It’s a delicate time in the U.S. right now. A man interested in the highest office in the free world calls for a ban on people of other cultures coming to this country. He is interested in building a wall to keep out those who would come here to improve the quality of their lives and the lives of their families. He makes no bones about restricting citizenship and is in favor of sending reliable workers and moms and dads back to their country of origin. And he pledged (and since recanted) a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”
Think about it. Has there been another time when certain cultures and races were targeted and singled out? When individuals who were separated from the mainstream melting pot of U.S. society due to their beliefs or backgrounds? If you’re not sure, here are two novels that talk about a time when separateness was in vogue.
“Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” is a love story. Henry Lee’s parents are in the U.S. from China and they speak Cantonese to him at home. They want Henry to assimilate into the American culture, so they encourage him to speak only English and enroll him in a prestigious school — “on scholarship” — so he can study with kids who have grown up immersed in U.S. culture. Henry’s father avidly follows events in China and expects Henry to go back to that country when his schooling reaches the college stage. While at school, Henry meets a sweet young girl named Keiko Okabe and they become friends. But Keiko is Japanese and, by 1942, both China and the U.S. are at war with Japan. Henry knows his parents, especially his father, will be furious should he discover that his only son is friendly with a Japanese girl.
Keiko meets Henry secretly one night and tells him, “The police and the FBI came and took our radios, cameras and a few people from our building …” Soon her family — and thousands of others — are rounded up, told to pack one suitcase each and leave behind family photo albums, wedding gowns, dried flowers, fading pictures of ancestors and everything else. Thousands of bits of memorabilia are stored in an underground storage room of a hotel.
Those of Japanese descent, even U.S. citizens, are bused to internment camps, forced into tight quarters, denied the right to cook and eat food of their choice, forced to share primitive bathroom facilities and even made to build basic furniture for themselves and their families. Henry eventually finds many of the hastily discarded items in the hotel underground and he finds Keiko, but not before the stark realization of what is being done to an entire portion of society becomes an ugly reality for him. “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet” was written by Jamie Ford who is himself of Chinese descent.
“The Book Thief” is a novel narrated by Death and set in pre-World War II Germany where Hitler’s power, fueled by flowery rhetoric, is on the rise. Leisel is aboard a train — her mother is taking Leisel and her 6-year-old brother to a rural town where she believes they will be safe from the disturbing early developments of the Nazi Party. Liesel’s brother dies on the journey. As the girl leaves his hurried funeral, she picks up a book, “The Grave Digger’s Handbook,” and keeps it.
Leisel sees her mother for the last time as she goes home with Rosa and Hans Hubermann.
“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness,” and soon she is calling them Mama and Papa. The couple, whose son and daughter are grown and away from home, welcome Leisel, but Rosa is stern and quick to correct and punish the girl. Hans plays the accordion, and his warmth and compassion come through as he helps Leisel learn to read. Words fascinate the girl and when Nazi leaders throw books onto a bonfire in the town center, Leisel steals a scorched volume. She sticks the book inside her jacket where it begins to singe her skin — words leaving a lasting imprint on her. As Leisel grows, so does the Nazi Party and its army. Rosa and Hans hide a young Jewish man, but the scrutiny is great and he is forced to move on. When a ragged, shackled, hungry parade of Jews is forced to march through the town, one of Leisel’s friends gives a hunk of bread to one of the prisoners. A German guard sees it and beats the young man. The town is bombed and homes become rubble, fathers never return from the war and parents cry over dead children. But Death passes her over — “I wanted to tell the book thief many things about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn’t already know?” Leisel survives the ugliness of war, moves away from Germany and lives her life, one that always includes words. “The Book Thief” was written by Markus Zusak and published in 2005.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, 1905.