Someday We Will Fly
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
From the author of Blind, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story set during World War II in Shanghai, one of the only places Jews without visas could find refuge.
Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will accept Jews without visas. There they struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn't understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive?
Meanwhile Lillia is growing up, trying to care for Naomi, whose development is frighteningly slow, in part from malnourishment. Lillia finds an outlet for her artistic talent by making puppets, remembering the happy days in Warsaw when her family was circus performers. She attends school sporadically, makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a "gentlemen's club" without her father's knowledge.
But meanwhile the conflict grows more intense as the Americans declare war and the Japanese force the Americans in Shanghai into camps. More bombing, more death. Can they survive, caught in the crossfire?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With pathos and a fine eye for historical detail, DeWoskin (Blind) relates the story of Shanghai's Jewish refugees during WWII, when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. In May 1940, two days before their scheduled escape from Warsaw, 15-year-old Lillia's mother disappears, and Lillia, her father, and her malnourished 18-month-old sister Naomi, must flee Poland without her. Lillia, who has inherited her circus performer parents' agility and love for storytelling, finds solace making puppets from scavenged materials. Realizing that her family's survival depends in part on her, she discovers the lengths she will go to save them from starvation and illness, including selling her hair, pawning her mother's gold ring, and dancing in a club for wealthy Japanese men, all the while wondering if she'll ever see her mother again. Lillia's first-person narrative details occupied Shanghai extensively, from her initial impression of the city as "an electric mob of running, waving, shouting" to the ever-present Japanese soldiers. DeWoskin captures the crushing destruction of war and occupation, the unfathomable resilience communities can muster through cross-cultural friendships and acts of kindness, andthe power of the performing arts to foster hope in times of struggle and desperation. Ages 12 up.
