Book Reviews

Following an evening performance as acrobat/dancers with the Stanislav Circus, teenaged Lillia, her father, and her baby sister flee Poland, as planned. But her mother, in the chaos, goes missing. The three members of the Jewish Kazka family head for Shanghai in 1941 in “Someday We Will Fly” (Viking 2019) by Rachel DeWoskin. I hadn’t known that Shanghai was a refuge for Jewish people. It turns out that the Chinese once considered Jewish people mystical—and therefore desirable.

By foot, by train, by ship the dumb-struck family travels to Shanghai, arriving with little money, no ability to speak Chinese, no food, no home, no Mama—yet they’re allowed to enter.

The family crowds into a tenement house with other Jewish families. A shell of his former self, Lillia’s Papa looks for work, day after day until their money runs out. Everyone in the tenements is struggling to various degrees in Japan-occupied China.

Lillia, in between taking care of her disabled infant sister and searching for food, manages to go to the Jewish school. She befriends other refugees. Biata’s family, also from Poland, hopes to start a bar in Shanghai. American Rebecca, Lillia’s favorite, is rich due to her father being a doctor. Sally, also American, scorns Lillia, but Rebecca discretely gives Lillia a pink dress—Lillia’s only dress—and invites her to Scouts. She tries to fit in with the girls but she can’t pay the Scouts membership—and is usually hungry. Rebecca takes Lillia to the theater, but Lillia doesn’t fit in there.

Lillia befriends Wei, the Chinese janitor boy at school. The other girls are aghast at their friendship, but Lillia is falling in love with Wei. She borrows school supplies from his janitor closet to make puppets at home. She has dreams of her friends making a theater/circus production with her, using her beautiful hand-made puppets and her own dancing.

Lillia’s father finds a manual labor job. But both he and her baby sister Naomi, contract cholera. Their neighbor Taube, who has become a mother to the children, dies of the disease. Lillia nurses her family, and despite wronging him, Wei helps her obtain healing Chinese herbs. At a breaking point, Lillia finds work as an escort and dancer at a “gentleman’s club,” where one particular Chinese gentleman regularly buys her meals. Many of the girls are forced to go beyond dancing, including Wei’s sister. Lillia’s life is perilous. And always they wait for her mother.

After Japan bombs Pearl Harbor, the war in China escalates. Bombs take down tenements and warehouses. As Japan takes stronger control of China even wealthy Jews are in danger—maybe more than the poor who are better able to remain invisible. The Japanese have imprisoned all Americans and their outcome looks bad.

There is plenty of heartbreak in this story but much beauty in coming of age while struggling for one’s survival. If you love learning history by reading well-researched well-written historical fiction, this book is a must. The audio book (Listening Library – available on Overdrive from our public libraries) is fine, too.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue and the new Lift As You Climb.  She teaches community classes in writing at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com

One girl, Yahaira, in New York City says goodbye to her father, when he leaves on his annual summer trip to Dominican Republic. One girl, Camino in DR awaits her father to arrive for his summer-long visit where she will clap when the plane lands, as is the custom. But the plane crashes at the onset of “Clap When You Land” (Harper Collins 2020) by the remarkable poet Elizabeth Acevedo.

Camino has been raised by her aunt, Tia Solano, after her mother died. Tia is a curandera, a healer. Because she consults “the Saints,” some would call her a witch. But her healing with herbs offers effective cures in the barrio where they live. Camino accompanies Tia to births and visits to the ill. In fact, Camino wants to study medicine at Columbia University in NYC. She’s a good healer and an excellent student.

Yahaira lives with her mother in Harlem. She’s a bit spoiled by her doting Papi and her angry Mami who manages a nail salon. Yahaira’s girlfriend, Dre and Dre’s mother, a doctor, are a second family to her. Until recently, Yahaira has been a chess champion. Dark like her father, she traveled the nation with him for her championship tournaments.

In DR Camino lives in a poor barrio a short run to the beach. Camino says: “this thin body better fed than most, curved softly/ in the places that elicit whistles & piropos; swimming/ has kept this body honed like Tia’s oft-sharpened machete.”

They live in a nicer shack than most of their neighbors due to Papi’s money. The vecinos—neighbors—depend on Camino, Tia, and Papi with his summertime visits to help them climb out of the hardships of abject poverty. Papi pays off El Cero to leave fourteen-year-old Camino alone.

But Papi is dead. El Cero is dangerous, not just as a young man, but as a newly minted sex hustler. “I am a girl who is not full-fledged,” just the kind of girl El Cero wants. Camino is in danger. And without Papi, how will she get to medical school in NYC. She can’t even pay for her private school tuition in DR without Papi’s money.

In NYC, Yahaira’s mother is about to receive the half a million-dollar settlement from the airline. Relatives are requesting money and she’s giving it. Mami is furious, but grieving deeply. Papi, always bigger-than-life, not just to his family, but to the whole hood where he owns a couple billiard halls. Everyone is mourning.

“There are pieces/of him all over/ this barrio,” Camino tells us. Acevedo conveys island life and urban Harlem life as only an “own-voice” writer can—knowing it from the inside out.

The reader realizes early on that island-dwelling Camino and urban Yahaira are sisters and we witness their shocking discovery. We see how they maneuver among the adults, and how they ultimately find support in each other. What an emotional story, beautifully told.

Patricia Hruby Powell is the author of the award-winning Josephine; Loving vs Virginia; and Struttin’ With Some Barbecue and the new Lift As You Climb.  She teaches community classes in writing at Parkland College.         talesforallages.com

What do you know about Nijinsky? He was a legendary dancer, homosexual, he caused a riot in Paris when he performed to Stravinsky’s music? All true, but there is so much more as shown in Lynn Curlee’s “The Great Nijinsky: God of Dance” (Charlesbridge 2019).

The photos in the book show a stocky, plain, stationary Slavic-looking man with decidedly small feet. Only one photo hints at Nijinsky’s brilliance as a dancer. Yet the artwork of the author/illustrator suggests the dancer’s theatrical genius.

Born in 1890, a Pole in Russia, he was educated at the preeminent Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg and joined the Imperial Ballet upon graduation. In 1909, he was wooed by the great impresario Sergei Diaghilev to dance in his Ballet Russe. At the time, Vaslav Nijinsky was heterosexual but Diaghilev required complete dedication which included being his lover. With Nijinsky dancing and luminaries Michel Fokine as choreographer and artist Leon Bakst producing sets and costumes, Ballet Russe was innovative beyond anything Paris or the world had ever seen.

The book is divided by the great ballets, each with an illustration, program details, blurbs from reviews, and the ballet’s story. They include Fokine’s Firebird, Scheherazade, Carnaval, Specter of the Rose, Petrushka—all titles known to balletomanes. The story of Nijinsky’s life is interspersed. Nijinsky soon came to hate Diaghilev, but Diaghilev was conducting Nijinsky’s remarkable career, so the dancer remained living with the entrepreneur.

Whereas Nijinsky was thought to be a dull, shy man, he was lauded as a miracle on stage—the most accomplished, brilliant dancer of the early 20^th century. This is entirely based on memories, reviews, photos, because there is absolutely no existing footage of Nijinsky’s dancing. He was known as a sex symbol—a genius performer.

            In 1912 Nijinsky choreographed Afternoon of a Faun on the Ballet Russe, to music of Debussy. A remarkable costume sketch by Leon Bakst is included and the dance is described as, “spare, severe, strangely erotic, totally original, and very beautiful.” Nijinsky required his dancers to abandon their classical training to execute challenging movement created to get from one “awkward” pose to the next. Some audience members, accustomed to lyrical Russian ballet hated it; some loved it. Regardless, Nijinsky was considered the “God of Dance.”

For the 1913 premier of Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky “composed a revolutionary score so audacious and original, so brutal and harsh, that when combined with Nijinsky’s unconventional choreography, it caused the audience to riot.” The yelling Parisians drowned out the orchestra so the dancers couldn’t hear it. Fist fights broke out amongst the audience.

Soon after, the Ballet Russe was booked to tour South America. Diaghilev stayed behind. On the voyage Nijinsky met a beautiful Budapest society girl, Romola de Pulszky, and married her, never thinking that Diaghilev would withdraw his support. But he did. Nijinsky’s career and mental health plummeted. Without the support of Diaghilev, Nijinsky, unable to dance, spiraled into mental illness and was institutionalized in 1919. He died in an asylum in 1950.

His life was tragic, his legacy stellar. I, among so many other dancers and admirers long to have seen this man dance.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s newest book, Lift As You Climb: The Story of Ella Baker is available, signed from Jane Addams Bookstore or available wherever you buy books.         talesforallages.com

The grandparents, Marla and Gottfried, sold off the family potato farm and developed it into a suburban subdivision to make a fortune. Their five children, who did not benefit from their parent’s new wealth, are all a wreck in one way or another, and their five children, the teens in the story, are a lot more together than the previous two generations, in “Dig” (Dutton 2019) by A.S. King, winner of the prestigious Printz Award.

The cover image at first glance looks like something anatomical, vaguely heart-like, but a closer look shows potatoes and their root system—the perfect image for this book.

So, there are twelve main characters plus two others—and they have actual names, but you don’t learn them until near the end of the book. The young adult generation in the story are Malcolm, the Shoveler, Loretta the Flea Circus Ringmaster, CanIHelpYou?, and the Freak. If I didn’t read in bed on my way to sleep, I would have made a chart and filled in their names as I went. And their lineage—which one is their parent.

I trusted, as I read this magical fabulously-written book, that it would come clear if I just let it wash over me. Well, sort of, but I still would have benefited from that chart. As it was, I actually had to keep thinking—THINKING—who was the parent of this one, who was the child of that one. But the microcosmic bits keep you going.

We get the history of the potato, which in itself, is fascinating, but is it as stupendous as the invention of the flush toilet, Malcolm wonders. The Shoveler wants to know who his dad is, while his mother is busy shoplifting porkchops. Loretta is a mess of flea bites, but it’s worth it because the fleas she keeps in her lunch box keep her going. CanIHelpYou? takes orders at a fast food window, as well as fills drug orders from her clients. The Freak “flickers” from place to place, visiting each of her four estranged cousins. This is the thread of magical realism that runs through the story. And we wonder why, until we finally get it near the end.

All of these kids and their parents could have their troubles ameliorated if the grandparents would part with a little of their cash—all except CanIHelpYou? who turns out to have immensely rich parents herself. The author addresses entitlement—specifically white entitlement—as well as racism and colonialism. Malcolm frequently visits Jamaica with his father who is dying of cancer, and maybe falls in love with a Jamaican girl. You might think I’m delivering a dozen spoilers here, but trust me, you’ll appreciate the help these spoilers offer. There’s so much to dig through here. Oh yes, and it’s a mystery.

Here is a perfect example of Young Adult literature being break-out literature—and it’s literature that will be read (by young adults and adults)—not sit gathering dust on a bookshelf.

Patricia Hruby Powell’s new and timely book about civil rights and the vote Lift As You Climb: The Story of Ella Baker releases on June 9, 2020. She teaches community classes at Parkland.         talesforallages.com