May 17, 1940 was the last time fifteen-year-old Lillia Kazka saw her parents perform at the Stanislav Circus in Warsaw. Their gravity-defying performance came to a crashing end when the secret circus performance was raided by German soldiers. In the confusion, Lillia's father grabbed her and her baby sister Naomi and raced back to their apartment on Zgoda Street. Lillia heard her mother's scream but she was not with them when they fled. Now Lillia, her father and her younger sister wait, certain that she will return.
When morning comes and Lillia's mother doesn't return, her father decides to return to the circus offices to see if he can learn what has happened. Lillia and her father are
"wild with fear". In two days they are planning to drive to Lithuania where they will take a ship to Shanghai. Lillia is left to mind her one-and-a half-year-old sister, her parents' "surprise baby" who is not like other babies and who cannot crawl or walk yet.
Her father returns, without any word of what has happened to his wife, Alenka. He tells Lillia that they must leave the next day but that they will leave word with friends in the hopes that she will follow them.This deeply upsets Lillia who wants to stay and find her mother. The next day, Lillia, her father and Naomi drive to Lithuania where they catch the train to Trieste, Italy. On May 23, their ship the Conte Rosso departs Trieste for Shanghai. During their thirty-six day journey, they will pass Venice, Brindisi, Port Said, the Suez Canal, Massowah, Aden, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, and Hong Kong before arriving in Shanghai.
One day on the ship Lillia is approached by a woman who offers to buy her hair. Reluctant at first, Lillia later agrees after she learns her father has sold his wedding ring so that they will have more money when they arrive in Shanghai. The final two weeks of their voyage, Lillia is sick and feverish. After her father carries her and Naomi off the ship, they board a truck from the Jewish service that takes them to a Heime, a shelter. In the Heime, there are Jews from all over Europe. They meet Joshua Michener, a banker who know is a barber and his wife, Taube who used to be a science teacher.
Out on the streets of Shanghai, Lillia notices soldiers carrying bayonets. Her papa explains that for the past three years, China has been occupied by Japan. Lillia recognizes that Germany and Japan are working together. With the arrival of summer, Shanghai experiences overwhelming heat and severe flooding. Lillia continues practicing headstands and doing the exercises her mother did to keep herself strong.
Lillia and her family move to a room in a three-storey house at 54 Ward Road. Mr. Michener and Taube also move in with them. Also living in the house is Gabriel Eber, a man they met at Wayside Park. In the fall, Lillia begins school, attending the Kadoorie School. There she meets another girl from Poland, Biata and two American girls, Sally Miller and Rebecca Rosen. Rebecca, who is very well off and who lives in the International Settlement, attempts to befriend Lillia. However, Lillia is reluctant because she is so poor and lives in HongKou with the very poor Polish Jews and the Chinese from the rural areas outside of Shanghai.
Eventually it seems that life for Lillia and her family is settling down. Naomi begins to speak and learns to walk and Lillia gradually becomes friends with Rebecca, attending a Girl Guides meeting at her home and going camping with the group. But when her father and Naomi become desperately ill, Lillia must make some difficult choices, ones that could put her in danger. And when war comes to Shanghai after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, life becomes a desperate struggle for survival amidst grinding poverty and fear. But an unexpected event gives Lillia and her father hope to continue on, in spite of all this.
Discussion
Someday We Will Fly is set during World War II in Shanghai, China. Most readers will know at least a little background about the years prior to World War II but most will not know about events going on in other parts of the world during the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism in Germany.
Prior to World War II, the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan were engaged in a series of conflicts. The Japanese had invaded Manchuria in 1931 and then attacked Shanghai in 1932. However, in July of 1937, the Japanese invaded China. The two nations waged a brutal battle for the city of Shanghai from July to November of 1937.Although the Chinese were poorly equipped, they fought valiantly, but lost to the superior Japanese. The city was now occupied by the Imperial Japanese Army. After the Battle of Shanghai, it was possible to enter the city without a visa or a passport. This made Shanghai an idea destination for the Jews in Europe, who were facing escalating persecution and who were being refused visas by almost every country in the world.
Ashkenazi Jews ( Jews from Eastern Europe) began arriving in 1933, their numbers drastically increasing as the Nazis tightened their grip on Austria, Poland and Germany. As Lillia and her family did in the novel, many traveled via luxury ships from ports in Italy to Shanghai. However, the city of Shanghai was not prepared to receive a sudden influx of refugees in such a short period of time. As a result food was scarce and illnesses in the impoverished Hongkuo District, where many of the European Jews settled were rampant.
DeWoskin effectively captures the extreme poverty and hardship Lillia and her family faced during the war years. Lillia is often ravenously hungry and DeWoskin incorporates many descriptions of Lillia's struggles to find food and to not show those around her just how hungry she really is. When she returns home one day after school and smells meat, her response is both visceral and intense.
"I smelled meat. My mind turned red and ravenous. I imagined stalking an animal, digging my teeth into its raw flesh." At Rebecca's home, tea time is overwhelming, filling her with unrealistic ideas.
"I took a single sandwich, but my mind buzzed, swarming with plans to fill my pockets, to pour tea into my clothes and squeeze it back out for Naomi at 54 Ward." Despite these intense feelings, Lillia retains her social graces and her decorum.
DeWoskin's evocative prose, rich with imagery, allows the reader to fully experience the many emotions Lillia feels as she struggles to keep her family alive in the ruins of Shanghai. Early on Lillia attempts to comfort herself by focusing on words and colours.
"I kept track of colors: Shanghai was tan, gold, green, and sometimes red, especially at night. Water was every shade but blue. Japanese planes turned the air metallic, chopped clouds into patches intersected by lines." DeWoskin captures the essence of all that Lillia and her family and the other Jews in Shanghai experience, impressing upon the reader just how difficult life was for the Jewish refugees during the war.
As well as the realistic portrayal of hardship, poverty, suffering and death,
Someday We Will Fly is also a story of resiliency, self-sacrifice, courage and hope. At great cost to herself, Lillia becomes a dancer and a dinner escort at the night club Magnifique in order to save her father and her younger sister Naomi from starvation. She uses her circus skills to save herself from a more ruinous fate in the night club. And in spite of all the trials, the novel manages a hopeful ending. Lillia's mother finds her way to their family in Shanghai after her own horrible experience and Lillia is able to stage her own puppet show that chronicles her family's journey. She is able to imagine her life going forward.
DeWoskin was inspired to write this novel after two photographs at the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum caught her attention. The photographs of Jewish refugee children in Shanghai
"seemed iconic of how human beings save each other and our children" Through her main character, Lillia Kaczka-Varsh, DeWoskin was able to explore many questions, such as
"...how human beings survive the chaos of war, ...how can children come of age in circumstances as unnurturing as those of occupied cities?" and
"How do we manage to hold on to the possibility of hope, even when we feel the constant pulse of its twin force, dread?" To try to answer these questions in the form of a historical fiction novel, Rachel DeWoskin, who had spent six summers living in Shanghai, did considerable research both in the city itself and in talking with several surviving Shanghai Jewish refugees. She walked through areas of the city that Lillia would have lived in during the war, she lived in an apartment in the Embankment Building which served as the processing center and shelter for the Jewish refugees, imagining what Shanghai was like in the 1940s and what life was like there. The relationship between Lillia and Wei, between European and Chinese would have been unlikely but possible, although it would have been frowned upon.
Someday We Will Fly will appeal to those readers who enjoy historical fiction and wish to read a novel with an unusual setting and and interesting and unique main character. In addition to the Author's Note at the back of the book, DeWoskin offers an extensive Sources Consulted list as well.
Book Details:
Someday We Will Fly by Rachel DeWoskin
New York: Viking 2019
353 pp.
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