Book Reviews

Anya Ulinich’s “Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel” (Penguin 2014), a graphic novel for adults will also be popular with young adults. The story of Lena, a 17 year old Russian immigrant moving with her parents to Arizona in the 80s, appears to be Ulinich’s thinly disguised memoir.

The “magic barrel” seems to be the burden of her lovers, the first being her Russian high school sweetheart Alik, who she loves “thanks to his Heathcliff schtick.” At 35, Lena is on a book tour to Russia (so was Ulinich). Alik shows up and the miniature “immigrant soul” appears and says. “Oh-Oh. The brain area that reacts to sad Russian men has been activated.” Alik, in spite of now being married to a Russian woman, suggests that he and Lena grow old together. She tells him it’s against the law in the U.S. to be old. At 35?

Ulinich gives a view of American culture seen through immigrant eyes. It is often hilarious as well as eye-opening.

With a good deal of flashback to her Russian upbringing, she informs us about the sad state of sex education during perestroika or “restructuring”—the Gorbachev years. Which sets us up for Lena’s two disastrous marriages stateside.

Upon arrival to Phoenix, Arizona, the synagogue “supports” the family by giving them “Jew Bags”—Lena’s includes size 11 green sneakers and Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”. The whole family is in effect indentured servants to U.S. families. Lena meets Chance who says, “So you’re Russian?” and she corrects him. “I’m from Russia. I’m a Jew.” She tells us only Soviets understand that. And it clarifies that cultural schism for me.

Chance calls her Anne Frank, teaches her about American culture, ridicules her, and asks why she won’t sleep with him. Answer: Because she’s serious about her virginity. No sex until she marries. So she marries Chance, gets a green card, and says “I have narrowly escaped becoming a Hasidic Wife, but that other woman whoever she is, dying of emphysema in a trailer park forty years from now—she is not me either.” They divorce.

Lena attends Arizona State and meets Josh. The complex Venn diagram and Relationship Map, showing how they’re meant for each other is hysterical. They marry have two girls and divorce (as does Ulinich). At this point Lena begins on-line dating, offers insightful, dark, funny opinions on the “gender war.” How can anyone be so honest in print (and drawing). She self-deprecates, showing herself as hideous, but she gets pretty. She loses and gains weight (in the drawings) without saying much about it.

There’s sex—not graphic or sensationalized—but honest. Even if a teen reader is (probably) not married, their parents might be and there are some fascinating insights into that institution. And love. And heartbreak. The drawings are frequently remarkable paintings. I love this book for many ages.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s new book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker won a Boston Globe Horn Book 2014 Honor for Nonfiction and a Parents Choice Gold Award for Poetry.

Candace Fleming’s “The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion & the Fall of Imperial Russia” (Schwartz & Wade 2014) centers on the imperial family, telling the complex Russian history through the eyes of both nobility and peasantry.

In 1903 Russian nobility represented only 1.5 percent of the population, but owned 90 percent of all Russia’s wealth. At the top of power pyramid, Tsar Nicholas II owned thirty palaces, estates in Finland, Poland, the Crimea, millions of acres of farmland, gold and silver mines, two private trains, artwork, five yachts, and jewels beyond belief. His income came from the taxation of his subjects.

Nicolas’ father, Tsar Alexander III, a bear of a man, scorned his son as a dunce and gave him no training for his future job, which would include ruling 130 million subjects on 1/6 the planet’s land surface in 34 provinces, choosing governors for each, and passing laws. Nicholas would be hiring and firing statesmen on a whim with “…flatterers telling him what he wanted rather than needed to hear.”

Before coming to power Nicholas married German princess, Alexandra. The two would have liked nothing better than to be left alone to raise their family. But rather than abdicate, the autocrat and his growing family, retreated to the country where Nicholas lost touch with Russia. Tsarina Alexandra, to the dismay of all Russians, took over a great deal of power. The two were utterly clueless to the plight of the peasants.

In interspersed chapters we hear the story of individual peasants whose major accomplishment was survival. They lived in filth, close quarters, were starving, oftentimes under the abuse of an otherwise powerless despotic peasant father.

Back at the country palace, Alexandra bore four girls—Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia—much to the chagrin of the people who needed a male heir to the throne. Finally a hemophiliac heir, Alexei, was born. He had two sailor nannies, whose job it was to catch him before he fell, bruised, and writhed in unimaginable agony for days, weeks, even months. There is still no cure for the disease. Alexandra knew she was a carrier, adored her children—especially her son—and was tortured by her son’s condition.

The famed Rasputin, a charlatan of a holy man, was the spiritual support of the royal couple. Several times the boy recovered just when Rasputin stepped in. Had the injury just run its course? The royal couple felt Rasputin had a direct link to God. After a brief period of popularity, Rasputin—detested by the Russians—was eventually assassinated.

Fleming makes sense of a chaotic history, taking us through Russia’s entry into WWI, Russia’s civil war, the rise of the Provisional Government, then the rise of the Bolsheviks and communism. In the end she walks us through the horrific execution of the Family Romanov—that which many of us may only have known through the confused eyes of Anastasia played by Ingrid Bergman in the 1956 film Anastasia.

What a page-turning, ambitious, well-written history Fleming has given us!

Patricia Hruby Powell’s new book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker won a Boston Globe Horn Book 2014 Honor for Nonfiction and a Parents Choice Gold Award for Poetry.

During WWII the U.S. was fighting for freedom while denying its black citizens their rights and freedom. In “The Port Chicago 50: Disaster, Mutiny, and the Fight for Civil Rights” (Roaring Brook 2014) Steve Sheinkin paints a picture of the segregated armed forces. Rather than being assigned to battle, blacks worked in the mess hall. Or worse.

At Great Lakes Naval Training there was one line in the mess hall for whites who ate upstairs, and another line for blacks who ate downstairs. The sports teams, music bands, blood banks and blood suppliers were all segregated.

When the black sailors arrived at Port Chicago near San Francisco, their job was to load ammunition—torpedo warheads and incendiary bombs—from freight cars to ships headed to the Pacific front. They received no training in how to handle the explosives. The professional civilian stevedores were horrified. Five hundred pound shells and 650 pound incendiary bombs rolled down inclined rails from freight cars to loading nets, which were in turn raised by cranes and lowered into ship holds.

The men stacked bombs one atop the other. The working conditions were chaotic and loud with clanking of metal against metal and cursing of men. Joe Small, a natural leader among the black men, took over running the winch and the duties of the petty officer, communicating with his superior (white) officers, but he was not promoted to petty officer. He did not receive the pay hike or the private room afforded the petty officer.

The inevitable huge explosion, seen and felt for miles around, blew to smithereens the 10 million pounds of explosives, boxcar, ship and all 320 men—202 of whom were black—on the waterfront. There were no surviving witnesses. Another 390, mostly black men, who fought the resulting fires, were wounded.

The accident was blamed on the black sailors. The official (white) navy report stated, “the colored personnel are neither temperamentally nor intellectually capable of handling high explosives.” No black sailor was asked to testify.

When the survivors—those not on duty at the time of the explosion—were ordered to a new site to load ammunition, they refused. 258 black men were imprisoned on a barge. Men, crowded together, long abused by segregation laws, grew angrier. Joe Small urged them to obey rules, act as a unit, and not get violent. Small asked his superiors for improved working conditions and to desegregate the base.

Instead they were court martialed. Many chose to go back to loading ammo. The group, whittled down to fifty men, were defended by a good brash young (white) lawyer, but it wasn’t enough to tip the decision of the presiding navy judge. They lost. In steps, Thurgood Marshall, working for the NAACP, appealed the case, calling their trial a frame-up. Marshall won their appeal and after serving months of hard labor, the men were released.

The Navy desegregated in 1946. President Truman ended segregation in the military in 1948. This is great readable history.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s new book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker won a Boston Globe Horn Book 2014 Honor for Nonfiction and a Parents Choice Gold Award for Poetry.

We experience the reality of rural nineteenth century Norway in “West of the Moon” (Abrams-Amulet 2014) by Margi Preus, yet we feel immersed in a land of magic. The Norwegians are Christian but are living in a world paralleling Scandinavian folktales. Superstitions are alive and alluring—with the invisible and wicked huldrefolks lurking near cradles and under bridges.

It’s not so much what the author says as what she doesn’t say that brings to life this world of awe and magic. This life is so natural to Astri and her little sister Greta, Preus doesn’t tell us about their world—we simply live it alongside of them.

Astri, about fourteen, likens herself to the girl in the folktale who is abducted by a white bear who turns out to be a prince. However, Astri’s abductor, Svaalberd or, as she calls him, goatman, is no prince. As his milkmaid, she milks goats. She says, “Oh, and shovel the snow and chop the wood and haul the wood and clean out the ashes and start the fire and rake the coals and cook the porridge and make the candles and knead the bread. All in the dark, dark, dark.” It’s wintertime.

When the goatman assaults her in her bed, Astri saves herself with the knife she keeps under her pillow. Goatman banishes her to the shed, where she discovers the odd silent Spinning Girl. Astri defends herself again against the entitled goatman. And now the picaresque quality really kicks in and the adventure takes off.

Astri takes Spinning Girl and finds her way back to the farm where she rescues Greta from her greedy aunt. Now they must find a way to get to America where her father has gone to make a better life. And on the road they discover the goatman, Svaalberd dying, probably, from the wounds Astri inflicted on him.

Greta and Astri give him a funeral right on the road. Astri says, “I know Svaalberd was a mean old man, but what made him thus? Did he have that hump as a youngster? That would make for a hard life, wouldn’t it?”

Greta responds, “This is a very strange sermon.” Preus is a master at magic and wisdom and dry wit. And metaphor. Astri says, “The snags in my heart are so tangled and deep, I feel them there, twisted little knots that can’t be undone.”

Astri leaves Spinning Girl at a kind farmer’s home, where she steals a horse. Astri and Greta ride to the sea. One snags a ticket and the other stows away, they both contract cholera and are visited by Death. They meet other Norwegians on their way to America as they make their way.

Preus’ story is inspired by the diary of her great great grandmother, Linka, the young wife of a Lutheran pastor, who met a wild girl all alone crossing from Norway to America in 1850 and asked if she might serve her as a maid.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s new book Josephine: The Dazzling Life of Josephine Baker won a Boston Globe Horn Book 2014 Honor for Nonfiction and a Parents Choice Gold Award for Poetry.