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No One is Here Except All of Us Paperback – February 5, 2013

by Ramona Ausubel (Author)
4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 143 ratings
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From the award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and the new story collection, Awayland.


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. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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  1. Print length
    416 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Riverhead Books
  4. Publication date
    February 5, 2013
  5. Dimensions
    5.26 x 0.9 x 7.97 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1594486492
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1594486494
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Fantastical and ambitious . . . infused with faith in the power of storytelling . . . Light and tenderness persevere—in a shining moon, in a candle still aglow, in a mother’s embrace of her child.”—The New York Times Book Review
"An absorbing and unpredictable novel that manages to encompass a wide geographic and emotional range. . . . Ausubel's original voice combines fresh, clear observation and Old testament grandeur."—The New Yorker
“Debut novelist Ausubel casts a vibrant, dreamlike spell in this tale of a remote Romanian Village whose citizens try to save themselves from the Holocaust by reinventing their own history.”—Marie Claire
 
“Romanian Jews in 1939 reinvent their own reality in this inspiring novel about the power of community and imagination.”—O, the Oprah Magazine
 
“Ramona Ausubel’s debut, No One Is Here Except All of Us captures the magical group-think of a Romanian village that retreats into an imaginary reality at the outbreak of war.”—Vogue

"No One Is Here Except All of Us contains so many achingly beautiful passages, it's as if language itself is continually striving to be a refuge. . . . If a book can be said to have a consciousness, the consciousness here is infinitely tender and soulful, magical and true. It's the kind of God we wish for.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Ramona Ausubel's first novel, "No One Is Here Except All of Us," is a poetic fable about a part of history after which some people say poetry is an obscenity… Ausubel's fable-like tone is effective in creating a sensation of tale and dream. For conveying the full horror of the events surrounding the Holocaust, it is less so, but this isn't what she's trying to do. Instead, she is comfortable reshaping, in a safe time and place, stories that were handed to her, using her rhetorical and narrative skill to create something that can be carried without cutting the one who carries it.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 
“In her debut novel, No One Is Here Except All of Us, Ramona Ausubel breaks new ground, with a unique prose style that weaves a classic immigrant tale into a world of dreams. The town of Zalischick and its citizens re-write their own story, filling it with magic, hope, and a determination in the face of destruction to find new ways to begin.”—Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief
 
"Here is a world created out of the most curious and beautiful remnants of our own: opera, suitcases, letters, rivers, daughters, strangers and shovels. Ramona Ausubel cracks open the very idea of a book and fills its shell with a thing glimmering, thrilling and new.”—Samantha Hunt, author on The Invention of Everything Else

“A special work of the imagination, an original gift, dark and light, and Ramona Ausubel colors it all with a glowing wisdom.”—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies

“Beautifully written and alive in story, fascinating characters, and place.  You can't help but compare Ausubel's book with Marquez, with her fantastic vision of history and invention, the small village dreaming the vast world, but she is her own new fresh voice.”—Brad Watson, author of The Heaven of Mercury

“A wise, compassionate book that even in its darkest turns uplifts.”—Christine Schutt, author of Florida and All Souls

About the Author

Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Awayland, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, and No One Is Here Except All of Us. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, Best American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been longlisted for The Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions award and the Pushcart Prize.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Riverhead Books; Reprint edition (February 5, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 416 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594486492
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594486494
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.26 x 0.9 x 7.97 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.1 4.1 out of 5 stars 143 ratings

About the author

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Ramona Ausubel

Ramona Ausubel

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Ramona Ausubel is the author of the novel No One is Here Except All of Us, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and a San Francisco Chronicle and Huffington Post Best Book of the Year. Her new book A Guide to Being Born is a collection of short stories, which will be out in May 2013. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, One Story, The Best American Fantasy and shortlisted in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.

Find out more at www.ramonaausubel.com

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5 stars
4.1 out of 5
143 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Gabrielle Harbowy
5.0 out of 5 stars A deeply resonant almost-fantasy
Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2014
Verified Purchase
No One is Here Except All of Us by Ramona Ausubel not only bypassed my editor brain, but also touched me deeply.

The story opens in Eastern Europe in 1939, but this is not just another book about the horrors of the Holocaust. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves, and how we use those stories to tell us who we are. It’s about isolation from the world into a hidden, perfect constructed reality, and then the shock of re-entry when that construct inevitably cracks and lets the real world in.

In that, it evokes A Turn of Light by Julie Czerneda, or Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan (a novel brutal and beautiful in equal measure) — minus bears and plus Jews. And I don’t mean for that to sound flippant. The first couple chapters, in which a small and remote village decides to renounce the war-torn world and start again anew, are undoubtedly the most emotionally resonant depiction I’ve ever seen of what it means to be Jewish.

No One is Here… is not a fantasy, but the prose is so dreamlike and the plot so improbable that at times it almost feels like one. Some suspension of disbelief is required, but accepting the improbable bits at face value is necessary. If you are willing to join the narrator and become a complicit partner in her lie, the narrative unfolds to involve you in a much deeper exploration of identity, hope, community, and faith.
3 people found this helpful
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Terry Banker
4.0 out of 5 stars Where to Go When the World Collapses Around You...
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2012
Verified Purchase
Where do you go when the world collapses around you, when war forces you to go where you never thought you could? For Lena in Ramona Ausubel's delovely No One is Here Except All of Us, Lena turns to her imagination and invites her family and village to help create their escapist world based solely on Faith.

The year is 1939 and 9-year-old Lena lives in a small Romanian town on a peninsula in the middle of a destructing world. She is Jewish and her Faith is about to be tested. As news of horrible tragedy seeps into the village, the members decide to abandon the world beyond theirs. Landlocked, they trade their way for a willing close-mindedness. Following Lena's suggestion, they ignore the world beyond their village and create the world from what they want. Everything that existed before that morning is no more. The one thing that remains? Faith.

Like their ancestors, Faith will guide them and care for them. Without Faith, everything else is meaningless. With Faith, their lives will be acceptable.

SPOILER ALERT: Some readers may consider the following words a plot giveaway. However, the author's message of faith occurs in her metaphors and not, in my opinion, the story incidents.

The villagers reassess their lives and relationships, trading spouses, careers, children, and old ways for a system that will accommodate their new world. A new temple is constructed with elements of their new lives. Technology and communication with a world at war is abandoned. The barter system works, as long as the reader doesn't probe too deep. Like a child's imagination, the believers hold their world together by ignoring the lessons of the past.

In an absurdist world, Lena is traded to a family who wants a baby of their own. Although Lena is a pre-teen, she is directed to act like a baby until she is told to grow. Lena pretends to grow again, to learn to talk and sing and act like a girl until she is promptly promised to a boy. They marry and have children. They live inside their bubble as the world collapses around them. Time is discounted and unchecked.

In a world where nothing makes sense, where Jews are to be exterminated for being peaceful Jews, Absurdism is all that remains. The threat is as real today as it was in 1939.

It is absurd to find a woman washed on the riverbank and decide to keep her, to task her as the record keeper of their new way. It is absurd to believe she would remain.
It is absurd to give up your children to another family who won't love them like you do.
It is absurd to marry a person who sleeps 23 1/2 hours a day.
It is absurd, sadly, to live in a world with only Faith.

Yet, when the world is small, when the way to unify the participants is as simple as crying out in a howl, a tribe can be a powerful unifier. No One Is Here Except All of Us, the howl says. We are alone together. We are our own pack. We are who we are. Howl.

Inevitably, the world breaks in. Families are broken and scattered to the compass directions. Lena's husband is captured, her child dies, her son is traded to a Russian family for a train ticket, and Lena goes along meekly, with Faith as a crutch. Because she trusts, she does what is best for her family, which is not what's best for them. Lena is childlike at heart. Her decisions are well-intentioned and, sadly, they are not what is best for her family. Her childlike decisions are all she can muster.

Yet all of us make mistakes.

While Lena is running from the war, she does not know the war has ended. She ends up in America, pushed by the winds of inevitability.

"I am not in charge of my own fate," Lena's husband says.

In America, Lena gives birth to a baby the product of a passive rape. With birth, the cycle of Faith continues. Lena's story, like a modern day parable, is poetic and grounded in a belief larger than herself. Life will continue as long as you believe.

4 1/2 Stars out of 5.

Poetic, fantastical, Faith-oriented, creative, focused, pretty.

Terry Banker
2 people found this helpful
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F Shaw
5.0 out of 5 stars You will love this book!
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2012
Verified Purchase
I got happily swamped by this book right away. The language catches us and floats us along. The theme of loss and forgiveness, of the need to survive, is inventively presented. In the beginning, the little girl Lena, the main character, has to be given away by her loving mother because of Lena's own invention of a "new world" (too complicated to explain here). We don't expect loss in such a familiar setting, yet we know we all feel it in our own lives, so it makes sense. Later, of course, there are other kinds of loss as well.
The dreamy beginning still connects well with the more gritty world at the end because narrative is the key to survival for these people and it strings us all along with them.
The comparison between how real our imaginative creations can be to us and how unreal the real world can seem are as relevant now as they were in 1943. Video games, anyone?
2 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Judith CS
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautifully written, mingling a very original poetic style with ...
Reviewed in Canada on June 21, 2015
Verified Purchase
Beautifully written, mingling a very original poetic style with dream-like descriptions of the universal Jewish narrative, the existential threat and the search for meaning and survival as a nation.
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