Not Just Another War Novel: Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

Why did I request one more novel set during war? I had read two books set during WWII and one during WWI in the last two months! But the novel was a "wish it were available" request--which was granted me. I asked for it! And was glad I did.

Lilac Girls is Martha Hall Kelly's first novel. When she learned about the experimental surgery inflicted on female inmates at Ravensbruck she began researching. The product is a whopping big novel that begins in 1939 and ends with a war crimes tribunal in 1959.

Based on real people and events, the story is told through the voices of three very different women brought together by the war.

Caroline Ferriday is a retired actress and philanthropist comfortable hobnobbing with New York City high society. At the start of the war she is working for the French Consulate and embarking on a love affair with a French actor. Her life is irrevocably changed when her lover returns to France while Caroline continues the battle at home to help war victims.

In Poland, German/Polish Kasia becomes involved with the resistance, locally lead by Pietrik Bakoski. Her sister Zuzanna is studying medicine; their father works in the post office and their nurse mother is an artist. Kasia is apprehended, arrested, and with her sister and mother is sent to Ravensbruck, a concentration camp for women.

Herta Oberheuser desperately wants to practice surgery and takes a job at Ravensbruck, unaware of what she will be asked to do. She justifies her work as her patriotic duty. Dr Oberheuser is instructed to perform experimental surgery on Kasia and other girls which leaves them crippled and gives them the nickname 'Rabbits', both for their hopping gait and their use as lab animals. After the war, Caroline learns of the Rabbits and works to bring justice and healing into their lives.

Caroline's story is an excellent foil to the horrors, privation, and starvation of Europeans during the war. Hall notes the clothes, jewels, food, and lifestyle of the rich. An amazing party set in 1942 New York has movie stars and American 'royalty'. Caroline solicits funds to bring the Rabbits to America for medical treatment. The party goers are tired of hearing about the war.

Kelly's extensive research spanning ten years is interesting to read about on her blog.

I appreciated that the book addressed the fate of Poland and its citizens and also allowed us to understand how Herta could do what she did. Bringing the story of the Rabbits to attention alone makes the book worth reading. In a subtle way the story also touches on modern concerns of immigration and American response to refugees of war. Kelly lets readers know that boat loads of European refugees were turned away. Our isolationism meant a slow response to Hitler's military take over of Poland, France, and most of Europe. We villianize Hitler and sing the praises of our Citizen Soldiers but forget our inaction early in the war enable Hitler's military conquest.

Hall is now working on a prequel to Lilac Girls.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Lilac Girls
Martha Hall Kelly
Random House
Publication April 5, 2016
$26.00 hard cover
ISBN:9781101883075

*****

But I have a special reason to like the book. For Pietrik Bakoski's surname is phonetically like my married name Bekofske. I have found multiple spellings in genealogical records: Pikarski, Pinkoske, Pikorsky, Pinkowski, Bekeski, Pekoski, Pekovski to name a few. "P" and "B" are phonetically similar. So is v and f. The sky, ski, and ske endings are related to translations into Polish, German or Russian.

My husband's German ancestor Christoff was living in Poland when he married Polish Carolina Reinke; they moved to Volhynia in modern day Ukraine. Political strife was behind the families immigration eastward, looking for a safe haven. Then as tensions between Germany and Russia increased, persecution of the Germans in Russia increased.

The family tried to immigrate to America in 1909. The youngest daughter had an eye infection and all but one daughter, whose husband was already in America, returned to Germany. Later sons Gustaf and Herman did immigrate to America. One brother became Bekofske and the other Pekoske. After WWII Christoff, Carolina and the three daughters were in East Germany and their American family lost contact with them. As Russian Germans it is likely they were removed to Siberia or a concentration camp.

My Beckers ancestors were also German Russians who left Volhynia like the Bekofskes.

Anything For Success: Three Martini Lunch by Suzanne Rindell

"Three Martini Lunch does for publishing what Mad Men did for advertising," wrote James Magnuson. So of course I requested the ARC from NetGalley! The author's previous novel The Other Typist had good reviews and is slated to be a movie. 

"Nobody ever became a writer by just wanting to be one," wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald to his daughter Scottie. With this quote Rindell set the novel's theme. 

Told in first person by the three main protagonists, the book starts with Cliff talking about Greenwich Village in 1958. Cliff channels Holden Caulfield (The Cather in the Rye by J. D. Salinger) with his crummy, lousy, swell slang and direct address to the reader. I was charmed by this voice. Cliff has big dreams and little self control, enjoying the Village life style and ambiance, hanging with 'wannabes" and feeling superior to his Columbia buddies. When Cliff meets man of the world Swish, a bicycle courier along with Harlem native and Columbia student Miles, he thinks he has found his true peer group. He tells the Old Man, an important editor and 'king of the three-martini lunch', that he is dropping out of college to write. No problem. The Old Man cuts off funds and Cliff finds himself sleeping on Swish's couch. 

Cliff has dreams of being a writer, but Miles is actually writing. As a black man with an education his prospects in 1958 are limited. From the start, when Cliff reads what Miles writes he rewrites it his way with the 'right' endings. He is jealous. 

The second voice is Eden, a Midwest girl with dreams of becoming an editor. Eden faces blocks and walls, men and women who take credit for her work and tell her a woman has no place beyond the secretarial pool. After losing a job she tries again, remaking herself with a new look and identity. Eden's story becomes entwined with Cliff's and they appear to be the main characters. But really, they are only the instruments of fate to the real center of the novel--Miles.

Miles is conflicted and searching, intelligent and insecure. His journey takes him from Harlem and the Village to the West Coast in search for his father's lost journal. Yes, it is a search for the father. Along the way he faces decisions about sexual identity and family commitments. The elderly, lonely man who hires him to do odd chores warns him about the pitfalls of denial. 

As the novel progresses we see Cliff is a sham and a loser. Eden hitches to falling stars until she finds her own inner strength and a mentor. Miles betrays all his lovers, and himself. We see a world in which people will do anything to succeed. 

For a 500+ page novel it was fast reading. Rindell has a lovely facility with words and her character's voices showed their unique identity. 

I don't begrudge spending three days with this story. But I am troubled by several things. First, starting the novel with Cliff's story made me think he was the book's main character, especially as we learn he and Eden become involved. Their story takes up a lot of space early in the book. We learn about Cliff's father's betrayal and why Cliff never really had his love. 

Second, Mile's sexual identity and relationships take up a large part of his story, more than his writing interest. The forces that batter Miles and how he buckles under societal pressures in 1958 shape the betrayal that is the most horrific in the novel. The portrayal of the gay characters did make me uncomfortable since none were healthy, whole individuals--Probable, given the times, but unsettling.

Last of all, when at the end of the book twenty years have passed and Miles is asked to write about the 50s Village scene I realized it was THAT BOOK, the one Miles is asked to write, that I really wanted to read! 

Looking back I feel there were too many stories for one book. I would have liked a tighter focus and a tighter book. Or several books, as the characters are all really interesting ones.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Three Martini Lunch
Suzanne Rindell
Penguin
Publication Date April 5, 2016
$27.00 hard cover
ISBN:9780399165481

The Poetry of Anne Sexton

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton is now available in ebook from Open Road Integrated Media. The book includes the complete poems and posthumously published work. It is a substantial volume of work. Sexton plumbed her own life as a woman, mother, daughter, wife and lover, addressed her struggle with depression, institutionalization, and suicide attempts.

The Publisher's Note explains how the poems were adapted to the ebook form. And How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton,  a revealing essay about Kumin's professional and personal relationship with Sexton.  Kumin writes that an elderly priest told Sexton that "God is your typewriter"; those words kept Sexton going for another year as she wrote her last book of poetry, The Awful Rowing Toward God.

I found The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton shortly after it's publication in paperback. I did not have much money in those days, and buying a book was a thoughtful decision. I did not know Sexton. I did not know about 'confessional' poetry or about Sexton's demons and suicide. The title caught my attention and I brought it home.

Sexton was a revelation. Her imagery was so novel and individualistic, unlike anything I had ever read before. Her voice was clear and honest. I fell in love with these poems. She impacted my own poetry more than I care to admit, but I was young and trying new things.

The volume begins with Rowing with its imagery of God as an island the poet endeavors to reach, an imperfect island but where

"there will be a door
and I will open it
and I will get rid of the rat inside of me
the gnawing pestilential rat.
God will take it with his two hands/and embrace it."

She tells us she is on a quest.

In the poem Courage she writes about what courage means in life, "it is in the small things we see it./The child's first step,/as awesome as an earthquake," to the courage of enduring despair, and the courage of old age when "at the last moment/when death opens the back door/you'll put on your carpet slippers and stride out."

At times the poems reflected me back to other poets. For instance, in The Poet of Ignorance Sexton writes,

"I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open and shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes."

And I recalled Emily Dickinson's poem about performing the mundane as a way of carrying on:

"I tie my hat--I crease my shawl--
Life's little duties do--precisely--
...
Therefore--we do life's labor--
Though Life's Reward--be done--
With scrupulous exactness--
To hold our senses on--"

Sexton refers to an animal, a crab clutching fast to her heart; Dickinson to a Bomb held to her bosom.

The last poems were my favorites.

Not So. Not So.,  beginning "I cannot walk an inch/without trying to walk to God" and ending "You have a thousand prayers/but God has one."

In The Rowing Endeth, the poet has arrived "at the dock of the island called God" and plays a game of poker with the deity. God wins and laughs, "the laughter rolling like a hoop out of His mouth/and into mine,/and such laughter that He doubles right over me/laughing a Rejoice-Chorus at our two triumphs." And as the whole universe laughs, she ends, "Dearest dealer/I with my royal straight flush/love you for your wild card/that untamable, eternal, gut-driven ha-ha/and lucky love."

The Christian faith is a comedy: God always wins for out of death comes the joy of resurrection. Death brought Sexton death respite from her demons. I  pray that she found peace.

I received a free ebook through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

"[Her poems] will be understood in time--not as 'women's poetry' or 'confessional poetry'--but as myths that expand the human consciousness." Erica Jong

The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton

Open Road Integrated Media

Publication Date: April 5, 2016

ISBN: 9781504034364

$9.99 ebook

1857 & Little Hazel

Over the last month I have been glad to have many book reviews already reviewed and scheduled. A cold virus was wrecking havoc on my system, moving from head to chest to throat. I did not accomplish very much on my quilt projects but here is what I did get done.

I made the sawtooth outer border on the center of Little Hazel by Ester Alui. Twice. It didn't fit because I was impatient and querulous while ill and did a lousy job. I had to tear it apart, resize the pieces, and sew it together again. I am about halfway through appliquéing the circle to the background square.

Little Hazel center

The 1857 Sampler blocks of the month from Sentimental Stitches had motifs that did not speak to me: woodworking and carpentry tools. I switched them for a quill pen and inkwell and sewing tools on another block. I inserted a toile print in the center of one block instead of a cross. Nothing against the religious symbolism, but I thought it was a perfect frame. I need to size the blocks and add the corner motifs.

I also sewed together blocks I had made before our move nearly two years ago, and intend on having the quilt machine quilted--a first for me as I have always hand quilted. The blocks incorporate shirts from my father-in-law, culled from his closet after his passing to make a memory quilt. I don't have a photo yet!

While looking through old photos I chanced upon these from 1973. We were living on campus while my husband was in grad school and participated in the community garden. While cleaning up we found a rabbit nest. My husband and I raised them until they could eat grass. Every two hours we hand feed them with an dropper. All but one survived.

Seeing this photo my brother asked, "who is that hippie chick?" Lol, I was far from being a hippie but today all my generation are called 'hippies.' 

 

Hope your spring is warmer than ours in Southeastern Michigan! The bird feeder froze solid for two days. Brrr. 

The Bard with a Thousand Faces

My dad did not understand why I had to read William Shakespeare. I was fourteen and reading Julius Caesar for English class. I was lucky; my teacher had a Master's degree in English and explained all the jokes and helped us understand what we were reading. Four years later he taught King Lear in World Literature class. I liked Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's words pervade our conversations and his stories are adapted into modern retellings. Consider King Lear, the inspiration for Akira Krosawa's film Ran and the novel A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Or The Taming of the Shrew, the basis for the musical Kiss Me Kate and the movies Ten Things I Hate About You and John Wayne's McLintock! Bernstein's musical West Side Story is an updated Romeo and Juliet. The Forbidden Planet sci-fi classic movie is based on The Tempest.

It is more amazing to know that Shakespeare has crossed bigger language barriers than archaic to modern English. World's Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe follows Andrew Dickson on five trips across world cultures to explore the legacy and reinvention of Shakespeare across cultures.

Dickson went to Danzig, where actors performed Shakespeare in the 16th c. We learn how German Romantic culture--and the Nazis-- claimed the Bard as their own, and how today German professional troupes perform more Shakespeare plays than in the UK.

Shakespeare's plays and the Bible were often the only books found in American pioneer homesteads. Traveling actors performed his plays in mining camps. Henry Folger amassed the largest collection of Shakespeare Folios and manuscripts in the world, more than in England.

Where ever Britain had colonies, they brought Shakespeare. His stories have been reinvented for 150 films in India!

My favorite journeys to read about were to South Africa and to China.

Dickson goes on a quest to learn about the Robben Island Bible, a cheap complete works that was passed among the prisoners of the island penal colony. Thirty-six inmates inscribed their signatures in the book, including Nelson Mandela. Mandela signed his name to the highlighted text from Julius Caesar "Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once..." Dickson also searches for Solomon Tshekisho Plaatj, a journalist and political activist who was the first to translate Shakespeare into a African language. Dickson's journey into contemporary South Africa while researching translators from the Boer War and Apartheid eras is a fascinating read.

Shakespeare in China may seem strange and doubtful. Translation issues alone are horrendous, plus the plays were repressed during the Cultural Revolution. Amazingly China is experiencing a surge of interest in the Bard, with so many traveling to Stratford-in-Avon in homage that the nearby airport has set up direct flights from Beijing. I was very taken by the story of Zhu Shiqiu whose life work was translating the plays. He lost his manuscripts three times, starting over until he had finished 31 at the time of his death.  Dickson discovers how the Cultural Revolution shut down Much Ado About Nothing; twenty years later the original actors brought back the play, same scripts, same costumes, same choreography.

Dickson struggles with questions of what Shakespeare means: a bridge of shared humanity, or a free-floating symbol whose ownership could be claimed?

Read Dickson's blog here: http://worldselsewhere.com

I received a free ARC through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

World's Elsewhere: Journeys Around Shakespeare's Globe
by Andrew Dickson
Henry Holt
$35 hard cover
Publication date: April 5, 2016
ISBN:9780805097344

Forgeries and Fakes: The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

Ellie was a twenty-six-year-old grad student working in art conservation when she was asked to make a copy of a 17th c painting by a female Dutch painter. The copy is her masterpiece. Ellie is complicit when the original painting is stolen and replaced with Ellie's copy. 

The painting's owner Marty recognized that his heirloom had been replaced with a forgery. He hired a private detective who leads him to Ellie. Marty assumes a fake identity to get close to Ellie. Each is hiding a truth, but find themselves drawn to each other. Their deceptions bring ruin into both their lives.

Forty years pass and Ellie and Marty are reunited when he loans his painting to the exhibit she is curating. Marty is full of regret as he faces coming death. Ellie's complicity haunts her; she knows she has built a house of cards and is certain her youthful indiscretion will be revealed.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos by Dominic Smith is related in three time periods, tracing the history of a painting over four centuries. The struggles and losses of Sara de Vos, a painter during the Dutch Golden Age, is told interspersed between the storyline of Marty and Ellie in the late 1950s when Ellie forges Sara's painting, and in the 2000s when Ellie and Marty are reunited.

I enjoyed reading this book. The writing is beautiful with lovely turns of phrases and memorable epigrams. Rooms 'bloat with darkness', a lie 'comes effortlessly, a deadbolt sliding into a groove." Ellie 'tries to uncover a breadcrumb trail of moral failure" in her history. 

There is psychological depth to Marty and Ellie as they struggle with moral decisions and their consequences. Regret, Marty says to Ellie, doesn't eat you alive; it keeps you alive. Marty's reflections on old age are darkly humorous. I do wish there had been a fourth time period in the novel; the missing 40 years would have been profoundly interesting, a time when Marty and Ellie hit rock bottom and had to rebuild their lives.

Sara de Vos was inspired by a real Dutch female painter. Sara's paintings are vividly described. Descriptions of the craft of painting in the 17th c and when Ellie makes her copy reveal the fatal flaw in Ellie's forgery. 

To read more about Dutch female painters of the 17th c. check out

Three Women Painters of the Dutch Golden Age

I realized I had read this author's book The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre some years ago and had enjoyed it.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

Dominic Smith

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

$26.00 hard cover

ISBN: 9780374106683

Publication Date: April 5, 2016

Smoke the Donkey; A Marine's Unlikely Friend

Hee Haw. This is not an April Fool's Day joke. Over $10,000 was spent to get a donkey from Iraq to the States. Fourteen months later the donkey died. Hee Haw.

It is crazy. In what world do people spend nine months tangled in bureaucratic tape and paperwork for a donkey?

Well, the Marines never leave a man behind.

It all started when Fobbits in Iraq presented Col. John Folsom with a donkey. He had joked that if the men ever found a donkey to bring it to him. Folsom was an animal lover and finagled the means to keep and provide the homeless waif, who happened to really like stealing the men's cigarettes, even lighted ones. Hence, his name--Smoke. Folsom discovered that Smoke had an integral role to play in the soldier's lives. Smoke became classified as a therapy animal. To the Marines he was a battle buddy.

When Col. Folsom returned stateside he provided a home for Smoke but after a while he decided to bring his battle buddy to the States. No easy task. But once secured in the U.S.A. Smoke became a great therapy animal for Marines with PTSD, a star promoter, and a real American icon with his own Facebook page. Sadly, his early neglected years left their mark on his health.

The story of Smoke is one more instance proving animals can break through our emotional fences and help us heal and find wholeness.

Written by Col. Folsom's wife Cate, an editor and news writer, the book includes primary sources and details of every step of Smoke's journey out of Iraq. Smoke and Folsom are the heart of the story. I started out enjoying the book but it bogged down when Smoke retreated to the background. I found myself speed reading through the middle.

The story does raise an interesting ethical question: Can we justify costs based only on longevity or also by impact on lives? For those who loved Smoke, what he brought to their lives was priceless.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Smoke the Donkey 
by Cate Folsom
University of Nebraska Press
Publication April 1, 2016
$24.95 hard cover
ISBN:9781612348117