Published 2018 by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York
ISBN 978-0-599-08307-9
293 pages
Grade 4/5
Genre: Novel
Keywords: Australia rural area, sheep farm, time period 1968-71, Holocaust survivor, Auschwitz concentration camp, post-war East-Europe, Hungarian Jewish community, religious brain washing, caring parenting, a love story.
Will I read more of this writer- probably.
In this book we meet Tom Hope, 33 years old, an Australian sheep farmer, whose wife comes and goes but then leaves him with a young child, Peter; Tom is not his biological parent, but he cares for him as if he was his own. His wife leaves him for good, divorces him but promises she will come back for the child when she is settled in the camp of the Church of Jesus. She picks up Peter a few years later when he is about to start school. Peter runs away a few times and therefore all the time punished physically and of course psychologically, no it is better to say attempts to brainwash him, which does not work; even though Peter is young he wants Tom.
In the village Hometown, Hannah Babel arrives, 45 years old, Hungarian, Jewish, survived Auschwitz, she has lost 2 husbands, one in Auschwitz together with her son, Michael, and another husband in the Hungarian uprising to the Russians. She arrives in Hometown and wants to open a bookshop with 25,000 books, the number of books burned in Berlin 1944 by the students. They consider her mad or a witch. Who will read classical European literature in this small rural community?
Tom and Hannah are taken by surprise when they fall in love in spite of the age difference, he has been betrayed by his ex-wife; she has already lost 2 husbands; she is Jewish, he is not. They compromise and celebrate Christmas and Hanukah with traditions from both holidays.
A quote (page 131)
But even here in Hometown, Australia, the censors must be accommodated. Borstal Boy or Lady Chatterley’s Lover; or Eros and Civilization. Apply at the counter for a summary of the story. The summaries were in Hannah’s head. She intended to rattle off the comings and goings recorded in the banned books for anyone with enough curiosity.
What is it with her last name, Babel? She speaks Hungarian, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Russian and English, a biblical reference? Her family was traditional, in her father’s words: keep a kosher kitchen, feed the husband, study, practice the piano. Hannah was very surprised the first time she came to the farm and Tom cooked her dinner.
Tom considers himself not a very good farmer, he inherited the farm after his uncle; so, he takes odd jobs and is employed by Hannah to make shelves for her shop but also fixed the fence in such a good way that when the floods came Hannah’s shop is saved. We hear about Hannah’s nightmares of Auschwitz and the chaotic period after the end of the war. There are senseless killings by the Germans, but also by the Russian army; it sounds in the book just like the atrocities we now hear about taking place in the Ukraine.
The description of rural Australia reminds me of the description of Nature in ‘The Dry’ by Jane Harper.
I did not know that Australia had been involved in the Vietnam war.
My thoughts:
I like Tom the farmer, full of doubts about himself and his work, but proving himself as a rock in the life of Peter and Hannah, and also to his first wife, dependable and reliable to a fault.
Each holocaust survivor has a story to tell, and here in Israel it is part of everyday reality, especially working in health care; many live in isolation, poverty and with depression, missing family members murdered in the concentration camps of the 2WW, like Hannah.
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