No one is here except all of us

Ramona Ausubel

Book - 2012

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Subjects
Genres
Historical fiction
Published
New York : Riverhead Books 2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Ramona Ausubel (-)
Physical Description
328 p. ; 24 cm
ISBN
9781594487941
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

RAMONA AUSUBEL'S fantastical and ambitious first novel, "No One Is Here Except All of Us," was inspired by reminiscences and stones told by her Romanian-born grandmother. Ausubel, who grew up in New Mexico, is several generations removed from Nazi-dominated Europe. She is not a despairing witness like Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel or Tadeusz Borowski, survivors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and other camps whose work revealed the terrors of the Holocaust. She is closer in age to Jonathan Safran Foer, whose first novel, "Everything Is Illuminated," follows a young American and his malaprop-prone guide on a journey to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Ausubel's novel is concerned with family history, communal memory and the power of the imagination, and maintains an uncanny, sometimes troubling, aura of innocence throughout. The novel opens with a brief poetic prelude voiced by a woman cradling an infant in her arms: "It began in 1939, at the northern edge of Romania, on a small peninsula cupped by a muddy river. The days then were still and peaceful." Nine Jewish families called the river valley, in the Carpathian Mountains, home. "Our village was complete and so were our lives within it; our ghosts were quiet under the earth and we were quiet above it." From here, the narrative is taken over by 11-year-old Lena, the youngest of three children of a cabbage farmer, who tells the story of her village and how its people reinvented the world as menace loomed. The imagery in the early chapters brings to mind Marc Chagall's optimistic and serene paintings of village life in Russia: goats, fiddlers, rabbis, brides, the tree of life. "In our village," Lena says, "all of us - mothers and fathers, grandparents and children, uncles and great-aunts, the butcher, baker, saddlemaker, cobbler, wheat cutter, cabbage farmer - stood in circles around our tables and lit candles while we blanketed the room in prayer." The first intimations of change come as everyone gathers for Sabbath. The village healer, who presides, opens a newspaper with the headline "WAR. 11 am, SEPTEMBER 3rd, 1939." As the adults react with fear, Lena wonders, "What if I die? . . . What if I don't grow up?" The healer reads the opening passages of the Book of Genesis, his words "a familiar river." But soon he is interrupted - Lena sees a silver airplane pass overhead, then hears "a thundering, time-stopping boom." Later that evening, the villagers find their river overflowing with trout, as well as with other treasures: "two bowls, one jewelry box hill of mud, a doll with no legs, a matted sweater, some cut logs, a hand-drawn map of the summer constellations smudged but readable, and a woman. A woman - hair, teeth, feet, fingers all. And she was alive." As the villagers comfort and feed the woman, she describes how her village was destroyed by soldiers, her mother, sister, husband and children tortured and killed. The villagers panic. What to do? "We start over," says the stranger, who has witnessed the worst and lost all. "When there is nothing left to do, and there is nowhere else to go, the world begins again." Through some mystical connection, Lena and the stranger help the villagers imagine their way out of reality into a fresh beginning. In chapters echoing Genesis, from the first day through the seventh, Ausubel describes their new existence unfolding. They plan for a grand temple and eventually build it in a barn, adorning its ceiling with constellations created out of broken china - "the pine tree, which keeps watch over men who can't sleep; the potato, which looks after those who fear being alone." They designate committees - the Committee for the Appreciation of the River, the Committee for What We Have and Where We Have It - and give the stranger the job of recording everyone's prayers each day. Lena's parents give her to her childless aunt Kayla and uncle Hersh, the village saddle maker, so that in this new version of the world, they, too, can be parents. Lena's life is reprised in accelerated form, beginning with infancy, so Kayla can experience all phases of motherhood. This plotline follows a convoluted path and is, in the end, distracting, as are occasional treacly passages: "One Friday evening, the sun hung heavy and waiting to drain, syrupy, into the wheat fields." Young Lena's narration is sometimes so naïve, it threatens to diminish the gravity of the historic events she describes. But her voice gains authority with the passage of time. After Lena grows older, marries the village banker's eldest son and becomes a mother, she considers her home's third year of undisturbed peace: "I do not wonder so much why we were left alone as long as we were. Why our village was skipped by marching Romanian soldiers with orders to send all the Jews and Gypsies to the other side of the border for the Germans to deal with. What aches in every part of my body is that we did not hear their cries, the lives ending." From this point on, Ausubel artfully introduces moments of grim reality, "cracks" in the village's story, via news flashes and Churchill speeches broadcast over a radio from the "old world" that the stranger, with Pandora-like curiosity, has exhumed. As the village's myths begin to shatter, the novel breaks into three strands: Lena's husband is captured and taken away by three relatively benign Italian soldiers who sequester him on an island as a prisoner of war; the doomed villagers prepare for the worst; and Lena makes a harrowing escape through the woods, subsisting on tree bark and stolen potatoes, determined to save her two young sons. "You have to survive to tell what happens," the stranger insists. "That's your job now." ASUBEL'S novel is infused with faith in the power of storytelling. Its concluding passages invoke a tone not unlike that of Chagall's tormented and apocalyptic painting "The Falling Angel." Begun in 1923 and finished in 1947, after the war and the death of Chagall's wife, the work depicts Satan throwing the world into chaos. Yet light and tenderness persevere - in a shining moon, in a candle still aglow, in a mother's embrace of her child. Like a mother shielding her infant from brutal reality, Ausubel has found her own muted way of writing about the Holocaust. "As I wrote through deeply sad stories, I found that hope was in the telling," she says on her publisher's Web site, explaining how she retrieved and reimagined family fables. "As long as the story was told, it was alive." In chapters echoing Genesis, Ausubel describes a village whose people reinvent their lives in the face of war. Jane Ciabattari is a contributor to The Daily Beast, The Boston Globe and other publications, and the author of the story collection "Stealing the Fire."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 5, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review

For the nine Jewish families who live in a valley in northern Romania in 1939, the troubles in their part of the world are known but distant. Then a woman who is the sole survivor of her ravished village washes up on the riverbank, and she, assisted by narrator Lena, suggests starting over, building a new and perfect world, with no memories of the painful past. With the barn as its temple and the stranger as its spiritual leader, the small village is bypassed by troops for years, until one day when three soldiers arrive and carry off Igor, Lena's husband, a man who specializes in sleeping. Taking her children, Lena leaves, with the admonition that she survive to tell what happens. While Igor is a pampered prisoner in Sardinia, Lena endures unimaginable hardships and wrenching losses. Ausubel uses the history of her own great-grandmother as the framework for her first novel, which fully evokes the horrors of the Holocaust by merely touching on events. A fabulist tale of love, loss, faith, hope, community, and, especially, the power of story.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Ausubel's debut novel about survival and storytelling begins in 1939 as nine Jewish families that make up the northern Romanian village of Zalischik decide-as war threatens to consume all of Europe-to "start over" by retreating into an imaginary, alternative history and remaking their world. Aided by a mysterious pogrom survivor who appears in their village, these families reinvent themselves, reassigning relationships, occupations, even ages, believing against reason that this new version of events will keep them safe, for, they hope, "this world is about hope more than events." At the center of the effort and the novel is Lena, the 11-year-old daughter of the village cabbage farmer, who must maintain the thread of narrative even as she is adopted by her aunt and uncle, married to the banker's unlucky son, Igor, and becomes a mother. When the outside world finally intrudes on the village idyll, Lena must accept that her duty is "to survive to tell what happens," and she sets out on a journey that will deprive her of everything but her will to keep telling. Despite hints of beauty and meaning, the novel's combination of magical realism and traumatic history feels forced, undermining its theme of the power of storytelling. Agent: Janklow & Nesbit Associates. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

A Jewish village in 1939 Romania decides to step out of time; "ambitious" (New York Times) and a "must-read" (Harper's Bazaar). (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A bittersweet fable of war and survival set in a Romanian shtetl. Like Chagall's art, charming or cloying depending on taste, Ausubel's fanciful novel employs an intensely imaginative style both to evoke Zalischik, a remote Jewish settlement in 1939, and also to fuel her story. As news of the encroaching anti-Semitic terrors filters into the village via the horrific experience of a half-drowned stranger, the community tries to hold the world at bay with its imagination while cutting itself off from external contact. The narrator, 11-year-old Lena, must endure a parallel delusion. Given by her loving parents to her barren aunt and uncle, she is pushed rapidly through the stages of childhood again as her partly-deranged new parents teach her to talk and walk, then arrange marriage to Igor, the banker's son. Happiness and children follow, but the village's isolation can't last. After Igor is taken prisoner, Lena flees into the woods where her baby dies and farmers offer her an impossible choice. Returning to Zalischik where she learns the fate of her people, she finally turns to a future in the New World. Ausubel's sustained, idiosyncratic take on the Holocaust is double-edged, alternating affecting heartache with sentimental poetic overkill. Opinion may be divided, but there's an undeniable element of talent here.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.