Recent Reviews
When The Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. One of the stories I remember from my childhood involved the Tanforan Race Track just south of San Francisco. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Americans of Japanese descent were held at this racetrack before they were forced on trains and sent to one of ten internment camps. My mother often recounts her father driving their family to Tanforan to bear witness to this wrong. My grandfather said to my mother and uncle, “ You should know that treating people this way is immoral.”
I recently told this story to a friend of mine who suggested I read Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel, When The Emperor Was Divine. I highly recommend it.
The novel begins, “The sign had appeared overnight. On billboards and trees and the backs of the bus-stop benches. It hung in the window of Woolworth’s. It hung by the entrance of the YMCA.” This seems like an intriguing and innocuous first few sentences. However, it is the spring of 1942 and the signs plastered around Berkeley order all Japanese-American families to report to the “Civil Control Station at the First Congregational Church on Channing Way.”
A nameless Japanese-American woman sees the signs around her neighborhood not far from the Berkeley campus. She begins to pack, buries valuables in her backyard, burns sacred family treasures and photos from their life in Japan and kills the family pets. She has already experienced first-hand the wave of anti-Japanese hysteria. The FBI had taken her husband in the middle night from their comfortable home and ended their simple life. He was now being held at a camp for enemy combatants.
By Chapter 2, it is September of 1942 and this unnamed woman, her elementary school age daughter and son are on a train to the Topaz internment camp in the Utah desert. Identification numbers are pinned to their clothing. Bricks are thrown at the train as it makes it way from the Bay Area to Utah. The mother warns her children to never say the Emperor’s name out loud in any context.
Life in the camp is monotonous and the living conditions appalling. The dust, wind, cold, and stress of not knowing when their confinement will end torment the family. The young boy lies awake wondering what horrible thing he had done that caused his family to be sent to this dreadful place. Some nights he remembers his bedroom at home. But most nights he replays the traumatic vision of his playful and poised father being placed in the back of the police car in his robe and slippers.
It’s a short novel, just 144 pages. In simple poetic prose, Otsuka transmits the strong emotions of indignity, shame and rage that each character feels. It is difficult to process this unfathomable alteration to their lives. By the time the family reunites in their Berkeley home 3 years and 5 months later; their sense of themselves and their place in the community has dissolved. They are psychically scarred. How could they not be? Julie Otsuka’s powerful novel bears witness to this horrific episode in our history.
The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on December 26, 2018
http://www.sfexaminer.com/golden-state-evocative-story-mother-crisis/
“The Golden State,” an impressive and insightful debut novel by San Francisco writer Lydia Kiesling, is a book about motherhood, aging, loss and love.
Written with humor and wisdom, it combines a coming-of-age story with a transformational California road trip. In Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road,” Sal Paradise is a Beat Generation wanderer. His road trip takes him to San Francisco on a restless odyssey. In Kiesling’s novel, Daphne Nilsen is an overwhelmed millennial mother who leaves San Francisco in search of a way forward.
Daphne, in her early 30s, works at the Institute for the Study of Islamic Societies and Civilizations at UC Berkeley. Her Turkish husband Engin has been waiting in Istanbul for five months for a bureaucratic visa snafu to be resolved. He longs to return to San Francisco and restart his life with Daphne and their 16-month-old daughter, Honey. While waiting, the couple use Skype to stay connected and plot immigration tactics.
Daphne feels isolated and alone taking care of Honey. When a student Daphne advised is involved in a horrific car crash in Turkey, Daphne is devastated. She feels responsible for the tragedy and the news triggers painful emotions about her own troubles.
She leaves work, packs her car, retrieves Honey from day care and bolts from the Bay Area. Her destination is the fictional town of Altavista in the high California desert where multiple generations of her family had lived. She and Honey begin their escape by way of El Cerrito, Richmond, the Nut Tree and Sacramento.
Daphne has no plan. She is pulled viscerally to the quiet beauty of Altavista and the tidy doublewide mobile home she inherited from her mother. In those peaceful surroundings she had felt the loving embrace of her parents and grandparents.
At a town diner, Daphne meets a forthright and philosophical 92-year-old woman named Alice, who has driven from Colorado to visit a sacred spot from her lost life with her husband. Daphne learns that Alice’s husband died 50 years earlier, the first of many losses she has suffered. Alice’s reflections and her resilience impress Daphne. She muses, “I feel there is something accusatory in her tone, as if to say, ‘I didn’t have some little meltdown like you seem to be having over nothing.’” This imagined rebuke actually empowers Daphne.
With minimal punctuation and few paragraph breaks, the novel feels like an intimate conversation. Ten chapters shape the story: one for each day she is away from the Bay Area on her pilgrimage to the high plains. Kiesling is best when she describes the exhilarating love and enervating boredom Daphne experiences caring for Honey. Though she is sometimes resentful, Daphne’s love for Honey is fierce, her devotion total. Yet fears haunt her: “Why did I have a child? To have a child is to court loss.”
Like the caterpillar in the book she reads to Honey, Daphne needs energy to advance to the next stage of her life as she sorts out how she arrived at her breaking point and how to move forward. An orphan without siblings, a wife deprived of her husband and a single parent with a job and a toddler, Daphne has been plodding along unconscious of her accumulating grief.
Visiting her safe space, laden with meaning and memories, she better understands both the emptiness and fullness of her life. By the novel’s end, we understand the full contours of Daphne’s existential crisis and we are now rooting for her to find her golden state.
The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish
Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink is possibly my favorite book of 2018. In every page, I could feel Kadish’s passionate commitment to her characters and to the historical period she describes. Her appreciation of the written word is evident as she captures both the smallest details and largest historical themes. At one level the novel is a mystery to be solved. Yet due to Kadish’s skills as a writer and thinker, we are exposed to other levels of inquiry and thought: philosophy, the nature of love, religious viewpoints, moral obligations, the existence of God, gender roles and the power of the past to affect the present. No lightweight list of ideas to contemplate.
The novel opens in 2000. Helen Watt is a Professor of History at a University in London. When a former student asks her to examine a cache of old letters discovered in a 350 year-old-home he recently inherited, Helen is astounded by what she finds. She knows immediately these letters, written in Hebrew and Portuguese from the 1660s, are historically significant.
The novel then shifts to London in 1657. We meet Ester Valasquez, a young woman in her late teens who was adopted by Rabbi HaCoen Mendes after her parents died. Rabbi Mendes and Ester have left Amsterdam and traveled to London where the Rabbi will lead a small Jewish community. Because he was tortured for not renouncing his faith during the Inquisition, Rabbi Mendes is now blind. Though the rabbi does not support women reading or writing, Ester is a skilled scribe and secretly assists with his correspondence.
Though 400 years separate Helen and Ester, both women seek to utilize their intellectual gifts. Their identities are intrinsically connected to their ability to think and express themselves by writing down their thoughts. Ester says, “.... the unpooling of ink has brought me much comfort always, and often have I written what I would not speak.” However, the religious, social and political customs of that time period do not allow women that option. Esters complains, “A woman’s body was a prison in which her mind must wither.” Nonetheless, Ester develops a way to communicate her own thoughts even as she continues to scribe for the Rabbi. This bold decision contributes to the mystery of these letters three centuries later. In 2000, women participate fully in academia. However, Helen Watt still faces sexism and isolation by the male colleagues in her department. Yet because of brave women like Ester Valequez, Helen Watt publishes her thoughts under her own name.
Kadish’s novel also illuminates the unfair and precarious plight of the Jews. Though fortunate to be in London and not Spain, the Jewish community of London in the late 17th century is at the mercy of the clerical and political leaders of London. An acquaintance of Ester says, “… to be a Jew in this world, I understand is a danger. If a Jew speaks the truth of his faith in the wrong moment, though that faith harms none, he brings down untold wrath.” Kadish depicts the texture of oppression the Jewish community faced during this time.
Rotating between two time structures can be difficult. Often readers connect to the characters in one time period but not characters in the other. In The Weight of Ink I felt immersed in the characters’ struggles from both time periods. At 560 pages, The Weight of Ink is not a short read, but it is an emotionally, intellectually and worthwhile one.
