Title: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende, translated from Spanish by Francis Riddle
Book Beginnings quote:
Vienna, November 1938 -- A sense of misfortune hung in the air.
Friday56 quote:
They fulfilled their mission of scaring the locals into submission by annihilating more than eight hundred people, half of them children, with an average age of six.
Summary: The Wind Knows My Name weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019. (Publisher)
Review: Isabel Allende is a reliably good author. In a writing career which has spanned five decades she gives voice to Latin American sensibilities with an eye to social and political turmoil. In The Wind Knows My Name she tells the tale of two children immigrants: Samuel who forced to leave Austria on a Kindertransport to Great Britain in 1938, escaping the Nazis without his parents; and Anita who travels from El Salvador with her mother in 2019, escaping unthinkable violence in her own country only to be separated from her mother in this country. As a social worker, Selena, and her lawyer partner, search for Anita's mother, trying to reunite the two, Anita is forced to live in a series of foster homes, many of them terrible places. Samuel, too, was forced to live in a series of homes in Britain during the war and afterwards. Both of these children were trapped in geopolitical violence and forced to navigate their circumstances in a new place on their own.
It breaks my heart when I hear about the atrocities that are occuring throughout our country by ICE agents looking to round-up immigrants, often separating parents and children with no way of finding each other ever again. This book, by drawing the parallels with what is happening at our border with Mexico and what happened to Jewish children during the Holocaust, bring the horrors into sharp focus. Thank goodness there are good people, like Selena, who are trying to save as many children as they can.
There is a happy-ish ending to this story, gratefully so, or no one would want to read it because of the very depressing message of cruelty it reports. I rated the book with 4.5 stars and look forward to discussing it in book club in a week.
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