23. A Woman in Amber

I think perhaps that I have owned this book for quite some time and if I have read it before, I don’t remember it – I find this highly unlikely. At any rate, I am honored to have read it now. A Woman in Amber by Agate Nesaule is a startling memoir of the author’s childhood experiences during the Russian and German occupation of her homeland of Latvia. While the horrors of the war were bad enough in her own country, her Lutheran father and mother, along with other family members, were forced to flee from the competing armies. Their journey was remarkable in complexity and perhaps luck.

As I read her accounts of war, I wondered what the appropriate age level would be for this memoir. The scenes described are brutal and difficult to think about or discuss. The author solved my problem in two ways. First, as a new immigrant to the United States, she learned English by reading tremendous works of literature. Her teachers questioned whether she was old enough to read such works. Her life experiences and understanding of the beauty and sorrow of the world made her absolutely capable of reading Anna Karenina at 10 years old. Second, I would like to share some of her final words in the book:

But the world is full of pain. Anne Frank, Heidi, and Hilda are dead, but Kurds still freeze on the hillsides, Bosnian women have to live on after rape, Rwandan children stand waiting, too emaciated to beg….But then the sun touches the blossoms again. We have to believe that dreams are meaningful, we have to believe that even the briefest human connections can heal. Otherwise life is unbearable. (p. 280)

So I think any child interested in learning about human pain and human healing should be able to absorb the richness of the story that Nesaule was finally able to tell. She endured the war, shameful indignities at the hands of Americans, a disastrous marriage, and finally through therapy and trust, Nesaule has given us her story; a unique memoir of the horrors of World War II. The other part of her equation of survival and hope is education. Early in her life, she learned from poet Karlis Skalbe that, The riches of the heart do not rust. (p. 121) To the Latvians, this meant that even if you lost every material thing, family, and country – no one can take away that which has been learned. In spite of near constant fear and depression, Nesaule completed her Ph.D. in Women’s Literature and taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. The book won the 1996 American Book Award.

While you will need to read the book to understand my final comment, I am very happy that she reconciled with her mother, if only in a dream. Sometimes dreams represent more clearly our reality.

TITLE: A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile
AUTHOR: Agate Nesaule
COPYRIGHT: 1995
PAGES: 280
TYPE: memoir, World War II
RECOMMEND: Stunningly beautiful book with so much we need to hear and learn.

15. Forbidden Bread

Let me begin this review with thanks to LibraryThing for providing me with the opportunity to read this wonderful book. The second thing is that my lifelong dream has been to be a Slovak peasant – knowing of course, as author Erica Johnson Debeljak discovers in her book Forbidden Bread that this group doesn’t exist in Central Europe as the romanticized vision I have in my head. But when Erica first moved to Slovenia with her lover and fiancé, the rural lifestyle and traditions were still common and she describes these with great detail.

When Erica Johnson met and married Slovenian poet Ales Debeljak she moved across the world to Slovenia, just as this country was swirling with national pride and development in a post-Communist world. Erica did not speak the language, did not understand the culture, and wanted desperately to please her new husband and his family. She chronicles her difficulties, challenges, and triumphs in this very funny memoir of adaptation. For anyone who has studied European history, the bureaucracy came as no surprise, but her funniest encounters with the red tape were found in her stories of being pregnant.

Debeljak supplements her stories with photos from her own collection. The reader truly gets a sense of their daily life, even over time. Like the author, I was sad with the last chapter which explains that even during her short time in Central Europe, many things had changed. The things that endeared her new country to her were obsolete, but not forgotten.

TITLE: Forbidden Bread
AUTHOR: Erica Johnson Debeljak
COPYRIGHT: 2009
PAGES: 304
TYPE: non-fiction, memoir
RECOMMEND: Because I love Central Europe, I loved this book. It is hard for me to separate out these feelings to know if you would also love it.

6. Unpolished Gem: My Mother, My Grandmother, and Me

Wah! What a fantastic memoir! Alice Pung has done a wonderful job of explaining in her own witty way exactly what it was like to grow up between two cultures. As an Asian girl growing up in Australia, Alice was insulated by her extended family even as she tried to fit in with the world in which she had to live. While we learn how one young woman experienced acculturation and assimilation, we learn even more about the culture the family brought with them to Australia from the killing fields of Cambodia.

Alice was born in 1981 shortly after her family immigrated to Australia and was blessed and cursed to live with both her mother and her paternal grandmother. The two women continuously used Alice as a pawn in their dislike for one another. Of course, Alice learned to use this to her advantage. Even so, she could not escape having to care for her younger sibling or to venture out into a world that remained foreign to the two older women. It is through these two women that we, and Alice, learn about the culture that was left behind in Cambodia. Alice comments on her grandmother’s character, Yet characters are only fixed through experience, and usually bad experience. Before character there is only personality, and who knows what kind of person my grandmother was back then? (p. 47) In another comment which showed the place of women in culture, a place Alice was determined to escape from, Alice says about keeping house and caring for all of the children in the neighborhood, I was not won over by their sedulous flattery. Girls only matured faster because they had to do more. (p. 94)

Pung manages to explain or dispel cultural stereotypes, even as she tries desperately to live in both worlds, make her parents proud, and find her own way. My favorite repeating cultural wisdom is regarding hurtful words that are often used to destroy the ones we love: Words with bones in them, my grandmother calls them. Words to make the other person fall flat on their back and die a curly death, my mother says. The sharp ones, the ones you can use if ever you need a weapon to protect yourself. (p. 36). Of course, we often only think we are protecting ourselves. In many cases, words with bones in them are intended to choke our victims.

Pung’s writing is very concise and beautifully descriptive. Describing her mother, she writes, But there is only so much the camera can catch. It does not capture the times when she laughs, her head flung back, nostrils flared, like a happy hippopotamus with squinched-closed eyes and blunt teeth, a few of them missing. (p. 243)

I would like to thank Plume and Penguin for allowing me to read and review this wonderful book. The Penguin Reading Guide has a wonderful conversation with the author. Read it here. I look forward to the forthcoming book by Ms. Pung as I expect her writing to only get better as she continues to share her humor and reflections. I loved this delightful memoir.

TITLE: Unpolished Gem: My mother, my grandmother, and me
AUTHOR: Alice Pung
COPYRIGHT: February 2009 (American release); originally published 2006 in Australia
PAGES: 282
TYPE: non-fiction, memoir
RECOMMEND: If you are interested in Asian culture, or even coming of age stories, you will enjoy this debut work.

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5. The Mighty Queens of Freeville

A big Thank You to Hyperion Books for giving me the opportunity to read and review Amy Dickinson’s The Mighty Queens of Freeville. What a fantastic and relatable narrative which will leave her readers wondering which side of her family tree links up with their own. Never mind that she grew up in a very small town in upstate New York. Each summer I lived with my extended family in Western Tennessee and I am quite sure we must be related somehow because there were many Mighty Queens living in my small town in the Deep South. In fact, the cover could be a picture of my own family reunion when I was about ten. I vividly remember it because my aunt and grandmother had decided that, in spite of my lack of tatas, I needed a training bra. I was not quite sure what I was training for, but my three male cousins certainly knew that they were training for the bra strap snapping championship of the world. After being chased and tortured to the point of tears for an hour or so, I took off the offending bra and hid it in the cabinet under the sink in my aunt's bathroom. I assume they found it eventually, but had the grace not to mention it to me.

While Mighty Queens is not an in depth account of Amy Dickinson’s life, readers get a strong sense of how Amy and her daughter Emily grew up together through bad times and good. A single mother, Amy was devoted to her daughter even as she tried to make sense of her own life. In chapters dealing with her divorce, dating, and coming home, Amy made me laugh out loud repeatedly. Coming from a family of strong women, I could relate. Describing her own family, Amy writes, These are the women of my world – the Mighty Queens of Freeville – who have led small lives of great consequence in the tiny place that we call home. (p. 9)

Although it may seem disconcerting to some readers, I loved the back and forth, the future and the past narrative that flows throughout the book. Amy relates what is happening to what has happened and even to the possibilities of what may happen. In many ways, this is how we all think. As someone who always loves a good short story about the human condition, this style was very pleasing to me. In fact, for me, this stylistic choice added to the character and impact of the book.

As an early and frequent contributor to various NPR productions and the new Dear Abby (Ask Amy) for the Chicago Tribune and 200 syndicated papers, Amy Dickinson has become very successful. As we read this book, we realize that perhaps success has not changed her too much, she is still the daughter of a woman from Freeville, she is still the mother of a daughter from Freeville, and her heart remains with these women with whom she has shared this wonderful, albeit sometimes painful, life.

If my review has not done this book justice and you cannot decide whether you should run out and purchase it, please take a look at the author’s website. I know I am a Mighty Queen; you might be as well.

TITLE: The Mighty Queens of Freeville
AUTHOR: Amy Dickinson
COPYRIGHT: 2009
PAGES: 224
TYPE: non-fiction, memoir
RECOMMEND: Because these people were like my relatives, I loved it.

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