Skip to main content

Lead up to the review: The Lost Girls of Paris by Pam Jenoff

Carl Cozier Elementary School
In fifth grade our teacher told us about being stationed in Germany during his time in the service. We didn't call him a veteran, just a balding guy with dandruff who taught us German words and phrases: Mr. Fish.

He went up and down the rows of formica topped desks with attached chairs and assigned German names to us at Carl Cozier Elementary School I was Christel and dreamed of handing that beautiful name over to the daughter I hoped some day to have. It didn't turn out quite that way, as things that were important when you were ten, are not as valued when you're thirty-eight.

Photo Dachau: Václav Pluhař 
One afternoon, Mr. Fish showed a movie, it was in French with English subtitles. So horrific, I thought it must be made up. Emaciated living, piles of shoes, clothing, the dead. Complete, utter fantasy. But it was a documentary: the Holocaust.

Ten years later, I perfected my German language skill in Germany before enrolling for a year at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Inspired by Mr. Fish, I'd foregone learning Spanish or French, both taught in middle school, and waited until high school to take German from Frau Fincher, then at Clark College from Frau Schmalenberger, and at Linfield College from Dr. Kurz, where I double majored in German and Piano Performance, which led me to apply for the Vienna program through Central College.

Photo Dachau: Terence Burke 
Thirteen months away from home allowed for plenty of time for travel amid my European studies, including a side trip to Dachau. My girlfriend, from the study program, her sister and I took a bus to the camp location far from town, and hitchhiked back, catching the 30-minute ride back to town with a German gentleman distraught that the only thing we might know of his city was the concentration camp and not the beauty surrounding his hometown.

Perhaps it is the distance between that youthful, study abroad adventure and today, but I keenly felt the loss of the girls who died in the camps in Pam Jenoff's book The Lost Girls of Paris over what I remember feeling when visiting the actual camp. The tension Jenoff built made me put the book down for a break. The girls walking arm and arm to their deaths brought tears.

And now, moments from the end, I dearly want to know, want to understand the truth in our world – of women making bold decisions, taking risks and being in the end merely women, not heroes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How I got here and why it matters by Carol Doane

When I learned to write complete sentences I had one goal, to write a book. Somewhere in the youthful march through grade school, in some secret place long forgotten, is the book I started. I was seven-years old. I wrote prose, neatly in pencil, on blue lined notebook paper and added tiny illustrations at the top of my chapters. I drew my brother's birthday, bunny cake that celebrated his arrival at the terrible twos with frosting smeared onto his nose by my mother before she took his picture — with a film camera. I wrote about my uncle's visit from the distant country of Texas. I wrote about the way the world hurt and how small I felt. As I raced through school and ploughed down the writing path, I wrote stories and essays that high school teachers returned, scratched with red grammar corrections and tantalizing notes, such as, "This would make a good book." When I graduated college, my reward was to take a break, stop writing, and read what I wanted to

Review: Everything I never told you by Celeste Ng

“Everything here reminds her of what Lydia could have been.”   Lydia, a high school student has died and her mother drifts into her room to experience the smells and sensations of the girl who used to inhabit the space. Across town, Lydia’s father has dropped into another woman’s bed and sleeps tranquilly. Nothing in life has happened as it should. Love gets lost in withheld touches and unspoken thoughts. Parents’ expectations are driven into successive generations and serve as baggage rather than inspiration. Words hurt: “ this,”  referring to Lydia’s parent’s marriage, “isn’t right.” Words are avoided: mixed, interracial, mismatched. Words that could reassure lay stagnant and not vocalized. Words are smithed to cope: “disappeared, fell in the lake, drowned.” The family’s search to understand the daughter who died, their search for a killer to pin their grief on, the destruction of trust, and the slow melting away of relationships show a family on the brink. The sprint to finish this

Review: Bride of the Sea by Eman Quotah

“And the word  divorce  is whispering in his ear, a secret no when else knows.” Muneer, a 23-year-old journalism student from Saudi Arabia attending university in the United States, is considering divorcing his 19-year-old wife, also from Saudi Arabia, who is pregnant and about to give birth. He has this thought when she is shoveling snow without a jacket, scarf, or gloves. She seems to like the cold. Before the baby is born, she strips down to her underwear and walks into a lake in winter. Is this a suicide attempt? It’s hard to grasp that concept –a young woman so unhappy she walks into a lake pregnant, a couple who doesn’t share, has no team goal, with divorce thoughts shortly before their child is born. The couple divorces. The wife, Saeedah, or Sadie as she is later known, flees with their daughter and spends the next seventeen years hiding from Muneer, his family, and her family. How is this life of hiding, that Sadie has taken her daughter Hannah on, different from a culture th