The Brightwood Code by Monica Hesse

Eighteen-year-old Edda Grace St. James had been a telephone operator with the American Expeditionary Forces, on the western front in France, in 1918. Her job was to "...answer the line, match the code name to a number, insert the right plug into the right jack, connect the telephone call." The codes changed every day so every night, Edda and the other girls had to memorize two pages of new codes. Then the next day they would sit down at their switchboards, "and when a caller asked to be connected to Montana or Buster or Wabash," Edda and the other operators would understand that they wanted to be connected to a specific division or general.  

Now back in America, in November of 1918, Edda is working at the Central switchboard in Washington, D.C. Her supervisor, Miss Genovese is not happy with Edda: she has incurred several "infractions" for her dress or not following proper protocol on the switchboard. Edda has been home from France for two months now. The last call of her night shift is a caller who tells her she has to tell the truth before it's too late and ends with the word, "Brightwood". Unable to find out more from the mysterious caller, Edda leaves work very upset.

She returns to her Aunt Tess's boarding house where she has a room on the fourth floor, along with other boarders including a young man, Theo Graybill who has a limp from a hip injury. Theo notices immediately that something is not right with Edda and he presses her to tell him. But all Edda will reveal is that she took a local call that was "odd". He tries to reassure Edda that the call was likely just random as it is impossible to choose the operator on a call. 

Unable to sleep after her shift, Edda decides to purchase new clothing instead of doing her laundry. While Edda is in Hecht's to purchase new white blouses and navy wool skirts, two women run in, announcing the war is over. An Armistice has been signed! This leads to partying and celebration everywhere including at Edda's aunt's boarding house. Intoxicated after drinking champagne, and still deeply upset over the call, Edda finally tells Theo what actually happened that fateful day seven months ago in France.

She explains to Theo that as a Hello Girl, and part of the American Expeditionary Forces, it was Edda's job as an operator to transfer calls between platoons, bases and generals, speaking and translating between French and English. Everything was in codes that changed daily. Ordered to place a call one night to Brightwood, the code Edda believes was for Baltimore's Forty-Eighth Regiment, Edda froze, unable to remember the code. The Forty-Eighth Regiment had advanced beyond the front and were trapped. Thirty-four men perished. The caller to her switchboard used the code, Brightwood and told her to tell the truth. 

Edda decides that she has to return to her home in Roland Park in Baltimore to retrieve a Polk's City Directory. When she calls Aunt Tess to ask her to bring her money to the train station, Edda learns that one of the switchboard operators, Louisa Safechuck has killed herself. However, it is Theo who brings her the money and who accompanies Edda to Baltimore against her wishes.  On the train, Theo confesses to Edda that he shot himself in the leg to avoid going to the front.

In Baltimore, Edda and Theo have a difficult run in with her father, who is dismissive towards Theo and unkind towards Edda. After visiting the home of Charley Dannenberg and meeting his angry father, the two return home. The very next shift, Edda receives yet another telephone call telling her she's the only one who can help them and mentioning Brightwood. Hysterical, her adjoining operator, Helen Gibson takes Edda to the break room where she is offered a chance to do a publicity shoot for the Hello Girls.

Back at her room, Edda tells Theo about the second call and the two sit down to try to determine which families might be the most suspect. But as Edda and Theo continue to investigate the families of the dead soldiers, Edda must finally face the reality of the trauma she experienced and come to  

Discussion

The Brightwood Code is a historical fiction novel set in 1918, at the end of World War I. The story focuses on Edda St. Clair, a former Hello Girl who has returned suddenly from France, traumatized by an event that led to the deaths of thirty-four young soldiers.  The story alternates between Edda in the present, in Washington, attempting to uncover the mystery of the caller and the recent past events that occurred while she was at the front in France.

Believing that she could forget what happened if she left France, and found work in a different city Edda's life unravels. She returns home to Baltimore, her father describing her arrival "...like a ghost, telling us nothing is wrong but of course something is wrong. Her room is a pigsty. She has to be dragged into the bath." She flees from her own homecoming party and is unable to dance with the son of her father's boss. Soon after, Edda flees from Baltimore, to Washington where she is able to find work as a telephone operator with Bell. It is at this point that Edda receives two mysterious calls, mentioning the code word Brightwood and begging her to tell the truth. The past has come back to haunt her and Edda is determined to find out who is behind the calls.

Initially Edda believes that the mysterious caller is someone related to one of the dead soldiers, all of whose names she has memorized, and is asking her to claim responsibility for their deaths. Edda is certain that she is responsible because she failed to do her job. "Of course there are things I left out. But nothing that would excuse any of my behavior...Boys were dying on the front. My job was to answer telephones. My only job was to answer telephones." However as the story unfolds, it is not quite that simple.

Edda believes she must investigate each soldier's family to determine who is making the calls. Theo challenges her as to what she hopes to achieve, telling her, "But what kind of endings do you think you can give?....You can't rewrite what happened, no matter what you do. None of us can. Whatever happened is what happened." Edda tells him, "There has to be something. There has to be some kind of finality. Some kind of way of making peace. It can't be the case that something horrible happens and you just have to live, forever, with this feeling of..." 

 As Edda continues to struggle to solve the mystery of who is contacting her, her feelings of guilt and conflict intensify. "I need peace, and I need an ending, and I need to make amends and have amends made to me. And I need to bring my soul back from France. I cannot keep living divided this way, I cannot keep feeling as though I am still in that switchboard room, still in that switchboard room with Luc." 

When Edda meets Charley Dannenberg's father a second time she recognizes the "primal woundedness", the "pain stuffed down" and the "untended grief" he is experiencing because she is experiencing the same. But it's after meeting August Danneman's sister, Eliza, that Edda begins to make sense of what happened to her in France. "Is it possible that I did the best I could with the choices I had? Is it possible that what happened to the boys of the Forty-Eighth was because of something I did, but not my fault? Is it possible that I am to blame, but not to punish?"

When Theo explains how he got out of fighting in the war, he tells Edda that his choice to do anything to get out of the war means he is a coward. But Edda tells him that maybe our choices simply  show "who we were forced to be in the moment that we made them."

Early in the novel, Theo quickly and correctly surmises that Edda's trauma is somehow related to a man named Luc. Edda refuses every attempt to discuss him and it isn't until much later when she remembers the details of that night in the office that it is understandable why this is. Eventually, Edda discovers the person behind the calls and learns that they were not asking her to take responsibility for the deaths of the men of the Forty-Eighth Regiment but to expose a man who had harmed her and possibly many other Hello Girls. These revelations lead Edda to realize that she had been so focused on what happened to the young soldiers, she missed recognizing her own trauma. "I was so focused on the story of the boys who were hurt and lost at war that I missed the story of how I was hurt and lost at war. I missed part of the story. I missed my own part of the story." 

The novel highlights some of the terrible realities of World War I, a war that saw many young men humiliated into enlisting, believing that their honor depended upon doing so. The reality of the war was young soldiers were sent out again and again by generals behind the lines, to face the muck, machine gun fire and gas without any chance of success and little of surviving. As the war dragged on with neither side winning, many people came to see the war as a hopeless endeavor with little regard for the soldiers. Mr. Dannenberg states this to Edda when they meet a second time.  "The truth is that boys like him are expendable. They fought in trenches but the decision about their lives were made over the telephone by people who got to keep their hands clean. That boys like my son never belonged in France, died their because of people like you. Because you were cruel and careless. My son paid with his life, and the people who drove him to enlist, and the people who should have looked after him once he got there -- they didn't pay at all."

The character of Theo Graybill is representative of those young men who were terrified to go to war, who in some way knew the measure of what was happening, but who had no say. " 'I was so scared, ' he continues. 'When my number was called, going was what I was supposed to do. Be a man. Be the first brave man in the family. I wanted to go but I was so scared to go, and I would have done anything not to go. And then I got there and I did. Do anything. I did anything I could do to come home again....' "

The novel also highlights the almost impossible predicament women who have been sexually assaulted faced in the early twentieth century. The conversation between Edda and her supervisor, Miss Genovese portrays the difficulty they faced in reporting Luc. When Edda asks why she didn't report him, Miss Genovese states that it didn't happen to her, that she needed someone who had been harmed by Luc L'Enfant, and that she would have been blamed for allowing the assault to happen to Louisa Safechuck. She knew that Edda was likely also a victim of Luc because of her premature arrival home from France and so she needed to try to get her to report him. And still she wasn't even sure if that was enough.  "It doesn't work to have just one girl's word against a man. You need two. You need twenty...Maybe twenty still would not have been enough. Maybe none of them would have been enough."

The Brightwood Code is a well written and thought-provoking novel that uses the historical fact of the Hello Girls as it's backstory. What starts out as a character trying to solve a mystery, reveals a whole other story, in a twist that is heartbreaking. In spite of all that has happened, the novel does end on a positive tone, with Edda open to developing her friendship with Theo.

The Hello Girls were female switchboard operators in what was known as the Signal Corps Female Telephone Operators Unit during World War I. The unit was formed in 1917 and was made up of two hundred twenty three women, most of whom served in France.

Book Details:

The Brightwood Code by Monica Hesse

New York: Little, Brown and Company    2024

321 pp.

Trajectory by Cambria Gordon

It is May 1942 and seventeen-year-old Eleanor Schiff lives with her twelve-year-old sister Sarah and her parents in Jenkintown, a small suburb in Philadelphia. Eleanor's father is a brilliant mathematician who suffered a devastating stroke that left his speech slurred and his body damaged. Eleanor is called out of her father's study where she is pretending to read Life Magazine but is really working on calculus. Her mother wants her to help with the Shabbos meal preparations. Soon her Uncle Herman, Aunt Jona and their seven-year-old twins, Jacob and Lila arrive.

At dinner conversation turns to the events in Poland. Eleanor had been corresponding with her ten-year-old cousin, Batja, whose father, Azriel is a first cousin of her mother and Uncle Herman.  Her uncle tells them that all the Jews in the Stanislau ghetto must wear shite armbands with blue stars of David to identify them as Jews. The ghetto is guarded by the German Schutzpolizei and the Ukrainian militia. The Jewish police guard it from the inside, something that shocks Eleanor's family. The ghetto holds an unbelievable twenty thousand Jews within a few city blocks. Uncle Herman has also heard that there are "selections" or "aktions" where those who are unable to work because they are old or sick are sent to die.

After dinner, while out with her friend, Trudie at Oswald's Drug Store for a soda, Eleanor learns about a MathMeet being held at 11 AM at the Women's Club on Saturday morning. Even though she feels she shouldn't attend the meeting, Eleanor sneaks into the meeting without registering and handily solves all the problems including the last and most difficult one.  However, on her way out, Eleanor is approached by the organizer, Mary Mauchly, who wants to return Eleanor's notebook which she has left behind. Mary notes that Eleanor was the only one able to solve the last problem. Mary who is associated with the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, tells her that the MathMeet is a ruse to scout for women computers for the U.S. Army. She invites Eleanor to join a new team she's instructing but Eleanor turns her down and flees.

The following day, while Eleanor and her mom walk her dad through the Morris Arboretum in his chair, she considers what happened after the MathMeet. Afterwards at home, Eleanor recalls her father's stroke and how she feels responsible for what happened to him. As a result their life changed drastically: no more faculty banquets, no more volunteer work. Their vibrant life lost. Eleanor's unique math abilities were recognized in kindergarten but she ripped up the teacher's note. She has spent her childhood hiding her ability, throwing math tests, trying not to sound too smart or too dumb and quickly earning the nickname "Nervous Nellie". Eleanor felt that because she took away her father's gift she had no right to hers. Thankfully a phone call changes everything. Mary Mauchly tries again to recruit Eleanor, this time telling her the pay is $1400 a year plus overtime. This would be enough money for Eleanor's family to hire a nurse for her father and to buy extra ration stamps.

When Eleanor decides to accept Mary Mauchly's offer, little does she realize that she will contribute significantly to the war effort and finally confront the trauma she experienced years ago.

Discussion

In Trajectory, a family tragedy forms the backstory of a young woman whose remarkable mathematics abilities see her recruited as a human computer to help the American war effort during the Second World War. 

Seventeen-year-old Eleanor Schiff believes she is responsible for her brilliant mathematician-father's stroke when she was six years old. This trauma leads Eleanor to believe that because she took away his math mind she's doesn't deserve hers. This leads Eleanor to nurture her abilities in secret. It isn't until she is discovered by Maud Mauchly that Eleanor decides to use her abilities during the war, as a human computer. 

In the novel, Eleanor's abilities are quickly realized when she is transferred from the Philadelphia Computing Section (PCS), a secret unit of the US Army to the Muroc Army Air Base in California to work on the Norden bombsight which is supposed to guarantee high altitude precision bombing during the day. When her work there succeeds, she is transferred to Pearl Harbor to teach the bombardiers "... how to compute for turbulence and adjust trail and drift accordingly." There she encounters a pilot, Captain Haines who knew her father because he was his math professor in Pennsylvania. This encounter causes Eleanor's intense guilt and self doubt to resurface leading to an emotional and mental crisis. Eleanor's crisis is also tied to events happening overseas in Europe with the Holocaust and the "liquidation" of the Jews in the Stanislau ghetto in Stanislau, Poland. She learns that no Jews survived meaning that her relatives, Azriel, his wife Rosa and their daughter, Batja have been murdered.

Fortunately, Eleanor is able to unburden herself to her parents who reassure her that her father's stroke was not her fault. This resolution is well portrayed by the author and is very moving. Ultimately, with the help of her parents and the army rabbi, Eleanor is able to experience forgiveness and self-acceptance, allowing her to move forward and complete her mission. In the end, Eleanor grows into a more confident young woman, confident in her mathematical abilities and confident that she can contribute significantly to the war effort. 

Gordon also includes a lovely side story of a blossoming romance between Eleanor and a pilot named Sky. Although Sky is seriously wounded in a plane accident, the novel ends on a positive note with the promise of more to come for these two characters.

Gordon weaves many historical details into her story. For example when Eleanor is reading the headlines in the Philadelphia Inquirer, she learns about how the racists attitudes common in America at this time, are influencing domestic and wartime policy. When she sees the headline, First Negro Division Forms at Fort Huachuca, Eleanor wonders, "Why do Negroes need their own division in the army? Aren't we all fighting for the same cause?" Another headline, Los Angeles Japanese Americans Relocate to Santa Anita makes Eleanor realize, "That's the stables where they race the horses Uncle Herman likes to bet on. It disgusts me the way they're ripping all those people from their homes and tossing them together in dirty, cramped quarters. Like the Germans are doing to the Jews." 

When Eleanor is going through her security clearance she has to deal with sexist remarks from the men who ridicule her "Don't get P-W-O-P."  meaning don't get pregnant without permission. Eleanor notes "Ever since FDR signed the bill into law establishing an army women's corps, the newspapers have been full of stories by male reporters worried that females in the military will wreak  all kinds of sexual havoc on poor unsuspecting servicemen. Petticoat army, they call us. Wackies, too." 

There are a few weak areas the novel's storyline. One of them is Eleanor's efforts to hide her ability to do math when she is very young. In the novel, Eleanor is in kindergarten when her gift to do math is discovered by her teacher. Excited, her teacher places a note in Eleanor's lunch bag for her parents but Eleanor destroys the note so her parents won't know that she has the same gift as her father.  Somehow her parents never learn of her math abilities. Did Eleanor's kindergarten teacher never follow up when there was no response to her note? Did Eleanor's parents never meet her kindergarten teacher or any other teacher in elementary school?  There also seems to be some confusion as to how old Eleanor was when this traumatic experience occurred. In Eleanor's mind it was prior to kindergarten but later on in the novel when she is talking with Rabbi  Richmond, it is revealed that she was six years old where her father had his stroke.  

Overall, Trajectory is a well-written story and one of the few historical novels offered for young adult readers this year.

Book Details:

Trajectory by Cambria Gordon

New York: Scholastic Press     2024
285 pp.

Safiyyah's War by Hiba Noor Khan

Eleven-year-old Safiyyah wants to travel and explore the world. She loved spending afternoons in the library where Madame Odette would bring out the right maps for Safiyyah to explore the places she was interested in. Places like Jerusalem, Manila, Harare or Manaus in Brazil. Often this led Safiyyah to lose track of the time and arrive home later than she should have. This would lead her mother, Yemma to worry, ever since autumn last year when the war began.

When she arrives at the mosque, Safiyyah sits down beside her grandma, Setti in the mosque courtyard. Setti advises her to use each breath she is given wisely and the knowledge she gains too from her reading of maps. Safiyyah's grandmother had moved to Spain from Algeria when she was a teenager. Safiyyah's great-grandparents had farmed large fruit orchards in Algeria. When they moved to Andalusia in Spain, they brought with them orange, lemon and cherry trees. Setti loved oranges and they brought back found memories. From the taste of an orange she could tell where it was grown.

Soon Safiyyah's mother arrives and takes her back to their apartment in the mosque complex to help prepare dinner. They are expecting her father's friend Ammo Kader for dinner. At dinner Baba tells them that the Germans have crossed the French border at the Ardennes. While they don't know what this will mean for them as Muslims, they do know it will not be good for their Jewish friends.

Baba works at the mosque, while Ammo Kader is the rector, liaising with politicians. Ammo Imam is also involved, helping to run the mosque smoothly. Safiyyah often attends their Saturday morning meetings. Baba hopes one day Safiyyah will attend college and he sees her involvement in the mosque affairs as preparation for this. At the meeting the discussion turns to the war and what might happen. Baba had fought for France in the First World War and had lost his hearing in his left ear. But the brutality had also affected him too. 

On Saturday afternoon, Safiyyah travels to the sixteenth arrondissement with Baba to see her best friend Isabelle. Because Isabelle's father works in the French government, her parents know important ministers and ambassadors. Normally Isabelle's mother was dressed with makeup and her hair in a chignon, but on this day she is still in her dressing gown, talking on the telephone in a panicky voice. Isabelle's nanny, Nounou took the girls to the park. There Isabelle reveals that her family is leaving Paris, going south to their chateau in Provence. Isabelle has no idea how long they will stay at the chateau and she also tells Safiyyah that they may flee to England if things worsen. Although Isabelle and her family are not Jewish they are frightened. Safiyyah is devastated by this news.

After Isabelle leaves Paris, Yemma and Baba take Safiyyah and her younger sister, Fatima to Baba's sister's house to visit their cousins. Sixteen-year-old Tarek, who has just finished high school and who wants to be an engineer, announces that he is enlisting. This shocks everyone. When they return to Paris Safiyyah goes to the library to ask for Madame Odette's help locating a book for Monsieur Cassin. He is an elderly friend of Baba and Ammo Kader who Safiyyah delivers medication to once a month. Monsieur Cassin is a botanist, researching plants in India, Sri Lanka, and Malaysia and has just finished writing a book. But he needs a specific book to finish his appendix on insect species. Madame Odette promises to help locate this book. Safiyyah also learns that the librarians are packing books to send to soldiers in the war. However, other books such as special volumes and rare collections are being packed to be sent into the countryside, hidden from the Nazis.

By June 1940, the situation rapidly changes. Safiyyah is no longer welcome in Baba's office for his weekly meetings. While Safiyyah is on her way to bring a book to Monsieur Cassin, Paris is bombed by the Germans. Safiyyah is caught in the bombing but survives and is help by the elderly scientist. Safiyyah, her parents and the mosque work to help the people of Paris and the refugees flooding the city, giving out food and water.

Eventually Safiyyah learns that her friend Isabelle is safe with her parents in England, at her grandfather's cousin's home in Dover. While she misses her best friend she makes a new friend in a young refugee, Timothee who is in Paris with his father. Her family help Timothee and he soon becomes an important helper in what soon happens.

With the arrival of the Germans and the implementation of a curfew, life changes even more. Safiyyah leaves school for several weeks. Then Monsieur Cassin is attacked, his completed book manuscript stolen and his apartment wrecked by the Nazis. Incredibly Safiyyah is able to rescue most of his manuscript from the Nazi soldiers and she and Baba return to help him. However, Baba is far from pleased with Safiyyah who he considers to have placed herself in terrible danger stealing Cassin's manuscript from the Nazi soldiers. However, she confronts him about what she has noticed: that he is exhausted and troubled, out late at night and that the librarians, Madame Odette and Claude have been at the mosque.  Eventually Safiyyah learns the reason behind all of the strange things she's seen and soon finds herself drawn into helping those most in danger, the Jews of Paris.

Discussion

Safiyyah's War is a historical fiction novel that is centered around the help provided to French Jews by the Grand Mosque of Paris during the Nazi occupation of France. 

The Grand Mosque of Paris was built between 1922 and 1926 to honour the sacrifice by mainly Algerian Muslim sharpshooters during World War 1. Like the character, Setti whose grandparents left Algeria for France, many Algerians immigrated to France after World War I. These Muslims were Kabyles and they eventually would join the French Resistance in 1940.

During the Second World War, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, the founder and rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris provided refuge and Muslim identity cards to Jews. At this time, France had a large population of Sephardic Jews. They looked similar to the French Algerian Muslims,  spoke Arabic and had similar traditions, including not eating port and male circumcision. While the mosque was a place of prayer it was also a place where people could find a calming quiet, take food and rest. 

It wasn't long after occupying Paris and the northern part of France that the Nazis and their Vichy collaborators began rounding up Jews. There is some confusion as to who was involved, if it was Benghabrit or individual Muslims and the extent of the help offered by the Grand Mosque. According to Benghabrit, he offered sanctuary to French and Algerian Jews in the mosque's apartments occupied by Muslim families, and he also created false identity papers. The sewers of Paris were used as escape routes to the Halles au Vins on the Seine River where they were hidden aboard empty wine barrels on ferries and barges. They were then taken out of Paris to Spain or the Maghreb (northwest Africa). The exact number of Jews aided cannot be confirmed with estimates of dozens to just over one thousand. There is also some evidence via personal testimony of Ashkenazi Jews being saved as well.

It is this history that forms the back story of Safiyyah's War. In the novel, Benghabrit is referred to as Ammo Kadr. According to Noor Khan, the name of the imam who was "the soul of the mosque's Resistance activities" is lost to history and is simply referred to in the story as Ammo Imam. Noor Khan has incorporated many details of the mosque's resistance activities into the story including the underground tunnels, the use of the wine barrels and the bell system to warn Jews of a Nazi raid.  Also many historical figures are represented such as master forger, Adolfo Kaminsky who is "the kind man", Noor Inayat Khan an Indian aristocrat who became a British spy who is represented by the character Madeleine and Madame Odette and Claude who represented the librarians who provided books for the Jews in hiding as well as the saving of rare books and those books the Nazis deemed worth burning. As well many details of life in Paris especially during the bombing of the city and the influx of refugees from northern France.

The novel places Safiyyah's family at the heart of the mosque's resistance with her father learning how to forge identity cards, hiding Jews within the mosque and taking them through the treacherous tunnels to the Seine. It doesn't take the main protagonist, Safiyyah long to uncover her father's clandestine activities and end up in the thick of things. She is a well crafted character, intelligent, compassionate, and full of courage. As Noor Khan writes in her Historical Note, "All those living in the mosque would have been involved in the Resistance activities in some way, no matter how small their efforts may have seemed. Safiyyah represents all the unlikely heroes whose names aren't memorialized and whose stories aren't sung and praised, but whose courage and actions change our world forever."

In a scene earlier in the novel, Safiyyah's grandmother, Setti advises her to choose the "path of light". Safiyyah loves to explore the world through maps. Knowing this, Setti tells her that often maps have led people to do terrible things, wars, oppression and colonization. She advises using the map of the heart to choose the path of light.

Safiyyah's War is a much needed novel about a forgotten piece of history.  The author states in her Historical Note that she wrote it "...to be a humanizing, unifying force in an all-too-often bitterly divided world." Besides being a well-written and engaging story, it is for this reason that Safiyyah's War is highly recommended, especially for classroom selections.

Book Details:

Safiyyah's War by Hiba Noor Khan
New York:  Allida     2023
329 pp.