The Spinoza Problem: A Novel: by Irvin D. Yalom–  Irvin Yalom is a prominent psychiatrist who is now Professor Emeritus at Stanford Medical School He is a well published author who is known for his outstanding books on group therapy. He also has written books about case histories and relationships, which have been very well received by the public including Love’s Executioner and Staring At the Sun, which addresses death and dying. In addition he has authored a few novels including When Nietzsche Wept and this latest book published in February 2012, The Spinoza Problem.

This very readable novel will be particularly engrossing to those who have some acquaintance with the philosophy of Spinoza or have chosen to put aside any literal understanding of the bible and question the traditional belief in God. It also will have great appeal to readers who are always drawn to trying to get further insight into how anti-Semitism and Hitler were able to flourish in post World War I Germany leading to the rise of Nazism and World War II.

Yalom acknowledges that he always had been fascinated with Spinoza but could never find a way to write about him since very little was known about his personal and inner life. In the foreword of this book he describes a circumstance, which stimulated an idea, which then allowed him to imagine this novel.

The story starts off by introducing the reader to Baruch Spinoza (nicknamed Benito), a brilliant Talmudic student in Holland and Alfred Rosenberg a student in Germany who runs for President of his College class by making an anti-Semitic speech which gets him called on the carpet by two of the faculty, one of whom is Jewish. Each chapter alternates by following the lives of one of these two young men. Spinoza who lived in the 17^th century in Holland becomes ex-communicated by his well-known Rabbi because of his heretic views of the bible and his refusal to accept a belief in God, rejecting both ideas as superstitions. Rosenberg lives in the 20^th century and experiences the aftermath of Germany’s humiliating defeat in World War I, becomes a writer and an editor, meets a young Adolph Hitler whom he idolizes and ultimately serves. Although they lived nearly 300 years apart, their connection through Spinoza’s writings resulted in nagging questions which Rosenberg pondered most of his life. These may have unconsciously challenged his deeply held anti-Semitic beliefs. On another level the examination of Spinoza’s deconstruction of a religion based philosophy founded on myths and superstitions highlights the flaws of the deeply held views of Hitler and so many of his followers.

Yalom offers this book as completely factual except for the personal life and inner thoughts of each of the protagonists and the connection that he imagines between the two. There are however some reasons that Yalom has for believing that Rosenberg could have been bothered by the problem that some earlier great German minds valued the writings of “Spinoza the Jew.”   The real lives of both men are well known.  This includes the details of the ex-communication of Spinoza from his Jewish community and the actual writings of Spinoza. Rosenberg’s life and ultimate death by hanging as a war criminal have been well documented and his views were widely disseminated, as he was an editor of a prominent Nazi newspaper as well as holding other important positions under Hitler.

There are records that show that Rosenberg did spend some time hospitalized in a Psychiatric Clinic during his Nazi years. Yalom creates therapy sessions between Rosenberg and a made up German psychiatrist who is not sympathetic to his vision. Yalom obviously does this, as he imagined the method in which he would approach Rosenberg if he were his psychiatrist.

Another made up character is Franco who is depicted as a friend and follower of Spinoza, who believes that Judaism should be changed from the inside rather than completely discarded in place of a new philosophical view of God as Nature, which was Spinoza’s view. This character becomes a Rabbi and plans to leave Europe and come to the New World and found a new religion. In the epilog of the book Yalom suggests that he was making a reference to Mordecai Kaplan a 20^th century pioneer of modernized and secularized Judaism known as the Reconstruction movement in the U.S. (although Kaplan’s trajectory was somewhat different than the character in the book).

Also in the epilog of the book Yalom quotes the wisdom that, History is fiction that happens. Fiction is history that might have happened.

This novel successfully weaves the two together in a stimulating, thought provoking and quite enjoyable novel.

If The Invisible Bridge is ever made into a movie, it will be almost impossible to capture the depth and nuances of the characters and the complicated stream of events with all the twists and turns in the playing tome of a typical film. The author, by giving us chance to focus on just a few people and essentially one family, mostly over an eight year period, allows us to witness and emotionally understand how the evil decisions made by one group of people actually effected the lives of so many more people. Ms Orringer ‘s narrative allowed us to identify with her characters as they lived their lives, made their decisions, had pieces of good or bad luck but aspired towards their ambitions, loves and the future. As we watched their journey, we saw that they had no idea what was in store for them but we knew what was coming. The focus was 1937 and a young Jewish man from a poor village in Hungry has worked out the details to study architecture in Paris while another brother figured out how to study medicine in Italy. In order to do this it involved persistence, hard work and good strokes of luck. Each person that they met on each step of their journey had their own story which we are allowed to understand and appreciate. Had this been in a better time and a better place, their struggles and tribulations would be something that we could all say, “ we did something like that “. The circumstances of falling in love and finding your partner for life are unique for each couple but we all know how meaningful it is to each person. However, since in this case the reader was omnipotent and knew that the insipient winds of anti-Semitism which were in the atmosphere of their lives were not only just unfair but portended a doomsday scenarios for them and their families. This knowledge creates anxiety in the reader but at the same time I felt that I was developing much more of an appreciation about this time period than I did from reading some other books which directly chronicled the concentration camps and the holocaust. The window from Shindler’s List, as I recall, while as vivid and poignant as could be, takes us mostly into the worst of it, rather than showing how they got there. It is easy to say that one can’t imagine what it might be like to be forced to move from your home or family apartment as did the these young men and their families, and be forced to live in small quarters
(with much more to come) or have to give up your job or your position in the university and wear a yellow arm band with a Jewish star, hoping that it would be temporary or even be “ drafted “ in to the military work force supporting the troops (the Nazis) under horrendous of conditions. But when a book allows you to care about the characters whom you have know for quite awhile, you feel that you are living through this experience with them. In the end when we glimpse at those who survived and see how they are perceived by their grandchildren, I realize that I too never got enough details of the first hand story from the previous generations of my family as to how their youth evolved into the horror they survived to see our generation live a better life. That is the beauty and the great value of books such as this one.

Buy now on Amazon: Cutting for Stone

This book  is a fictional story narrated in the first person by  someone who  spends most of his life in a setting that most of us would not expect to identify with or relate to. That is growing up on the grounds of a hospital in Eithopia with one’s identical twin and loving adoptive Indian parents who are physicians along with the dedicated servant staff including the daughter of one them who is your age. You only know that your biological mother was a nun who died in childbirth and your biological father was a brilliant surgeon at the hospital who fled the country  after an abortive effort of crushing the skull of your identical twin in order to try to  extract him in a stalled delivery prior to you and your brother ultimately being saved through a Caesarian section performed by your soon to be adoptive father who was internist. Shortly thereafter your adoptive fathers would marry your adoptive mother who was the Ob-Gyn physician at the hospital who happened to be out of the country at the time of the tragic circumstances of the beginning of you and your brother’s life. As unique as all these circumstances seem to be, the subsequent issues in the life of the narrator while unusual are things that do happen in the course of human events and become powerful determinants of one’s life story.  Despite being identical twins, the narrator’s brother seems to be on the “autism spectrum”, talking at a late age and usually saying very little, having minimal capacity for experiencing and expressing interpersonal emotions, although being objective to the point of ultimately developing an interest and a single minded obsession in women’s fistulas which leads him to wide recognition for his knowledge and advocacy in this arena . His directness as a young man leads him to a sexual experience with the daughter of the household servant which sets off a crescendo of events that go on through a lifetime of the characters in this book. As is so often the case of lives and events, each intersection makes a change which will be so important in another significant event  which will change another one. One misunderstanding or missed opportunity has set up a future event, which will forever change one’s life.  Because the author has chosen to follow his characters for significant portions of their life cycle we come to know them in great depth so we empathize with most of them in a very meaningful way. We do pay a price for this depth of knowledge and understanding of the characters as the author has intertwined his narrative with endless detail about external events of climate, vegetation and seemingly unrelated incidental thoughts of the characters.  I had to fight my obsessive style of not skipping sentences or paragraphs in a book as I usually deplore the style, which skims ahead for dialog or events in a wordy book although at times I lost this battle.  The final reward for reading this book is an insight into one family and a glimpse of life in Ethiopia during the regime of Halle Sal isse as well as a little bit of the feel of the revolution which disposed him . The author being a physician also writes in great detail (sometimes more than you need) about the medical issues of the people who come to the hospital and as well those of some of the characters whom you have come to care bout.  He also blends in some ethical dilemmas which not only challenged the characters but will most likely fascinate the reader. In the end the reader has taken a meaningful journey  with the narrator and the people close to him and you cannot help but feel you are the richer for it.

On the same day as I started writing this review, I heard a report on NPR of a group of Saudi women who are protesting the law in their country that women can’t drive a car and must be driven around by men or take a taxi. The subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia and other Moslem countries was the underlying theme of this novel Finding Nouf. It is a mystery of the disappearance and death of a young wealthy women and the efforts of mainly two people who are trying figure out what happened to her. It is through their eyes that we appreciate how the everyday life of women must be hidden behind the berka where her ankles should never show in public and the vail so no man but her husband or immediate family should look at her face. At the same time we see how the rules are neglected at times despite the fact that there are actually religious police who patrol the streets demanding proof of marriage between a man and women who are together in public. As the mystery of what happened to Nouf unfolds, we also appreciate the yearning of this woman and so many others of this culture to be freed from their oppression. We know about CSI NY and CSI Miami but do we have a CSI Saudi ? We do have a death, an autopsy, fingerprints, DNA, footprints (this time in the dessert aided by a expert footprint tracker) as well as some unexpected twists and turns. If the subtext of the Moslem culture were well known to us, I don’t think I would have been fascinated enough to stay turned in.

The White Tiger completes the trilogy of countries about  which we have been given an insight through our book selections. China, Japan and now India. I previously  only had the vaguest idea of what a flawed democracy was in fact the government of India. The creative vehicle of a letter to the Prime Minister of China from Baltram – humble servant driver and now entrepreneur worked very well. He was likable and seemed to be like a real person which made the circumstances he described and his actions seem very plausible. The book also clearly raised the question of whether democracy which allows corruption and basically slavery is any way a worthy form of government. Perhaps the reason that the author had chosen to have his character write to the Premier of China was because he wanted to raise the question of whether a democracy which permits such behavior as described in the book is better than a non democratic form of government such as that of China which through the governments efforts are raising the standard of living of it’s people in an organized manner. Of course in order to consider this book a reflection of the actual circumstances in India and events that while fictional, could have very well happened, as compared to a completely fanciful novel one would have to consider the credentials of the author. As stated in the book , he was born in India in 1974, attended Columbia and Oxford, was a correspondent for Time and currently lives in Mumbai India which seems to make him legit. Just the other day I cut out an article from the LA times titled “ Corruption scandal rocks India which had statements such as widespread and corrosive corruption …scandal with government official involving billions of dollars  estimates that government lost 38 billion dollars equivalent of the  defense budget or enough to  feed 10% of it’s poorest populations for a year etc. This book  also raised at least  two moral questions- is murder ever justified especially when his victim was willing to sacrifice Baltram the killer when his wife ran over a child? The other questions which Balram never really deals with is how could he let his whole family be wiped out without even trying to warn them? There is also the Rooster Coop issue. How can one stand by and not escape or attack your captor when you see them one by one destroyed by the people who have locked you into this situation?

Buy now on Amazon: City of Thieves (Also available on Kindle!)

I read 90% of this book in one sitting on an airplane flying back to Los Angeles from China. So I obviously found it engrossing and it held my interest. Therefore I appreciate that it was recommended and made my flight easier.  Having said that I do feel that if I am reading another heart wrenching story with painful graphic details of how innocent men women and children died as result of the Nazi’s during World War II, I would like it to have some new enlightening aspects of this history  which will shed some fresh ideas on this atrocity, which I didn’t really find in this book  Granted we did lean about horrible deaths often due to starvation and freezing temperatures as well as grisly murders for human food all  due to the siege of Leningrad, in addition to the direct murder by the Nazis. While it is conceivable that some of the fanciful details how death was missed and survival occurred, may very well have happened to some people, our main characters seem to mostly have a string of good luck embodying an unusual amount of  fortunate events. Perhaps the author was trying to have his cast represent many of the unusual, unbelievable and yet heroic things that the people of this beleaguered city had done. There also was a recurrent theme which seemed to be playing off the words and writings of various Russian writers, which might have been more interesting and coherent if I were familiar with these authors, which I am not. I did get the point that Koyla, the Russian deserter was whistling a happy tune because he was afraid himself and that his quoting the so called novel that his young friend never read, was actually from  the novel which he hoped to write himself. However, all these references to Russian authors must have had some additional significance. Finally the author did something that I did not like. When Vika, the sharp shooting partisan decides to go her own way and depart from the the other two main characters, the narrator who is the young boy smitten with her  ( who is supposed to be the authors grandfather telling him the story of his youth states, I knew I would never see her again. This is the author writing off this character which he basically restates in the next paragraph when he writes  …and if the mystics are right and we are doomed to repeat our squalid lives ad infinitum, at least I will  always return to that kiss. The character did not say I believed she was gone, he said I knew I would never see her again. Therefore when she reappears for the happy ending I was not only very surprised but I felt tricked with an unacceptable literary device. So in conclusion, while the book held my interest and will probably make a great movie, however for all of the above reasons, I give it thumbs down.

Vienna Triangle by Brenda Webster – Published by Wings Press, San Antonio, Texas, 2009

I originally wrote this book review for Academy Forum which is published by the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. I also subsequently published it in my blog PsychiatryTalk.com accompanied by a Q&A with the author which is also included here .

The year is 1968. Helene Deutsch is 84 and, while vacationing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, meets Kate, a young woman who, by coincidence, is writing her PhD thesis at Columbia University about the early women analysts. Dr. Deutsch is one of the most prominent, well-known and respected early women psychoanalysts and who had been in analysis with Sigmund Freud himself. One thing leads to another and in the course of their now mentoring relationship Kate uncovers some previously hidden documents belonging to her mother and which shed light on a family secret that her mother had withheld from her. This secret was that her maternal grandfather was the well-known psychoanalyst Victor Tausk who had been part of Freud’s inner circle and who had committed suicide.

Kate becomes obsessed with trying to unearth the details of her grandfather’s life and to find out why he killed himself. Dr. Deutsch who knew Dr. Tausk and even briefly analyzed him, reflects on distant memories and begins to bring forth pieces of the puzzle. These details involve Tausk, Freud and the beautiful Lou Andreas-Salome. Kate also stumbles upon information that leads her to meet her two previously unknown uncles, sons of the late Dr. Tausk.

Author Brenda Webster uses this plot in her novel to explore and describe life in Vienna and the complicated interactions both inside and outside of Freud’s Inner Circle during the birth of psychoanalysis. The personalities of the cast of characters unfold. Freud the creator, the father figure, is portrayed as extremely protective of his newly developed “baby.” Tausk is described as a brilliant young man who is making important contributions to psychoanalysis but who feels he is not quite appreciated by the Master. He develops a love affair with Salome who at the same time has become one of Freud’s favorite pupils. Young Helene Deutsch is making her own contributions about psychoanalytic theory and women at the same time that she is having her own love affairs. Freud does not grant Tausk’s request to be analyzed by him and instead refers him for analysis to Deutsch. There is a question about whether Freud’s harsh and rejecting treatment of Tausk contributed to his decision to take his life. Documents that purport to show Freud’s reaction to his junior colleague’s suicide do not paint a flattering picture of the leader of the psychoanalytic movement.

The characters in this book are interesting and well developed. There is love, romance, jealousy, rivalry, narcissism, loyalty, rejection, dedication to the cause, and the mysterious suicide of Tausk that contribute to making this a fine novel. It is a page-turner (or in my case a button pusher – I read books on the Kindle). This book should have strong appeal to all students of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic theory. It is well known that to fully grasp all of these ideas you need to go back to the streets of Vienna and the lives of the people who were bringing forth this revolutionary new understanding of human behavior.

However there may be a problem with this book. It is a novel. It is fiction. If you are thinking of reading it to understand the intricacies and nuances of the relationships that existed in Freud’s inner circle, shouldn’t you really be in the non-fiction aisle of your library, bookstore, or frame of mind (if you are buying online).

Brenda Webster states the following in her authors note at the beginning of the book: “This is a work of fiction, not of history; nevertheless it is based on the lives and relationships of real people: Viktor Tausk, Sigmund Freud, Lou Andreas-Salome and Helene Deutsch. I have attempted not to violate the known facts, but have invented diaries, dialogs and secondary characters in order to bring the actors, their ideas and passions to full imaginative life.” This is an ambivalent statement. She says that it does not violate the known facts and yet all sorts of things have been invented.

In the author’s afterword she further elaborates that an important letter mentioned in the book from Freud to Andreas-Salome after Tausk’s suicide is genuine, as are her responses to it. (This is one of the documents to which I referred to above.) Webster also cites Kurt Eissler’s writings that she says defended Freud’s treatment of Tausk. This suggests that she made efforts to found the main premise of the book on as much fact as possible.

My advice to potential readers is as follows: If you have been around the block and studied the history of psychoanalysis to the point where you are satisfied with what you know, or if you don’t really care about who said what or who was jealous of whom etc., then consider reading this enjoyable and interesting novel. It is fun thinking about these people even if many of the facts, attributions and nuances may not be correct. However, if you are a new student of psychoanalytic theory and want to learn more about these historical figures and how they interacted while coming forth with these ideas, hold off reading this novel. I suggest instead, that you read some of the many historical accounts, biographies and diaries, which are available about this period of time and these important people. Ask your teachers and mentors for suggestions, in particular about areas of your interest. By the time the movie comes around of this intriguing plot, if they ever decide to make one, you will be ready for this version of the story.

The following is a Q&A with the author Ms. Brenda Webster

MB: What attracted your interest to these characters and the birth of the psychoanalytic movement?

BW: I had written two previous books of psychoanalytic criticism and a memoir chronicling my history in therapy and had no intention of doing more. Then one day I was reading about how the great Goethe sucked the life out of people close to him and used them for his own purposes. This made me think of Freud and Viktor Tausk. I wondered if genius couldn’t tolerate the existence of great talent in its vicinity and I was off and running.

MB: On one hand you emphasize in the author’s notes at the beginning of the book, that this is a work of fiction, not history, but on the other hand you note that you have attempted not to violate the known facts. Is the story your best guess as to what was the nature of the relationships which you wrote about or is it rather an attempt to write a fanciful interesting novel ?

BW: As I researched my story—and I read everything I could get my hands on from background material to biographies of Deutsch, Lou Salome, Tausk and Freud—I came to feel that Freud played an important role in Tausk’s suicide.and subsequent cover up. I had no impulse to write a polemical book. (My analyst Kurt Eissler had written two books defending Freud) I wanted to explore what happened, to re-create the people and the situations to decide for myself what motivated them. Fiction was from the beginning a way of gaining imaginative insight.

MB: In the story, you show Freud as using Tausk’s ideas without crediting him . As a writer yourself, do you view this as a particularly immoral act or do you believe that things like this can happen without malicious intent?

BW: I think that writers often borrow from each other but in the case of Freud and Tausk there was so much emotional freight behind the borrowing. Each man accusing the other of not giving credit that it took on a more sinister coloring.

MB: Can you picture this book as a movie and would you like to share your ideas as to which actors and actresses might best capture the spirit of your story ?

BW: Yes, I can picture it as a movie. The first thing the Freud scholar Paul Roazen said when he read my early draft was that it would make a terrific movie. I don’t keep up with contemporary actors but I think someone like Helen Bonam Carter would be good for Lou. Both sexy and super intellectual.

MB: Where will you be taking your readers in your next book?

BW: I am working on a play with a New York Producer/director that carries on my interest in Freud and his circle. So far it has been an exciting experience

Prior to reading this book, I had recently read Shanghai Girls  by Lisa See which is about two Chinese sisters and chronicles their lives from the horror of the Japanese invasion in China to the painful unfair  discrimination which they encountered  in this country during and after World War II. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet  which is debut novel by Jamie Ford in a sense compliments the other book as it provides insight  into the fate of the Japanese living in the United States approximately during this time period. Most Americans, of course  know very little about this page of our history. This novel  provides a window into what happened when the Japanese families were ripped from their homes and jobs  and put in what were called internment camps by the government but prison camps by the  people who were involuntarily taken there. While the story was quite poignant and sweet, it did not have the complexity of story and the depth of characters, which I thought was present in Lisa See’s book.

The story is mostly told through, through the eyes of Henry, a Chinese American who was born in the United States to immigrant parents who expected him to speak English although they could not and maintain their Chinese heritage which  included a hatred of the  Japanese who had attacked their native country. As a youngster he was sent to an upper class white school in Seattle on a scholarship, which meant that he had to help out in the kitchen at lunchtime and clean the erasers after school. While doing this job he meets Keiko, a Japanese girl, also born in the US and sent to this school by her proud parents. They work together, become good friend and even develop an emotional bond which becomes disrupted when she, her family and her entire Japanese community is whisked away almost overnight. The attempt of these barely teenagers to hold on to each other in these impossible circumstances is quite touching. The Hotel Panama is one of the last remnants of the Japanese community and had bordered on the still thriving Chinese community. It is the place where so many of the artifacts of the now transported Japanese Americans have become eternally stored symbolizing their buried memories.

We don’t really get to know these characters of this book  as fully formed multi-determined individuals. We are actually introduced to Henry at a point in life where his wife has died and his son is ready to get married. We know very little about him other than that he has this burning memory of his early love at age 12-13 which is locked in his soul. We learn about this phase of his life as chapters flashback to this time .

The mood of the book is unfulfilled forbidden love which perhaps symbolizes the unfavorable lives of the community of people where their most prized possessions reside in this Hotel of Bitter and Sweet also known as the Hotel Panama.  The sadness of loss is also played out in the somewhat lengthy discussion of the Nursing Home death of  Henry’s s childhood close friend Sheldon. When the movie of this book comes out , the musical score  will be the soulful  sound  of legendary Seattle jazz musician Oscar Holden which was an important part of this story and  played in the background for most of the telling of this tale.

It is a well known fact that Australia was originally settled primarily by convicts who were shipped there by the Bristish government in the 18^th and early 19^th century. The Secret River puts a very personal face on what it might have meant to be one of the settlers who had his life reprieved from a hangman’s nose for stealing good to then be faced with a life sentence of exile in a barely inhabited land.

Even before we follow the protagonist of this novel William Thornhill and his wife and small child across the ocean to Australia, we are given insight in to the desperation which lead a hard working honest man to make stealing an everyday part of his life in order to prove a bare sustenance for his family. Particularly when your everyday life as  waterman boatman on the Thames River in London put you in contact with the gentleman gentry, we see how the dreams and aspirations of the poorest man can be seeds seed waiting to sprout if ever given the opportunity. Just as the Americans had its Indians who were here first, the Australians had its aborigines although the latter word was never used in this novel. They were usually referred with some variation of “ black”. They were usually a stealth group off in the woods. How the convict settlers tried to dehumanize them in order to justify to themselves their right to dominance over the land is a good part of psychological underpinning of this story.

Author Kate Krenville was apparently inspired to write this noel during her own exploration of studying the family journey of a distant relative. She appears to have mastered the history, the dialect as well as the interesting trials and tribulations, which her main character and his family might have experienced. The reader gets into their shoes and appreciates their struggle as they battle to hold on to their dreams and their values.

Reluctantly, I began this novel, believing I wouldn’t particularly be interested in these women’s lives or the historical time in which it was set. I was immediately sucked into the story line and the lives of these two        “beautiful” girls living in what they thought was an upper-class life style. The place was Shanghai, China and the time was 1937. Knowing that the world was about to change and that the characters would probably be impacted and swept up by these impending changes, riveted my attention to these people, their life style and culture. Just as we begin to know them and feel comfortable with the characters there is a crescendo of events, which we come to appreciative through the eyes of these girls. Arranged marriages, invasion by the Japanese, dissolution of family, fleeing home and country, rape, murder and the desire to survive captivates the reader as a great movie might also do (and this is sure to be made into one).

As engrossing and enlightening that the first half of the book may have been, it is the second half, which I found the most stimulating and thought provoking. The Shanghai girls come to the United States through Angel Island (the Ellis Island of the West) and struggle with their new family to survive in the ghettoized Chinatown in Los Angeles. The discrimination, which they and their family experience, and the treatment as second-class citizens is eye opening. The history books, which I studied, somehow never quite conveyed this story. I knew the U.S. interred Japanese after Pearl Harbor but I never appreciated how harshly we treated the Chinese who hated the Japanese as much as Americans did. Similarly, whatever you have understood about how badly McCarthyism  may have unfairly treated suspected “Communist sympathizers”, it was nothing compared to how Chinese in America were treated during the time that the Communists had just taken over China and were perceived as our enemy.

As I got into this book it was clear to me that the story could have been “ripped from today’s headlines”. You easily could substitute “ Latino” for “Chinese” and be describing the plight of “undocumented” Latinos who are being discriminated in our country today  and even persecuted under the new Arizona legislation. The family members in the book who were trying to eek out a living could be my gardener, the car washer and so many Latinos that we encounter everyday in Los Angeles.

In between periods of reading the book, I found myself thinking about what I knew about the refugees from Poland, Germany and Russia who were my family. I know best the story of my wife’s mother and grandparents who after being bourgeoisie in Russia were confronted and severely maltreated by the Cossacks and then by the Communists causing them to flee their homeland. By hook or by crook they made it to the United States. Initially they lived together in less than ideal accommodations and faced discrimination and hardships. It is easy to forget how so many of us are living the dreams of our ancestor immigrants. We may never fully know the hardships which they faced but are reminded of what they may have been when we read a book such as this one.

Lisa See, the author of Shanghai Girls has indicated in some notes at the conclusion of the book that she has researched the history and based much of the characters and plots on interviews and oral histories, which clearly gives this book an authentic ring. I thank her for work and also our book club for choosing his book for me to experience.