The Hidden Child by Louise Fein

If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.

Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel,  frolicking  in a park, suddenly and out of nowhere Mabel begins to act in a most frightening way. A postman has just dropped his bike in shock as he points to the beautiful child in front of him. 

Eleanor turns in confusion.

Mabel! Sticks scattered around her, she’s sitting on the dusty ground, face twisted, her eyes weirdly rolling back. Her chin drops to her chest, once, twice, hands twitching. 

Eleanor’s feet are rooted to the ground in horror. Her daughter looks as though she’s been possessed, her normal sweet expression vanished behind the contorted features of her face. 

But this is not the first nor the last of these fits. Eleanor’s instinctive reaction is to brush of the momentary behavior, and she implores the postman not to fetch a doctor.  Besides her inclination to deny and hope the momentary aberration is just that, passing and of no significance, she is married to a psychologist who is a leader of the eugenics movement in the U.K., and who would be most embarrassed to admit his daughter is among the unfit who need to be weeded from society.

Fein skillfully weaves her story. Edward, the psychologist husband, insists that Mabel’s ailment must not be discovered, both to protect the child from being singled out and ridiculed, and to protect his own reputation within the movement. He insists that it will be best for all concerned if Mabel is locked away in a sanitarium and kept from public scrutiny. 

Although heartbroken, Eleanor cannot stand up to her husband and his professional stature and eventually defers to his judgment. Unable even to visit her young child, she slowly becomes more and more aware that her husband sees only what he wants to see and that he even skews his research to omit  evidence that would count against his theories regarding the improvement of the race via incarceration, sterilization and other drastic measures.

The story itself is compelling and so well written, but the controversy behind the theory is really the most important part of this novel. Fein, herself, has a child with epilepsy, and that no doubt adds to her careful and thorough research in writing this book. In her notes at the end of the novel:

I was therefore rather shocked that when I began to look into the ideas behind the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, including epilepsy, in the 1920s, I found , in fact, that Nazi Germany took its lead in this area from widespread and accepted eugenics ideas circulating in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The eugenics movement had been born in England in the late nineteenth century and was extremely widespread in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century.

The pseudo-science of eugenics and other theories such as craniology are thoroughly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in his superb set of essays, The Mismeasure of Man. Like Edward in this novel, many of the experiments meant to support the theories were manipulated such that only confirmatory data was allowed and contra evidence swept under the rug. 

This novel and the story stand on their own quite apart from the eugenics controversy, but the social and political importance of the book  needs to be emphasized. 

I will end with another quote from the author’s end notes:

Legislation was proposed for compulsory sterilization and incarceration of those considered “weak-minded,” a catchall phrase for those with learning difficulties as well as epileptics, criminals, those with behavioral difficulties, alcoholics and anyone else considered “undesirable” and ruinous to the health of the population in general.

Oh William by Elizabeth Strout

Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabeth’s Strout’s new novel, Oh William

And then I thought, Oh William!

But when I think Oh William!, don’t I  mean Oh Lucy! too?

Don’t I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!

Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.

But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.

This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.

Strout in her unique way, again reminds us that there are no ordinary people, that everyone is extraordinary, and that the simplest of day to day events is filled with mystery.

As she does in each of her novels, Strout revisits old characters. This time it is Lucy Barton who reappears. Like Strout, Lucy Barton is an author. Her most recent husband, David has died leaving her buried in grief. And she decides to tell us a few things about her first husband William with whom she has remained good friends after their divorce. They have two adult daughters together, and the two daughters have a half-sister from William’s last marriage. William has been married three times: Lucy, Joanne, and Estelle.

William has been having terrifying dreams and he finds it quite natural to confide in Lucy regarding those dreams. He wonders if the dreams have simply to do with getting older. 

“Maybe,” I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to me—and to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, “Do you want to see anyone to talk to about them?”

Strout’s writing is so simplistic, so flat, and yet her readers understand they are being given a very wise view of the world.  At times her writing seems almost like the awkward journal jottings of a high-schooler. And yet, and yet there seem to be profound insights  about marriage, about raising children, about respecting old relationships and getting beyond petty jealousy.

Both William and Lucy have had sad, lonely childhoods and few warm feelings about their mothers. 

There is this about my own mother:

I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy. 

The rather complicated and often humorous plot of this novel is, I think, much less important than Lucy’s asides; asides about choice and loneliness and not being able to let go of past hurts.

People are lonely, is my point here. Many people can’t say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.

The only other writer I can think of who is as skillful in uncovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives is Alice Munro, and like Munro who writes almost exclusively short stories, Strout makes her points in passing, in throw-off comments. Her insights cannot be easily summed up, her messages not easily articulated.

I will leave you with this heart-rending quote from Lucy.

There have been times—and I mean recently—when I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was with me my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)—to have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me.: There was no escape.

When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying. 

Oh Elizabeth, you genius story-teller, please keep writing.

A Single Thread by Tracy Chevalier

It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried ‘spinsters’ who are dubbed ‘surplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violet’s mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much so that she makes Violet’s life miserable, and Violet longs to get away from her home and town where she feels suffocated by the life of caring for her aging mother.

When Violet spots an ad for a typist in a nearby town, she applies, and immediately accepts the low-paying job when it is offered. 

When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. “Good-bye, Mother” she murmured. “I’ll see you next Sunday.”

Mrs. Speedwell sniffed,. “Don’t bother. I may be dead by then.”

And thus Violet begins her new life, living in a boardinghouse with other young women and working long hours typing forms for an insurance company. Excited by the new freedom, she puts up with meals of sardines on toast or beans on toast. 

She took herself to the cinema every week—her one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day. 

Her life is dreary and lonely until one day she goes to the grand cathedral in Winchester and happens onto a particular service, one filled with mostly older  women. She is not at the church to pray, ”prayers had died in the war alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men.”

It turns out to be a special mass for broderers, i.e. women who embroider seat cushions and kneelers  for the hard wooden benches of the cathedral. At first blocked from entering the group, she persists and eventually is allowed to be a part of the group. An so begins a new and much less socially impoverished  life as she befriends other broderers and comes under the very kind tutelage of Miss  Pesel, one of two women in charge of the group of women.

When I picked up this novel, I knew nothing of spinning, weaving, crocheting , or embroidering, but I was fascinated by the descriptions and by the friendships between the women. Although Violet has had very limited introduction to needlework, she quickly takes to it under the watchful eye of Miss Pesel. She also becomes friends with an older man, Arthur, who is a bell-ringer for the cathedral. Arthur is married to a woman who is frail and ailing, unable to recover from the loss of her son in the war.

In order to be allowed to attend the daytime broderers meetings, Violet comes up with a plan to improve efficiency in the insurance office  such that it will allow both she and Olive, the other typist to attend the meetings.

“But, Miss Speedwell, I  shall say this  idea came from me, if you don’t mind,” he added with a frown. “I can’t think what management would say about a girl having such a ...progressive idea”

The author, Chevalier, has such a wonderful ear for the nuances and prejudices of this time in a Europe decimated by one war and on the eve of another. 

Violet decides on a walking tour in the country in place of the holidays of the past spent with her mother and younger brother and his family. She has a frightening encounter with a man she calls the corn man, having met him in a cornfield and then followed by him. Having walked to Sthe small town where Arthur lives, she confides in him about the scare she has had. “ He frightened you?”

“Yes” Arthur looked at her waiting.

“It’s not easy being a woman on your your own,” Violet explained after a moment. “No one expects it, though there are plenty of us. The ‘surplus women’. One would think it would not be such a surprise to see a woman walk through a field, or have a cup of tea in a pub.”

This is such a lovely little novel; I didn’t expect to be so intrigued by it, reading it as a kind  of respite from two rather heavy novels, but by the end, I knew I had to call it to the attention of other readers.

Among the broderers, Violet becomes a special friend of Gilda, and Gilda seems to light up when yet another woman, DJ, Dorothy, shows up at meetings. 

When Gilda appeared—out of breath and shouting hello—DJ started,  and suddenly solidified, as if outlined by solid black. She did not stop smiling, but her eyes drifted toward the corner of the room as if to dodge attention. Gilda too seemed out of sorts, looking everywhere but at DJ, and laughing a little too brightly as she removed her cloche...Violet discovered that there was something to discover, though she did not yet understand what it was.

Only Violet and eventually Miss Pesel accept the relationship between the two women.

There was something around them that made them seem closer than others, although they were not actually standing closer or even looking at each other. It was like an invisible fence, penning them together.

“That’s what can happen when you’re a spinster.”

It was said quietly, behind Violet, one woman to another. There was sarcasm in the words and a harshness, and something like fear.. 

Violet comes to see just how lovely and natural the relationship between Gilda and DJ is, opening her eyes to new possibilities. 

Attachments by Jeff Arch

This is primarily a love story, a love triangle between two best friends and one girl loved by both. But it is an incredibly complex story full of lies and secrets. Stewart Goodman, known by all as Goody and Santamo Piccolo, known as Pick, are unlikely best friends. Goody is a quiet and reflective boy who ponders all the big questions, while Pick is brash, cynical and dismissive of all things spiritual. Laura is Pick’s girlfriend and the love of his life. The three become fast friends at the boarding school all three attend.

Years after the three leave the school, a teacher, Griffin, becomes the  dean of the school, and as the story begins Griffin is felled by a stroke, and his last conscious words uttered to his secretary who sees him fall are, Pick and Goody. Throughout the book, Griffin is suspended between life and death, on life support machines. There are other characters who sometimes act as narrator, but I’m not going to try to sum up the story. The author jumps from time to time and character to character in a dizzying manner, that makes the entire novel read as a kind of stream of consciousness.

I’m more interested in conveying a theme returned to again and again in the novel which I will call a struggle, a tension, between clear cold reason and spirituality. I see it as the author’s argument with himself about this tension. Much like Ian McEwan’s wonderful little novel Black Dogs, in which it is clear that McEwan favors the life of reason his philosopher brother defends , but feels the pull of  that which reason seems not able to explain. The black dogs represent the two sides; we might even say the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Plato uses a similar metaphor in his description of the tripartite soul: the black steed of passion or appetite, the white steed of spirt and reason as the charioteer.

Pick has a no nonsense view of all things, while Goody seems open to all religions. At one point, Pick takes Goody to task for talking admiringly of Jesus, though Goody is a Jew.

“They want you to behave a certain way,” Pick went on, “so they throw Jesus at you.  Look at history, for Christ’s sake”

Goody shook his head. “It wasn’t propaganda when it started though.”

“You think he was the Son of God?” Pick asked. “I didn’t think you guys were allowed to”

Goody crumbled up some more hash and dropped it into the pipe bowl. “To me, Jesus is...he’s like the older brother, you know? Like the ultimate older brother”... I mean God is the father, right? Everybody at least agrees with that.

“Everybody who believes in God.”

Goody looked at him, to see if he could actually mean that. “Well when you’re a kid, you know, your father...he’s this powerful thing.

“He’s this force,” Goody went on. “And he’s above you and he’s mysterious and everything comes from him. And then Jesus, he’s like your older brother—he explains your father to you. He’s off to the side, just a little. And from there he interprets things. So that you can understand what the hell is going on sometimes.

Pick looked at him. “That’s what the Jews think?”

“I don’t know what they think. Nobody ever talks about him.”

While I am clearly on the side of reason and defend atheism, I have a sense for what both McEwan and Arch are wrestling with.

This is a truly beautiful love story. The love between Goody and Pick is lovely and both characters are drawn fully and carefully. The love Laura has for each of the boys in turn  Is beautiful rather than trashy or deceitful. The love of Griffin for his wife and son, all of these loves are described so well. 

Because of the many narrators and the sudden, unannounced shifts of  time and place this is not an easy novel to follow. Added to that  is the obvious fact  that Arch is most comfortable as a screen writer, so almost all of the text is in the form of monologue or dialogue. 

This is just a beautiful book, and as touching an examination of the many kinds of love as i can recall. This is not a book I would have picked up as a matter of course, but it fell into my hands from one of the readers in a small group of friends who pass along books to each other, and I was deeply touched by it. 

In many ways Griffin, who never speaks for himself, is the glue that holds the book and the characters together. Does he survive the stroke and return to his school and his family? That is something  readers will have to determine for themselves. 

Take What You Can Carry by Gian Sardar

It’s 1979,  Olivia Murray, who is a secretary at a Los Angeles newspaper,  has aspirations of becoming a photojournalist.  Out of the blue, she has a chance to go to Iraq with her Kurdish boyfriend, ostensibly for a weeding of his cousin, but also because he needs to reunite with his family. And so begins this remarkable 2021 novel by Gian Sardar, Take What You Can Carry. 

In her acknowledgments at the end of the book, Sarder explains that "... Kurdistan is spread over four countries, so isolation has been both geographic as well as political." While Sardar is quick to point out that her book is a work of fiction, it is based on true events. Sardar’s father is from Kurdistan, and her mother an American. She explains that her father’s tales about his life in Kurdistan provide the kernel of the story she tells in the novel. “Growing up in Kurdistan of Iraq, my father and his family endured atrocities I could never fully capture with words.”

In  many ways this novel is a love story, Olivia and her Kurdish boyfriend, Delan, find their love and their very lives in danger. Delan has called his parents in Iraq to tell them he might show up for the wedding, but they must speak in code, since the family is political, and they know the government taps their phones, and he is not sure from their coded conversation whether his mother is telling him to come, that it is relatively safe, or  whether instead she is telling him not to come, that the risks are too great. 

Even before his trip to Iraq, Delan agitates in the U.S to inform his friends of the plight of the Kurds in Iraq. 

The United States and Kissinger had encouraged and funded them in a rise against the Iraqi government, as a favor to the Shah of Iran, but abandoned them when they no longer served their purpose...They never wanted us to win. That’s what the committee found. They wanted us only to fight and keep Baghdad busy. We were a pawn. Kurds quit their jobs, school, you name it. Everyone joined in to fight and to die in a battle we were never allowed to win.

More than two hundred thousand refugees when they abandoned us, when we were being slaughtered, and not one dollar of humanitarian aid from the United States. Our leader, Barzani, he begged Kissinger for the United states to help.

There is a lot of drama in this novel, and I don’t intend to give much of the plot away. Delan has a brother, Soran, who is a passionate gardener, and who says he must stay out of the fray, since he has an adopted daughter, Lailan, to care for. At one point Olivia questions Soran about his habit of bathing at night. He replies:

People in our family, they’ve always been political. So even in peace we had problems, Arrests. Imprisonments. But then the the kingdom was toppled in ’58  and the republic created. From then on no Kurds had peace. And the government bombed during the day.” He stops, as if this is all that needs to be said, but then sees that’s not the case. “Imagine, not having clothes on when the sirens go  off or when the ground starts to shake and you have to run. Imagine soap in your hair when you see the shadow of the plane.

We learned to live at night. To work, to bathe. When the time came, you had to run. Take what you can carry to the mountains. That is where we would go. The mountains to be safe.

Olivia learns to hear the common saying, Head for the Hills, in a new light.

Juxtaposed with the harrowing arrests and raids and constant fear, Sardar manages also to describe the colors and sounds and smells of Iraq, and to understand the history of that ancient land. She describes the vibrant colors of the dresses at the wedding they attend, so different than the bland whites of American weddings. 

In the field, she catches a flash of silver: the bride’s sisters and friends are dancing with knives. “They’re dancing with knives” 

He turns “They’re about to cut the cake. That’s to let him know they can handle knives. That he should be good to their sister. That they will protect her. 

There is so much color and excitement in this novel, and while it is often sad and frightening, there are also moments of great beauty and courage. Delan is known for his spontaneous kindness and generosity which is often impulsive and even dangerous. But one of his acts of kindness, turns out to save the family when there is an attack by government forces. This incident is one that Sardar explains is based on a real events in her Kurdish father’s life.

This is a wonderful book and I am so grateful that it fell into my hands. I was all set to review a different book, The Five Wounds, by, KIrstin Valdez Quade. But I read that book weeks ago, and it was already vanishing from memory, so I decided on this novel that I had just finished. 

Of Women and Salt by Gabriela Garcia

Gabriela Garcia’s 2021 debut novel is really a collection of interconnected stories, spanning several generations of women. The first story is about women cigar rollers in pre-Castro Cuba.

The air thickened. Maria Isabel had by then breathed so much tobacco dusts she developed regular nosebleeds, but the foreman didn’t permit workers to open the window slats more than a sliver—sunlight would dry the cigars. So she hid her cough. She was the only woman in the workshop. She didn’t want to appear weak.

A quick overview: Carmen came from Cuba to the U.S., and has always felt displaced. Her daughter, Jeanette, is addicted to drugs, and is determined to find out more about family history, and thus goes from Miami to Cuba to learn  more from her grandmother  than her very reticent mother will tell her. Carmen has taken in the daughter of neighbor who has been detained by ICE. Jeanette travels to Cuba and the stories of the three women unravel in  snippets via the stories of women who write down their histories. 

Once in Cuba, now under Castro, she begins to hear or read the stories. 

Study has become a habit among them; today they leave behind the cockfight in order to read a newspaper or book; now they scorn the bullring; today it is the theater the library, and the centers of good association where they are seen in constant attendance.

While the author is quite willing to expose the difficulties of the poor in Castro’s Cuba (and the racism that is denied, and claimed to be only an American problem), she makes it clear that most are much better off than before when American corporations took from Cuba its wealth of natural goods and gave back little.

The grandmother in Cuba has seen the brutal treatment of those who shout for change. She sees the coming revolution that is born of blood and poverty.  Married to a disenchanted intellectual who joins the struggle, she is denied access to the group of agitators once he knows she is pregnant. 

She placed one hand on her belly and felt the something  in her move and stretch as if seeking its freedom, felt as if the whole world were her womb. She wanted to write her own words. She wanted to write her life into existence and endure. Perhaps a piece of her knew death crouched close.

While much of the book is concerned with the political struggles that led to the overthrow of corrupt, American controlled dictators, and then the new set of problem under Castro, the author is also swept away by the incredible natural beauty of Cuba. In a chapter titled “An Encyclopedia of Birds”, the birds a metaphor for captivity and the struggle for flight and freedom:

The burrowing parrot also known as the Patagonian conure also as the burrowing parakeet is the only bird species with eyelashes. This is a little-known fact. Another little-known fact is that burrowing parrots, while often purchased as pets, become exasperated if caged too long. Burrowing parrots need interaction. They need color. If you separate two burrowing parrots, in short order the one left behind will die. She will die of loneliness.

Birds fly even if it kills them.

She speaks of the baby jails where the children of deportees are kept, and of the children’s crayon drawings of birds, there is no sun in the drawings. 

I don’t know what you remember, but they didn’t tell us where they were taking us. I thought we were going before a judge finally. I thought I could argue my case, my credible fear. I had practiced. Instead they boarded us onto a bus with bars on the windows and dropped us off in Mexico. We were Salvadoran by nationality but Mexico was just a few hours away, and that’s where we’d come from , so there they left us. Said, Find you way home. We were supposed to be turned over to Mexican immigration officials, but I guess they didn’t show up. Or they thought we were Mexican.

Story after story about women and children. 

Jeanette had added her own words, We are more than we think we are. 

I will leave you with the last words of the book which sum up the author’s view well.

And though Ana had no idea why Jeanette had written those words, she chose to believe the sentence, the scribble, was a cry across time. Women? Certain women? We are more than we think we are. There was always more. She had no idea what else life would ask of her, force out of her, but right then  there was cake and candles and this, a gift. She thought that she, too, might give away the book someday, though she had no idea to whom. Someone who reminded her of herself maybe. Someone drawn to stories.

Garcia is a wonderful story-teller, and she understands the power of stories. 

The Cold Millions by Jess Walter

What Jess Walter shows us in his 2020 novel The Cold Millions is that he is a wonderful story-teller, a fine historian, and like one of his characters guilty of “first-degree aggravated empathy.”

This lovely historical novel is on one hand simply a story of the love between two brothers, Gig and Rye Dolan who hop freight trains together, traveling from town to town and job to job. They are part of the cold millions, that is, the millions upon millions of workers who struggle day to day simply to live, while a few wealthy owners live lives of almost unfathomable wealth and luxury.

While Walter is quick to inform  us in his afterward that this is a book of fiction, he also makes it clear that some of his characters are based on real life people, one of whom, is “the great labor organizer, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn”,  a key character in the book. Gurley is a mesmerizing and powerful speaker and organizer. Even the skeptics listen when she speaks.

Listen brothers and sisters, have we ever seen such trying times? She went through a list of outrages, fifteen-hour workdays and women dying at their sewing machine, men crushed in cave-ins while their families got nothing, copper kings and shipping magnates living like royalty while poor workers couldn’t even afford a flop bed, families in tents and hovels, workers given no rights and tossed aside when they were too broken or sick or old to work.

Clearly Walter shares the sense of outrage expressed by Flynn. He tells us that his own father was a union man. Gig, the older brother joins the IWW, although he discourages his brother Rye from getting involved. While Walter’s sympathies are clearly with the so-called Wobblies, he carries on a kind of debate regarding the efficacy of their non-violent methods. One character, Early Reston, clearly thinks non-violent methods will not work, and that rather than piecemeal reform the whole structure must be blown apart. At times in the book both Gig and Ryan become disenchanted with the methods of the IWW.

Rye felt demoralized. It didn’t matter what he did, what Gurley did, what Fred Moore did, what any of them did. Somewhere there was a roomful of wealthy old men where everything was decided. Beliefs and convictions, lives and livelihoods, right and wrong—these had no place in that room, the scurrying of ants at the feet of a few rich men.

It made me think that Early Reston was right, in his way ... that maybe it was the castle that needed to be blown up...

While it is clearly the struggles between owners and labor that is the focus of this novel, the side stories are also fascinating. The story of Ursula the Great, a performer who enters a cage with a full grown cougar, and then strips to near nudity as the crowd looks on partly horrified, partly titillated.  There is also a sweet tale of budding love Rye feels for Gurley, although she is married and pregnant, and nothing comes of it.

I much appreciated the argument Walter has with himself throughout the book regarding the possibility of real change and the methods that can achieve it. At one point when Rye is called out as one of the Wobblies by a salesman:

Rye didn’t answer. But at that moment, he felt done with it all—done with the beatings, done with Taft, done with Lem Brand and Ursula, done pretending they could stand on soapboxes and draw justice out of the air. Early was right. Rye didn’t believe in anything but a job, a bed, some soup. 

If you read this novel, be sure to leave some good reading energy for the acknowledgments and the short closing essay by Walter: “The Undercurrents of History”.  Walter talks of his own growing up in Spokane, Washington, and of how “The World came to me in books.”

With The Cold Millions, I set out to write about the sort of working-class Spokane family in which I had grown up. My dad’s father, a rancher named Jess Walter, first arrived in Eastern Washington on a train he’d hopped as a vagrant field-worker; my mother’s dad, Ralph, was an itinerant laborer in the 1930s who later died on a construction site when a crane fell on him. My own father, Alfa Bruce Walter, was a lifetime steelworker and union leader who worked almost forty years in an aluminum rolling mill.

For those readers who want to go to original historical sources, Walter provides an extensive list of his own sources in addition to his personal experience. For all who have labored, and for all who feel keenly the injustices of the world, this is a must read, and it is also a wonderful story.

Blood Grove by Walter Mosley

Easy Rawlins is a tough and hard-boiled as  any detective in the mystery genre. He has been asked by a Viet Nam vet to look into a possible murder in a southern California orange grove.

I would have turned him down out of hand if it weren’t for my understanding of the America I both love and loathe.

In America everything is about either race or money or some combination of the two., Who you are, what you have, what you look like, where your people came from, and what god looked over their breed--these were the most important questions. Added into that is the race of men and the race of women. The rich, famous, and powerful believe they have a race and the poor know for a fact that they do. The thing about it is that most people have more than one race. White people have Italian, Germans, Irish, Poles, English, Scots, Portuguese, Russian, old-world Spaniard, new-world rich, and many combination thereof. Black people have a color scheme from high yellow to moonless night, from octoroon to deepest Congo. And new-world Spanish have every nation from Mexico to Puerto Rico, from Columbia to Venezuela, each of which is a race of its own--not to mention the empires, from Aztec to Mayan to Olmec. 

I’m a black man closer to Mississippi midnight than its yellow moon. Also I’m a westerner, a Californian formerly from the South–Louisiana and Texas to be exact. I’m a father, a reader, a private detective, and a veteran.

In his most recent novel, Blood Grove, WalterMosley lets Easy describe the America of the 1960s in which a black detective is a rarity. In lieu of payment from a client, Easy is given a yearlong lease of a pale yellow, 1968 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI which will become his at the end of that year unless he is paid sixty thousand dollars. Since he has a written contract showing he has the right to drive such a fine car, he decides to drive into Beverly Hills. 

I had even made it a block or two past that when the flashing red lights appeared in the exta-wide rearview mirror. It was one of those wake-up calls that happen in the lives of black men and women in America when they mistakenly believe they have crossed over to freedom.

I pulled to the curb, put both hands on the steering wheel, and sat patiently awaiting the rendering of the calculation of my situation. That equation was a matter of simple addition: Rolls-Royce + black man without driver’s cap + any day of the century = stop and frisk, question and dominate—and, like the solution of pi, that process had the potential of going on forever.

The whole process took about half and hour. If I added up all the half hours the police, security forces, MPs, bureaucrats, bank tellers, and even gas station attendants had stolen from my life, I could make me a twelve-year-old boy versed in useless questions, meaningless insults, and spite as thick as black tar.

Although the story told in Blood Grove is a detailed and interesting one, what I find much more interesting is the social commentary Mosley provides along the way. Easy quickly garages the Rolls and borrows a plain blue car, knowing that the he will be unable to drive the Rolls to do his business without daily repeats of being pulled over and questioned or worse.

In this, his newest novel, Mosley adds an ingredient he had touched on in an earlier novel Little Green, his fasciation with counter-culture youth. 

Driving west down the Strip was slow going, but I liked the streets filled with hippies, head shops and discos. There was what they were calling a cultural revolution going on among the youth of America. They wanted to drop out and end the war, make love for its own sake, and forget the prejudices of the past. These long-haired, dope-smoking, often unemployed wanderers gave me insight into what my country, MY COUNTRY might be.. 

There is the usual cast of characters in this novel: Easy’s adopted children, Jesus and Feather, the dangerous best friend Raymond, called Mouse, who is usually called in to do the dirty work for Easy, a couple of good cops who help Easy obtain information and get him out of scrapes with the law. 

After many harrowing adventures, Easy helps the Viet Nam vet and solves the mystery, giving the reader his summation of Easy’s reflections on the state of the world. 

Nineteen sixty-nine was an interesting year. There was strong anti-war action from the colleges and universities and all kinds of black political insurgence. The sleeping giant of white guilt was awakening and there seemed to be some hope for the future. If you were innocent enough, or ignorant enough, you might have believed that things were improving in such a way that all Americans could expect a fair shake.

But of my many flaws, neither innocence nor ignorance played a part.

It seems to me that it is easier to describe and call out racial injustice as a writer of fiction than as a social scientist or reporter. Walter Mosley describes things as he sees them, and he does so with the direct experience of what it is like to be black and poor in America. He also understands how racism and sexism are connected, and he blows the whistle loudly and clearly. If you, like many readers I know, have read Devil in a Blue Dress, but not others of Mosley’s many novels, I recommend them all to you as wonderfully told stories and stark pieces of social commentary

The Orphan’s Tale by Pam Jenoff

I know next to nothing about circuses or aerialists, but reading Pam Jenoff’s fascinating novel, The Orphan’s Tale has me wanting to know lots more about both. This novel is about two women who, for very different reasons are on the run during WWII. Noa is a young woman whose parents have kicked her out of her home because of an unwed pregnancy. 

The girls’ home where I lived after my parents found out I was expecting and kicked me out had been located far from anywhere in the name of discretion and they could have dropped me off in Mainz, or at least the nearest town. They simply opened the door, though, dismissing me on foot. I’d headed to the train station before realizing that I had nowhere to go.

When her very non-Aryan son is born with dark eyes and olive skin, she is not allowed even to hold him, before he is whisked away. Working as a cleaner in the railway station, she lives in a tiny storage room. One night she hears a sound coming from a boxcar. “The sound continues to grow, almost a keening now, like a wounded animal in the brush.” When she slides the door of the boxcar open, “There are babies, tiny bodies too many to count, lying on the hay-covered floor of the railcar, packed close and atop one another. Most do not move and I can’t tell whether they are dead or sleeping” But one baby has woven booties on and on impulse, she grabs the now crying baby and takes it to the little storage closet where she sleeps. Once she realizes there is no way she can keep the child and still do her job, she runs away with it.

The second woman, Astrid, is Jewish and comes from a circus family. She is married to German officer who turns her out to save his career. Although her family circus is no longer together and, for all she knows, has been arrested or killed by the Nazis, another circus shelters her and takes her on as an aerialist, a trapeze artist. 

Noa stumbles onto the circus as she runs from the police, and she, too, is taken in by the kind circus owner, both she and her stolen baby given shelter. The two women with such completely different backgrounds start a relationship that begins in hostility but blossoms over time into a wonderful friendship.

I will not give away much more of the story here except to say that Astrid trains Noa to become an aerialist and both travel by rail with the circus into Nazi occupied France. As we learn from the author in her afterward remarks, the kernel of the novel begins from her reading two stories, one about a boxcar full of babies, “ripped from their families and headed for a concentration camp, too young to know their own names,” the Unknown Children. And the second about a German circus that sheltered Jews during the war. 

The author obviously researched extensively about circuses in general and about The Circus Althoff in particular. The reader is treated to long descriptions of how the circus travels from town to town, set up from scratch at each location. We readers are also given hair-raising descriptions of how the aerialists perform protected only by their skill and very inadequate nets. 

While it is obvious that author Jenoff mainly wants to tell the story of how Jews were sheltered by German circuses, she develops her characters carefully and fully so the story, itself, is fascinating quite aside from its political and moral messages.

I am told by reader friends that there is a large circus community in Portland, and I find myself driven to learn more about the history of circuses and aerialists. This is love story of the very best sort; it is heartwarming and frightening in equal measures. Although a fairly long novel, I predict that most readers will read it in a sitting or two. Once started it is hard to put down.