2023-06-05 17:38:02
PHOENIX (AP) — Chilean writer Isabel Allende deftly weaves together the traumatic stories of two children separated by decades and thousands of miles in her latest novel, “The Wind Knows My Name.”
The book is something of a tribute to parents who make unthinkable decisions to save their little ones, and to children who survive some of the most difficult challenges imaginable.
A fictional child appearing in the novel is 5-year-old Samuel Adler, whose father disappeared following the 1938 pogrom in Vienna known as Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass. The other is 7-year-old Anita Díaz, who flees her native El Salvador with her mother, but is separated from her at the Arizona-Mexico border in 2019.
In both cases, the children travel by train and are ultimately left alone, torn from their families by war or immigration as we witness the dramatic sacrifices parents must sometimes make to protect their sons and daughters and give them the best possible life.
Allende moves between the past and the present, between Europe and the United States, while two very different children in very different places and circumstances seek the safety of home and family.
It’s a very different book for Allende, who often sets his stories in his native Latin America, including his best-known and best-selling novel, “The House of the Spirits” and last year’s “Violeta,” which spans the length of a century of history in South America.
At the beginning of his most recent novel, a Nazi mob attacks the Jewish neighborhood where Samuel lives with his parents. Then his father turns up at a hospital, but he is taken to a concentration camp and the mother sends the boy to safety in England. Samuel never sees his parents once more.
Decades later, at the US-Mexico border, 7-year-old Anita Diaz is separated from her mother under the US government’s previous zero-tolerance policy that tore migrant children from their parents. The little girl is sent to live with other children while the whereregardings of her mother are unknown.
Through a series of circumstances, Samuel and Anita finally meet through Leticia, a Salvadoran woman who immigrated to the United States as a child following losing most of her family in the 1981 massacre in El Mozote, El Salvador, for which certain of the settlers died.
Allende knows firsthand the loss of her homeland, having to leave Chile as an exile two years following Salvador Allende, her father’s first cousin, was overthrown as the country’s president in a 1973 coup.
She lived for years in Venezuela before settling in the United States and now makes her home in California.
Considered the most widely read Spanish-language author in the world, Allende is known for her many novels, including “Eva Luna,” “De amor y de sombra,” and “Largo petala de mar.” She also wrote “Paula,” a 1994 memoir.
With “El viento conoce mi nombre” (“The Wind Knows My Name”) — published in Spanish by Vintage Español and Plaza & Janés, as well as in English by Ballantine Books — Allende adds a new dimension to his already varied body of work.
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