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Anya's War, by Andrea Alban
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Anya Rosen and her family have left their home in Odessa for Shanghai, believing that China will be a safe haven from Hitler's forces. At first, Anya's life in the Jewish Quarter of Shanghai is privileged and relatively carefree: she has crushes on boys, fights with her mother, and longs to defy expectations just like her hero, Amelia Earhart.
Then Anya finds a baby―a newborn abandoned on the street. Amelia Earhart goes missing. And it becomes dangerously clear that no place is safe―not for Jewish families like the Rosens, not for Shanghai's poor, not for adventurous women pilots.
Based on a true story, here is a rich, transcendent novel about a little-known time in Holocaust history.
- Sales Rank: #1014465 in Books
- Brand: Feiwel & Friends
- Model: FBA-|318401
- Published on: 2011-02-01
- Released on: 2011-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.60" h x .87" w x 5.93" l, .69 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 208 pages
From Booklist
In 1937, Anya Rosen, 14, and her extended Jewish family have fled their comfortable home in Odessa, Ukraine, where they were threatened by Stalin’s secret police. Now settled in Shanghai, they join other refugees, including those from Hitler-controlled Germany. In this first novel, based on the author’s family experience, the dramatic cultural and historical details are sometimes more compelling than the plot, in which Anya makes friends and then rescues an abandoned newborn Chinese girl in a culture where girls are worthless. Most moving are the scenes with the full cast of family characters, who are irritating, irritable, funny, surprising, mean, and prejudiced. Alban also explores the complexities of Anya’s Jewish community. Anya resents the Orthodox constraints against women: why can’t she go to synagogue like her brother? The Ashkenazi Jews do not like the Sephardic refugees, and both speak disparagingly of local coolies, though for Anya, the family’s Chinese servant becomes a mentor. An important addition to literature about WWII refugees. Grades 7-12. --Hazel Rochman
Review
“Based on the author's life, it is a book with history, drama, and good writing.” ―Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews
“The characters, and most notably Anya, are well crafted and believable.” ―BCCB
“A delightfully textured…glimpse at a little-remembered period of Jewish history.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“An important addition to the literature about WWII refugees.” ―Booklist
About the Author
ANDREA ALBAN is the author of several picture books, including The Happiness Tree for Feiwel and Friends, as well as Mother's Nature: Timeless Wisdom for the Journey into Motherhood and other adult inspirational books written under the name Andrea Alban Gosline. Anya's War is her first novel, and based on her own family's experiences during WWII. Andrea lives in San Francisco.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Structured, cogent, compelling and evocative
By Charles S. Weinblatt
Anya's War is a tender coming-of-age tale of a Jewish girl whose family escaped to Shanghai from the impending Nazi takeover of their home in Russia. Fourteen year-old Anya Rosen's father believed that China would be a safe reprieve for Jews escaping from Hitler's vow to punish the Jewish people. Although the characters are fictional, the story is real and based upon the author's ancestors.
Alban's compelling characters elucidate the very real terror of Jews living in China during the early years of the Holocaust. Anya's War is rich with metaphor and reality, a powerful combination during an explosive era of world war and genocide. Alban delivers a persuasive dose of a dichotomous society where timeless class structure results in domination of the wealthy over the poor. Anya was raised in a moderately wealthy family in Odessa, which was transformed into an upper-class family in China. She soon became immersed within a culture that included suffering, yet devoted servants and the condescending wealthy.
Anya arrives as a typical adolescent, filled with curiosity, plans within plans and a burgeoning interest in boys. Like many adolescent girls of the time, Anya has natural heroes. She greatly admires Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt. She also plans to live in The United States and become a physician, like her aunt. Like all teenagers, Anya fights with her parents. She is especially defiant with her dominating mother, who has other plans for Anya's career. At the same time, Anya explores deepening feelings for a boy in her class at school.
Woven into Anya's life are her doting parents, grandparents, brother, friends and servants. Except for her parents, these characters possess rudimentary depth. Yet, the events and circumstances surrounding Anya are described with delightful depth. Alban's descriptions of life in China are terrific and she pulls the reader along with vibrant flow and intensity.
Because she lives in relative wealth and attends the Jewish school in Shanghai, the morass of subjugation, starvation and hopelessness prevalent among Chinese remains just below Anya's radar. Anya races around Shanghai in her bicycle, visiting friends and running errands. She has a new camera which she uses to take pictures along her way. Anya takes advantage of her newly-acquired ability to bargain with sellers in the market.
One day, Anya discovers an discarded newborn girl in a basket. She brings the baby home, to the horror of the entire household. Anya immediately loves and cares for the abandoned child. She is determined to keep the baby and proffers the child a name. At the same time, her father brings home a new Jewish family in Shanghai, including a boy who sweeps Anya off her feet.
One day, Anya's younger brother follows her on an unapproved trip into Shanghai, during which a Chinese bomber accidentally drops bombs upon the city. The resulting disaster leaves Anya's brother seriously injured. Alone and deeply frightened, Anya must find a way to save her brother's life.
Alban brings to light that mystifying, confusing time of life in which Anya is neither child nor adult, but some confusing stage in between. This story becomes an exploration of adolescent desire and passion, a newfound freedom chained with responsibility, underpinned by the desire to remain a part of a nurturing, loving family.
Alban's writing style is structured, cogent and evocative. Her protagonist and the primary characters are entertaining, well developed and delivered with expressive dialog. They induce depth and fervor. Anya's character is powerful and seductive. One can feel her empathy, defiance, curiosity and passion. However, the secondary characters are less well developed, leaving the reader with a somewhat murky sense of their personality features. The family's Jewish identity is carefully elucidated through the manner in which they honor the Sabbath, observe holidays, recall the past and enjoy valued traditions. Interspersed in the dialog are Yiddish words used to convey more expressive meaning.
Anya's War is a powerful novel of cultures, adolescent emotions, aspiration, passion, fear and anticipation. Within it, we glimpse wartime China, its deep-seated traditions, structures, classes and beauty. Alban also delivers the devastation, anxiety and terror of war. Here we find a bright, expressive teenager named Anya, who is struggling to become an independent young adult, learning valuable life lessons from venerable servants, friends and family. The pace of this novel increases exponentially, with an explosive conclusion.
Reviewer Charles S. Weinblatt is the author of Jacob's Courage: A Holocaust Love Story (Mazo Publishers 2007).
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Anya's War
By Jewish Book World Magazine
Anya's War is a first person account of a 14 year old Jewish girl's adventures and misadventures in acclimating to her new life in Shanghai in 1937. Her upper class Jewish family has fled there from Odessa, Russia, where Jews are being persecuted under Communism. Anya Rosen (her father has just shortened the family name from Rosengarten) narrates the events around her 14th birthday when, riding her new bicycle home with her purchases from the kosher butcher, she hears a mewing sound that turns out to be a crying baby. She finds and rescues the Chinese infant girl she hears crying in the bushes. The baby has been abandoned because she is a girl and unwanted by a society that values males over females. (This event is based on the factual account of the author Andrea Alban's grandfather, who lived in Shanghai at that time and brought home such an abandoned infant girl.) We learn much about Chinese culture in this book, and much about Jewish culture and family life. The Rosens; Anya, Georgi (her younger brother) Mama, Papa, Babushka and Dedushka celebrate Shabbat faithfully in elegant Odessa style. Anya expresses a very personal and emotional experience of Shabbat:
Anya lit hers last, one candle for shamor, observance, and one for zachor, remembrance. It was time for her second neshamah to enter her body. Her skin tingled with the feeling of the additional soul slipping in. This extra soul might distract her from her worries about the Japanese and Chinese fighting for control of Shanghai.
Anya worries about the big things: war, infanticide, injustice to females in China, a bombing that injures her brother and Amelia Earhart, whose plane is lost. She also worries about personal things: a boy she likes, her looks, her relationship with her mother, father, brother, Babushka and Dedushka. She has a close and trusting relationship with Li Mei, the family's 17 year old Chinese cook. Anya writes in a Book of Moons (diary) and opens her personal and political world to young readers. Though fictionalized, this account of a little known period of Jewish, Russian and Chinese history fills in a blank that most don't know. Boys and the male viewpoint are well represented in this book, so it is not a book for girls only. Ages 10 and up. Naomi Morse
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
a compelling story of a little-known chapter in Jewish history
By M. Tanenbaum
In her debut novel for young adults, San Francisco writer Andrea Alban mines her own family history to weave a compelling coming-of-age story of a fourteen-year old Russian-Jewish girl and her family in 1937 Shanghai. Anya and her family had left their comfortable life in Odessa, where Mama was an opera singer and Papa was a journalist, because Papa wouldn't join the Communist Party, and sought safety from the Russian Secret Police in far-off Shanghai, then a safe-haven for many Jews.
The story opens with Anya writing a list of wishes in her diary. Their servant, Li Mei, has told her that planting wishes under a full moon gives them the best chance of coming true. What does a 14-year old girl in 1937 Shanghai wish for?
She wishes Amelia Earhart, her idol, will be found safe somewhere in the Pacific. She also struggles with telling her mother the truth about her hopes for the future--going to university in the United States, not becoming an opera singer like her mother. "I am absolutely, one hundred percent certain that I don't want to sing opera. I think." And she's trying to think of something witty to say to a boy she likes at the bowling club, hoping her right bosom will grow extra fast to catch up without her left side, and last but not least, wishing "the Japanese would stop killing Chinese children by accident."
But Anya's life changes when she discovers, on her way home from purchasing the family's food for Sabbath dinner, an abandoned basket with an unwanted newborn girl baby inside. What should she do? The baby was thrown away by her family, but Jews don't throw out baby girls, Anya tells herself. "All girls are precious. We're all the same." She impulsively decides to take the baby home with her, where she is helped by her best friend, Giselle, and Li Mei. Will her mother allow her to keep the baby safe? But Anya soon learns that no place is safe, especially for her new friend Gabriel and his father, who fled anti-semitism in Italy, or even in Shanghai, where unexpected danger lurks.
Alban paints a detailed picture of the exotic Jewish life in Shanghai, from the trip to the kosher butcher to the synagogue to celebrating the Sabbath rituals in their home, with a meal cooked by their Chinese servant. She writes with great affection for her characters and their hopes and fears, and young readers will readily identify with Anya and her companions. The author incorporates some romance as well, as Anya dreams about boys and even gets her first (very innocent) kiss.
An author's note explains how Alban grew up hearing stories of her father's Jewish childhood in the French Quarter of Shanghai, China, and how the small community of 4,000 Jews swelled to 20,000 with the influx of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler. The Jews that arrived after 1937 were herded by the Japanese invaders into the Hongkew Ghetto, a little-known chapter of Holocaust history.
This book is the first in a trilogy that will go through the end of World War II, and subsequent volumes will tell more about Anya's family and this fascinating chapter in history.
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