful dilemma. Penniless refugees, their families murdered in the Holocaust, unemployed in London, how on earth did they find the strength to carry on? One day at a time, they just did what they had to do. That is the subject of my fiction, always trying to answer that existential question: How do we live with trauma, and still find love and happiness?
I wrote...
Promised Land: A Novel of Israel
By
Martin Fletcher
What is my book about?
Promised Land begins when fourteen-year-old Peter is sent west to America to escape the growing horror of Nazi Germany. But his younger brother Arie and their entire family are sent east to the death camps. Only Arie survives.
The brothers reunite in the nascent Jewish state, where Arie becomes a businessman and one of the richest men in Israel while Peter becomes a top Mossad agent heading some of Israel’s most vital espionage operations. One brother builds Israel, the other protects it. But they also fall in love with the same woman, Tamara, a lonely Jewish refugee from Cairo. And over the next two decades, as their new homeland faces extraordinary obstacles that could destroy it, the brothers’ intrigues and jealousies threaten to tear their new lives apart.
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The Books I Picked & Why
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa
By
Peter Godwin
Why this book?
A beautifully intertwined story of the decline of a man and the parallel decline of a nation, Zimbabwe, which pivots into an entirely new story: the author’s dying Christian British father was actually a Polish Jew, born Kazimierz Goldfarb, whose family was killed in Treblinka concentration camp.
Godwin’s story is ultimately inspiring and uplifting as he comes to terms with his family’s past while building his own future in his new country.
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Desert Flower
By
Waris Dirie,
Cathleen Miller
Why this book?
It isn’t the best-written book but Waris Dirie’s account of her escape from Somalia, her life as a domestic servant in London, her marriages of convenience, and her ultimate triumph in New York’s world of fashion, haunted me for years.
A frank, intimate account of a beautiful woman’s escape from a nomadic tribal life of female abuse to scaling the heights of western fashion modeling.
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Last Waltz in Vienna
By
George Clare
Why this book?
A sensitive yet relentless story of his family’s failed assimilation that ends in its annihilation. Clare ends up in the UK, seeking meaning, in vain. His story so closely mirrors the real-life story of my own family, also Jewish refugees from Vienna who found refuge in the UK, that it sent a chill down my spine. Beautifully written and evocative. Clare concludes with Voltaire’s verdict: “History never repeats itself, man always does.”
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Swedish Tango: A Novel
By
Alyson Richman
Why this book?
The former movie star “was now in a country where no one even knew his name.” The cry of every refugee, the eerie sense of being transparent, dispensable, irrelevant emerges powerfully from Alyson Richman’s intricately plotted and touching narrative: a fictional tale of World War Two refugees from Finland and France and asylum-seekers from Pinochet’s Chile whose new lives cross in Sweden.
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Small Island
By
Andrea Levy
Why this book?
This gem of a novel is just as much about how the British adjusted to Jamaicans as how the latter adapted to Britain, and the conclusion is – with great difficulty.
In Levy’s story, Hortense confronts the abyss between her lofty expectations of Britain and the post-war racist reality, as well as her equal disappointment with the man she has married. But Hortense marches on, swinging her handbag, overcoming every obstacle, and Levy’s witty, penetrating and accurate portrayal of Britain’s uncomfortable adjustment to its colonial heritage is a triumph.
