Tag: Ana Johns

Three Other Books I Read in January 2024

January brought me lots of books and time to read them. Last week’s blog post talked about three books I read last month. Today’s blog is about three other books I read. Next week, I’ll blog about the other four books I read in January.

The Woman in the White Kimono, by Ana Johns

Photo of book cover for The Woman in the White Kimono by Ana Johns features a profile image of a Japanese woman with her hair up and her face partially hidden by her black hair.
The Woman in the White Kimono, by Ana Johns

It is not often I get to read a book that I hate to put down – one I just have to read “one more chapter” before stopping to do something else. The Woman in the White Kimono was one of those novels.

I learned about this historical novel by being a member of the Historical Fictionistas group on Goodreads.com.

This is one of the best historical novels I’ve read in a long time. Well-researched, it takes the stories of mixed-race babies born to Japanese women and American military personnel before, during, and after the post-World War II Allied Occupation of Japan. There were 10,000 such babies, and the ones that survived were ostracized.

This novel grew out of the author’s own father’s story. Hearing bits and pieces of his story spurred her on to do extensive research in Japan and weave a compelling piece of fiction.

This is a can’t-put-downable novel of racial prejudice and the power of love. I don’t usually like novels with alternating timelines, but this one worked – and maybe wouldn’t have worked well chronologically.

In additional being based on good research, I was captivated by the beautifully-written prose.

Sisters Under the Rising Sun, by Heather Morris

Photo of book cover for Sisters Under the Rising Su
Sisters Under the Rising Sun, by Heather Morris

If you have followed my blog for several years, you may recall that I have blogged about three earlier historical novels and one nonfiction book by Heather Morris. (The Tattooist of Auschwitz in Many Good Books Read in October! on November 5, 2018; Cilka’s Journey in I stretched my reading horizons in November on December 2, 2019; Three Sisters in Books Read in December 2021 on January 3, 2022; and Listening Well: Bringing Stories of Hope to Life in Spy Thriller, WWI Novel, Nonfiction, and Historical Mystery Read Last Month on October 10, 2022.)

I praised each of those books, and I recommend Sisters Under the Rising Sun to you, too.

Heather Morris, a New Zealand author, has a way of taking a great amount of information from historical research and in-depth interviews with the survivors of an event – or their descendants – and turning their experiences into unforgettable historical fiction.

Sisters Under the Rising Sun is the story of 65 nurses in the Australian military and some British, American, and Dutch civilians who were captured by the Japanese and held prisoner for three years and seven months on Sumatra, Indonesia during World War II. Although only 24 of the 65 nurses and an undisclosed number of civilians survived the war, this is the remarkable story of their heroism, tenacity, and dedication to each other. It is a story of sisterhood and self-sacrifice. It is based on real people and their experiences under horrendous conditions.

More than 65 individuals are mentioned by name in the narrative portion of this book, so I recommend that you keep a running list of characters as they are introduced because, unless you read the Author’s Notes at the end of the novel first, you won’t know which characters you need to remember.

There are a couple of biological sisters whose stories are woven throughout the book as well as the stories of the Australian nurses. It is the practice in Australia to refer to a nurse as “Sister,” so the title of the book has a double meaning.

There has been a spate of World War II novels published over the last few years, so you might be growing weary of them. I recommend you read one more: Sister Under the Rising Sun, by Heather Morris.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves, by Lauren Grodstein

Photo of book cover for We Must Not Think of Ourselves: A Novel, by Lauren Grodstein. It is a downtown street scene and the Star of David is on one of the buildings.,
We Must Not Think of Ourselves, by Lauren Grodstein

Although a novel, the author bases this book on real life accounts she has researched. The premise is that certain Jews in Warsaw, Poland were selected to write notes about their treatment and what they observed starting in 1940 so, if they were survived by their notes, the world would eventually learn what persecutions the Jews endured under Nazi Germany. The project was called Oneg Shabbat.

The story follows a Jewish widower, Adam Paskow, who had been an English teacher and was fluent in five languages. The gradual persecution of the Jews is chronicled as one right after another is taken from them until their homes and businesses were confiscated and they were forced behind locked gates into crowded and deplorable circumstances in what came to be called the Warsaw Ghetto.

The author artfully takes written accounts from many people and turns them into Adam’s story and reflections. The narrative chapters are interspersed with interview-type chapters.

I liked how the author, through dialog at the Oneg Shabbat meetings, included bits of news about the war. For instance, by the spring of 1941 the Oneg Shabbat participants knew about the gas chambers at Auschwitz. That information filtered down from Polish resistance spies, POW escapees, and Russian soldiers captured by the British.

One thing that comes through in the book is how the people of Poland were wondering why the United States wasn’t yet willing in 1941 to send troops to help them. They reasoned that if they knew it in the Warsaw Ghetto, surely the United States knew it. They wondered why the US was willing to help convey ships across the Atlantic Ocean while unwilling to commit troops to the war.

Interwoven throughout the novel is the love story of Adam and his wife, Kasia. She dies before he is forced into the ghetto to live in a cramped apartment with strangers. Over time, he and Sala fall in love; however, Sala’s husband lives there, too, which creates an awkward situation. Adam and Sala’s story reflects the desperation and hopelessness the Jews lived with. It was a hopelessness that grew by the day.

The people in the ghetto survived by selling or bartering with their meager possessions. Adam carefully sold every item of his wife’s that he’d been able to take into the ghetto. Will he have anything of value left in the end to secure papers that will give him a chance to escape from Poland before he’d shipped to Auschwitz?

Until my next blog post

I hope you have a good book to read. I’m reading a novel and a nonfiction book.

Remember the people of Ukraine.

Janet

I’ve Made it Around the Sun 71 Times

Photograph of a large seventy-one in numerals
Photo credit: Metin Ozer on unsplash.com

There’s a popular saying now: “Being in my 20s in the 70s was more fun than being in my 70s in the 20s.” There is a lot of truth in that, but I’m glad I’m in my 70s now and not in my 20s.

My parents always made my siblings and me feel special on our birthdays.

Mama always made a buttermilk pound cake and decorated it elaborately for our birthdays. She made a “doll cake” for my birthdays for many years. They were things of art I didn’t fully appreciate at the time.

There were no cake molds then for making such a cake. Mama had to make the cake in several layers of different sizes and then do some trim work to make a perfect full evening gown-shaped cake.

Everything was made from scratch. She took no shortcuts with a cake mix or store-bought icing. (I don’t think that was even a thing back then.) I wish I had a photograph of one of those doll cakes that I could share on my blog.  

Mama’s hand and fingers must have been sore for days after painstakingly decorating the doll’s evening gowns with ruffles and flowers of stiff homemade icing. I had no idea how difficult it was to use her metal cake decorator gizmo until I was old enough to try to use it myself. The operative word is “try.”

Daddy only made home movies on the following special occasions: Christmas morning, our birthdays, and sometimes on Easter morning. Film and its developing were expensive, so he usually managed to get our birthdays and those two holidays on one roll of 8mm movie film.

It was always a great day when a roll of film was developed. Daddy would set up his movie screen and movie projector in the living room, thread the projector, and alert whoever was appointed to then turn off the lights. It was fun reliving the events as many of the occasions projected onto the grainy white screen had happened more than a year earlier.

It was even more fun years later to look at those home movies. At least, it was fun until sometimes when the film would get stuck and the heat from the projector light would immediately burn a hole in the film. But I digress.

It was a special time to be a child in the 1950s and 1960s. It was a good time to be a child. At least, I can say that because I was a white middle-class child in the United States. It wasn’t as good of a time if you were a black child in the United States.

Until all the public schools were racially-integrated and black citizens secured the right to vote and receive equal service in restaurants, hotels, and in public transportation and employment opportunities, it was not a great time for them. I’m aware of that now. I wasn’t back then.

We weren’t bothered by social media and the only drugs we knew about were the ones prescribed by Dr. Nicholas Lubchenko, the family doctor who made house calls when we were sick. If you had stayed home from school because you were sick, you’d better be in bed and not on the couch watching “I Love Lucy” on the black-and-white TV when he came to check on you!

The years I spent in school dragged by slow as molasses, but the rest of my life has passed in a split second. That’s an impossible concept for people under 30 years old to understand. They cannot imagine how fast their next 40 years are going to fly.

So Happy 71st Birthday to me! I can’t believe I’m this old, but many of my friends and relatives were not so fortunate. Therefore, I try to value every day God gives me. I have been blessed beyond anything I deserved.

Since my last blog post

Finally feeling like I had recovered from having Covid in December, I thought last Thursday would be a good day on which to get my second dose of the shingles vaccine. I guess it was as good as any. I don’t want to cause anyone not to get the Shingrix shot, but that second injection laid me low for the entire weekend. I’m just one of those people who often has ill effects from vaccines, so the aches and fever were not a surprise. That they lasted for more than three days was. (Postscript added January 31, 2024: I should have also said that I had Shingles in my right eye a few years ago and it felt like there was a knife in my eye for weeks; therefore, I was eager to get the Shingrix vaccine as soon as it was available free of charge to Medicare patients. The discomfort of the side effects of the shot pale in comparison to the pain of having Shingles!)

I took advantage of my down time by reading a very good historical novel.

I admit that I had a “senior moment” when I typed the title of this blog post. Just before pressing the “publish” button, I realized I had typed the title as “I’ve Made it Around the Moon 71 Times.” Thank goodness I caught that mistake! I never would have heard the last of it! After a rough few days, it was good to have something to laugh about.

Until my next blog post

I hope you are reading a book that’s so good you didn’t want to put it down long enough to read my blog. (I read a book like that over the weekend – The Woman in the White Kimono, by Ana Johns.)

Remember the people of Ukraine.

Janet