Zeitoun by Eggers (4 stars)

This is the true story of Abdulrahman. Zeitoun and his family in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.  Their Kafkaesque experience demonstrates the ineffectiveness of government assistance and the inherent bias in our law enforcement and military societies against people who are of different faiths and ethnicities. Before hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, A. Zeitoun sent his wife and 4 children to Baton Rouge to stay with her relatives.  He chose to stay in New Orleans to look after his business and several rental properties as well as their own home.  After the hurricane Zeitoun recognized that he could be of help to the residents or animals who were stranded.  He found a canoe and rowed around the city helping where he could.  His wife begged him to leave after hearing reports of the terrible damage and lack of services in the city. She also saw the terrible flooding on T.V.  However, Zeitoun chose to stay in order to be of help.  His actions were at times heroic.  Unfortunately, the police and military suspecting him of looting, arrested Zeitoun, his tenant and his Syrian friend while they were visiting in the tenant’s house.  Because Zeitoun was a Syrian Muslim and because of military and police over reaction to the situation, Zeitoun found himself imprisoned. He was never read his rights.  He was not permitted to consult with an attorney and he was kept incommunicado from the outside world for more than 2 weeks.  His wife did not know what had become of him and she feared the worst.  He was not permitted to phone her.  No one would phone her on his behalf.  In part this was because there were few working phones and no judicial system in effect during the catastrophe.  Zeitoun was held in a dickinsonian prison.  I understand the point this book was trying to make.  However, I felt it failed in two respects.  First Kathy came from a dysfunctional family with 9 children.  Her conversion to Islam had more to do with that then her romantic attraction to Islam.  The book hints at this but does not emphasize it.  More should have been made of this.  She seems to want to be singled out for discrimination because of her hijab.  This is not normal behavior.  Additionally, Kathy had a son from a prior marriage.  He is barely mentioned in the book.  Zeitoun speaks with great affection and love for his three daughters, but he never mentions any feelings for his stepson.  I suspect there were problems in the relationship, because when the stepson turns 18 he moves out of the house to live with a friend.  There is no talk of his future or his further education being supported by Zeitoun.  So in the absence of any information on the relationship, I suspect it was not good.  Mentioning it would have taken away from the heroic Pollyanna image of Zeitoun that the author wanted to create.  I also do not understand why Kathy had to stay with relatives in a crowded and difficult situation when she could have stayed in a motel.  I know that hotel living can be expensive, but Zeitoun had a successful contracting business that surely could have afforded a two week stay in an inexpensive motel.  Instead Kathy drove to Phoenix to stay with Yuko, her friend. She then had to drive back when she learned that her husband was in prison in Louisiana.

Whites by Norman Rush ( 5 Stars)

This is a masterful collection of short stories. I do not normally love short stories and find “slice of life” stories boring.  However, these charming tales each have a beginning, a middle and an end.  If you are a fan of The No.1 Ladies Detective Agency Series by Alexander McCall Smith which take place in Gaborone Botswana, you owe it to yourself to read about the other Botswana portrayed in Rushes’ book. The characters are all distinct and other than minor interactions they have little to do with each other’s story.  They also are impactful.  Some are disturbing or frightening. It is impossible to remain objective and the reader becomes involved.  Perhaps, my two favorite were the stories about Ione and Frank ,”Instruments of Seduction” and “Alone in Africa.”  How can two people married to each other know so little about their mates? I am now going to watch a video on how to string sugar peas.  I could not put this book down and am going to seek out his other novel long book if it is in print. I do not know the author, and I am not a shill for him.  I read the kindle edition.

Flowers In The Blood by Gay Courter 3 Stars

This is an example of “chick lit”. I will probably be lambasted for labeling this book “chick lit” and in particular by Jewish women.  Let me begin by saying that I am a Jewish woman who loves reading about the Jewish experience including the Holocaust. Yet this book just did not do it for me.  It is very long (630 pages). My test to characterize a book as “chick lit” is would a straight man read this book unless asked to do so by his female significant other?  My answer is a resounding “No!”

We meet little 5 year old Dinah Sassoon, daughter of an affluent opium trader and a pillar of the close knit Calcutta Jewish community at the turn of the century.  Her father is on one of his lengthy sojourns during which he buys the poppies, has them processed and sells them in Shanghai to the Chinese.  Dinah’s mother is young, lonely, and very beautiful.  She is addicted to the opium her husband sells and takes on two lovers.  Her life style was not one that was accepted in the Calcutta Jewish community.  However, so long as it was kept behind closed doors, no one paid it any mind.  However, one night one of Dinah’s mother’s jealous lovers murders her as she lay on her chaise longue in her bedroom.  Poor little Dinah walks in on the scene of her mother covered in blood.  She is heartsick.  The hired help and the relatives do their best to cover things up and protect Dinah from the horrors of her mother’s sudden death.  However, Dinah is bereft and lonely and she cries bitterly for her mother.  She has a two year old brother as well.  Her father’s parents refuse to allow her mother to be buried in the family cemetery plot.  The entire community is aware of the notorious death. Additionally, because Dinah’s mother has this history and because of all the suspicion about such things, Dinah is marked as unmarriageable in spite of her father’s great wealth. However, her father remarries a much younger and somewhat dimwitted teenage bride with whom he has a child and who dies shortly after she gives birth.  He marries a third time to a Bene Israel.  The Jewish community believe Bene Israel are Jews who have mixed with the native Indian people, are not 100% Jewish blood, and who are therefore, not well accepted by the Calcutta Jewish community.  Yet Dinah becomes extremely fond of the third wife and her father’s children with her.

Meanwhile, Dinah’s father though recognizing that Dinah may be his brightest child begins to prepare his three sons to learn and takeover the business.  Dinah begs him to teach her and he begrudgingly teaches her bits and pieces, but he will not teach her the most critical business areas.  She begins to learn on the sly.  Her father plans to see her married and is sure her husband will provide for her.

However, when Dinah is old enough to have her marriage arranged, no appropriate suitor can be found.  Year after year she is still single and without a match. Even a much older gentlemen who Dinah did not want to accept backed out after giving the proposal a second thought.  Poor Dinah may be forever a spinster because of the tragic circumstances of her mother’s death and the superstitions that were prevalent in the era.  Finally, Dinah manages to acquire a husband named Edwin.  He is from the distant Djaarling Jewish community and is in the tea business.  Most people thought that he was willing to marry Dinah, because his family was not so completely aware of her background since they lived so far away.

However, Edwin’s family had a secret too.  Edwin was a flagrant homosexual.  The marriage is never consummated and though Dinah and Edwin remain lifelong friends, the marriage is annulled.  Dinah marries again to a sufficiently ardent suitor but one who has no fortune or head for business.  He becomes involved with a wily and dissolute maharajah and loses whatever business interests he has including the shipping investment he made with Dinah’s dowry.

In the end Dinah rescues herself and becomes head of the family business.  She runs the entire opium trade and moves the family into more respectable and legitimate businesses.  The rest of her family is happy to let her do so.  Throughout the book we see evidence of the social strata in India.  The British Christians were at the top.  The Indian Jews came next and then the Indians.  The Indians were not welcome in the British clubs.  The Jews while not offered membership were often welcome guests at their celebrations and parties.  There were few non-Indian Europeans there so the British were willing to forge relationships, alliances, and friendships with Jews when they might not have had they been living in The British Isles, the U.S, Canada, or Australia. It was interesting to observe the different strata.

These story lines could have made for heady reading, and I typically love epic stories about fictional Jewish experiences.  However, the characters are mere cardboard cutouts.  Dinah is shuffled from one incident to another.  I had a hard time finishing this book and often thought of putting it down.  It was tedious and mediocre.  I do not recommend it.

All The Light We Cannot See by Doerr ( Five Stars)

 In this intricate and complex novel about a blind French girl and a brilliant though small German teen both trying to survive WWII, the author weaves a gripping tale using various metaphors for “light.” Marie-Laure goes blind at age 6 and  lives contentedly with her widowed father in Paris near the museum of natural history where he is the chief locksmith who holds keys to every exhibit and safe.  They live a relatively peaceful life.  She accompanies him to his work daily where she is schooled on many subjects by the experts on the museum staff. Her devoted father whittles and carves a miniature version of their neighborhood in wood so she can learn her way in spite of being blind.  They spend all their time together, traversing the public gardens on the weekends.  He purchases a braille edition of the first volume of Jules Vernes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  She is ecstatic and enamored of the book.  On special occasions like her birthday he carves unusual puzzle blocks that become buildings in the model.  She learns to open them by solving each puzzle.  Secreted within is a treasure of some sort like a bon bon. 

Suddenly the Germans invade France and Marie and her father flee to a coastal town in Brittaney called Saint-Malo where her now deceased grandfather once lived and where his brother, Maire’s great uncle resides.  They move into the house of her troubled uncle. He suffers from shell shock from world war 1 and secrets himself up in an attic room where he fixes, builds and broadcasts from radios. He regularly broadcasts science lessons about magnetic fields, the brain, radio waves, magnetism and other subjects.  Some days he locks himself in his room and does not come out for 3 days.  A woman named-  cares for the house and the man.  It is into this situation Marie and her father find a sanctuary where they may live in more peace than would be possible in Paris.  Before leaving her father is asked to carry with him a very valuable diamond held among the museum’s mineral collections.  He secrets the stone into one of the buildings which contained a puzzle box.

Werner and his sister Jutta grow up in an unhealthy mining town.  Their widowed father dies and both he and Jutta are placed in the local orphanage run by a French speaking nun named Elena.  The country is very poor after the loss of WWI, and the children scarcely have enough to eat, enough soap with which to wash, or proper bedding and clothing.  Still Werner becomes engrossed in how radios work.  With cast off parts and jimmy rigged supplies he builds a crude radio.  It is on that radio that besides beautiful music, they hear the lessons broadcast by Marie- Laure’s uncle from Saint Malo.  These lessons and the music keep their souls alive.

Werner is selected to attend a brutal academy for Hitler youth because of his precocious ability with radios.  There he develops a method for triangulating radio signals which is then used to identify resistance radio operators’  locations.  Germany is losing the war, and it becomes desperate for soldiers. Werner is inducted at age 16 and is placed under the protection of a huge 18 year old he met at the academy.  V is to protect this radio operator as he scours the countryside searching for illegal radio operations in occupied countries in Europe and the Ukraine.

Meanwhile a vicious Nazi is hunting for the diamond secreted out by Marie’s father.  The museum in an abundance of caution in hiding this priceless gem, sends 4 or 5 of them into hiding, but only one is genuine.  This Nazi hunts down each one.  He is further motivated by his own illness.  He is dying of a cancer that is in his throat or neck glands.  The history of the diamond is that whoever has possession of the stone will never die.  The Nazi officer hopes to find it to satisfy the German high command but also as a way to save his own life.

Marie-Laure’s father is taken prisoner and she is left with non-communicative great uncle Ettienne and his housekeeper.  She is devastated by the loss and refuses to leave her bed and then the house for weeks.  The housekeeper finally entices her with a trip to the beach.  They begin walking the streets and become part of the resistance movement.  Marie-Laure picks up messages hidden in loaves of bread and which are then broadcast by Ettienne.

Of course, Werner comes across Marie-Laure when he arrives in Saint-Malo.  She is a red head, and he is immediately reminded of a 6 year old red headed girl who he first saw in a town walking down the street with her mother.  Next he sees her with a bullet in her head laying in water with her dead mother nearby.  The image of this senseless killing of a pretty feminine little girl haunts him.