dancing with kittens

The other book I finished during my voyage through the southwest was How to Love Your Daughter by Hila Blum, translated from Hebrew by Daniella Zamir. This was book [checks notes] #17 from the “Women in Translation” rec list. It’s about an estranged mother and daughter; as the mother peers through the windows of her adult daughter’s house from across the street, she ponders what went wrong in their formerly loving relationship.

How to Love Your Daughter is a cerebral kind of novel that swims back and forth between Yoella’s present, desperately reaching after the daughter who’s walked out of her life, and Yoella’s recollections of raising Leah.

The twists and turns of their relationship are subtle, almost too subtle. Both characters come off slightly neurotic, fussing about every minor interaction and seeming, to me, to invent problems where none really existed. In the end, it’s not so much a long-deteriorating relationship, which is what I expected, as it is Yoella making one decision that forever alters Leah’s perception of her.

“No one warned me my love could destroy her,” Yoella says about Leah at one point and that’s the core of it. Yoella adores her daughter, almost beyond reason. And it’s that very willingness to put Leah above everyone and everything else that eventually pushes Leah away from her, which is such a perfect tragedy.

I saw another review that said this book was both too long and too short, and I think there’s some truth to that. There are drawn out middle sections which don’t necessarily add much, but the ultimate break and subsequent efforts at reconciliation by Yoella don’t get as much room to breathe as might have benefitted them.

However, the ending is an exquisite microcosm of the tension of the whole novel, leaving you wondering about unreliable narrators and perceptions. Some people felt that Yoella gets off too easy—I would recommend rereading the section where Leah talks to Yoella about her reality/fantasy of Dennis writing her a letter.

I don’t know that either Yoella or Leah comes off as really sympathetic here, but they do come off very human, full of flaws and self-justifications and irrational reactions. And maybe sometimes it’s just human nature to create a tragedy where there didn’t have to be one.

It seems timely to read about America’s past experience with unjust detention of people based on perceived threats to national security, so last night I finished Together in Manzanar by Tracy Slater, a true story about one of the families in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. The situation of the Yonedas was somewhat unusual as they were a mixed-race family—Karl Yoneda was a Japanese-American citizen and his wife Elaine was white and Jewish.

The Yonedas make for a very interesting case study in what happened in the camps because a) their mixed-race family status (including their 3-year-old son, Tommy) made it clear how little the American military had really thought about this plan, given how thrown-off they were by the mere existence of mixed-raced families; and b) Karl and Elaine had been vocal social activists well before they were imprisoned in the Manzanar camp, speaking up for labor rights, racial justice, and participating in Communist advocacy. They had the language, tools, and knowledge to speak up and speak out, and they did.

Slater has done her research and provides a thorough list of sources at the end of the book, which include interviews with the Yonedas’ grandchildren as well as their own diaries and news clippings.

Together in Manzanar provides an in-depth look at the politics within the Japanese-American community at this time, both leading up to the camps and within. It ably tackles the question of “Why did they go? Why wasn’t there resistance?” (There was.) For the Yonedas in particular, the importance of an Axis defeat was difficult to overstate: as horror stories of German atrocities in Europe began to trickle out, they knew that a German or Japanese take-over of the United States would almost undoubtedly lead to Elaine and their son Tommy going into a death camp.

It provides a three-dimensional look at the discussions on the ground at the time, as well as following up with details from interviews Karl and Elaine gave many years later reflecting back on their statements and advocacy at the time.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the writing style, but this is one of those books you read for content, not style. It jumps around from perspectives in a way that’s occasionally confusing, but I also appreciated getting some more background information on some of those in the camp who opposed the Yonedas’ view on cooperating with the US government. Slater does a good job showing how each person highlighted got to their perspective and why the tension both within the camps and in the world generally at the time put everyone so on edge.

The book is also helpful for reminding us of the names of the hateful racists (architect Karl Bendetsen) who propagated this plan and then later tried to lie about why it was implemented or how bad it was. It’s also a useful reminder that when these people were released, they didn’t get to just waltz back into the lives they had been living before being imprisoned. Many of them were forcibly resettled further into the US, away from the coastal cities where they had lived, and forced to restart their lives from scratch, away from their communities and businesses.

It just seemed like a particularly relevant time to remember this.