STILL COME HOME: Book Review

The novel opens with a young woman in Afghanistan daydreaming of an apricot:

…She wants the fruit. She wants her freedom. She wants to do everything she shouldn’t. She shoves back her purple headscarf and walks to the open window of her small, second-story apartment. She sticks her torso out and leans, hanging her head upside down. Her hair dangles like a black flag in the breeze. Positioned like this, she won’t have to look up the street at the remains of her family compound. She won’t have to wish she’d died in there three years ago either.  

-- Katey Schultz, Still Come Home

This morning I finished reading Katey Schultz’s new novel, Still Come Home, a story focusing on four main characters: Aaseya, the young Afghani woman in her early 20s; Rahim, her 40-year-old husband; Miller, an American second lieutenant stationed in Afghanistan; and Miller's wife, Tenley, back home in South Carolina. I don’t want to tell you very much about them, because you deserve to meet them as I did, as Schultz introduces them. Let me say only that their worlds and cultures and experiences are light-years apart from each other but that as a reader I was completely pulled into every scene, fully believing in their reality. 

This is a powerful novel. From beginning to end, there is no slackening in the tautness of either the action or dialogue. 

…A headache balls at the base of his skull. He watches the city face into shadows, block by block. Airborne particles of sand catch the sun’s rays, Mother’s Nature’s tracer fire. Within minutes, the horizon appears lit by a throbbing Armageddon. Four tours and it has come to this. The night before Miller’s last mission outside the wife, Chaffen’s voice echoing like a challenge inside Miller’s head: That’s how you’ve got to start thinking, in all directions.

Miller’s mind is fixated on responsibilities to his men and his family back home but tortured also by an earlier mission that went badly. Rahim, hungering for a future with sons of his own, has not escaped his own nightmare boyhood, and his present is confused and cruelly limited. So both men try to focus on tasks at hand and not think or plan or dream too far ahead. Their wives, too, can only meet each day’s immediate challenges and hope, dimly, that the future will be better. 

A poor, scrawny, mute, orphaned or outcast child plays a pivotal role in the story. 

…Flecks of dirt line his closed eyelids, and she can see a few fleas in his shaggy, dark hair. His lips are chapped, his earlobes bitten and red. Scuff marks fall in a line down his torso, likely from belly-crawling over rocks or wriggling through shrubs. At the bottom of his shorts, each leg pokes through the opening of fabric like a tent pole.

Such a frail and unlikely survival — so far! — in this country torn by endless war! We fear for Miller and Rahim and Aaseya but especially for Ghazél as the story’s tension amps up page by page. Does this child have a chance?

Describing the most barren landscape, Schultz’s lyrical sentences convey the love its inhabitants have for their home:

Rahim darts across the road, taking his weapon off safety, then leans his side against the embankments from shoulder to ankle, blending into the land as seamlessly as a scattering of dirt. The desert is amazing like that, the way it stretches and folds across the country like the broad, sloping belly of a giant. The way it holds almost everything a man could ever need, including his shape, until they’re practically one.

But maybe you think you don’t want to read a novel about war in the Middle East. 

Perhaps Afghanistan is the last place you think you want to envision with your mind’s eye. 

It’s too alien, too faraway, too nightmarish. 

What I’m telling you is that those “reasons” count for nothing. It is not only the American soldier and his wife back home with whom you will feel kinship but also with Aaseya (from the book’s very first page), Rahim, and Ghazél, and this story will bring home to you the truth of universal humanity like nothing else I’ve read for a long time. 

*. *. *

Katey Schultz visited Dog Ears Books in 2013 to read from her book of short and short-short stories, Flashes of War. Among her many awards, Schultz was awarded a Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America for that earlier work. I’ve been anticipating more from her ever since, and Still Come Home has exceeded my high expectations. Her connection to Michigan, in case you’re wondering, is through Interlochen Center for the Arts. 

Journey Into a Broken Heart

The Family: A Journey Into the Heart of the Twentieth Century, by David Laskin

NY: Penguin, 2013

Paper, $17

A strange, unlikely, and in the end a false family legend sends David Laskin back into his family’s past, the legend quickly abandoned for a true story – or rather, several true stories -- much more complicated and compelling. His great-great-grandfather, Shimon Dov HaKonen, a scribe in the village of Volozhin in the Pale, in the part now called Belarus, is the beginning of a dynastic trail that branches in three different directions. One leads to the United States, another to Israel, and the third ends there at the place of beginning, as the branch of the family that stayed in place is overcome by the Holocaust.

How can one review such a book? It is well written, with fully dimensional, engaging characters (i.e., real people), but with every page we turn, we know what is coming. It’s not like reading a novel or even the personal memoir of someone whose life is unfamiliar to us. We are told from the beginning that the family members in the Pale did not survive, and we have read and heard accounts of the atrocities committed in those places and those times. And yet there is a strange, irrational hope as one reads, as one turns pages, that maybe a miracle will --. But no, what’s past is past, and all of them died, perishing in ghastly, unspeakable circumstances. But it is precisely in speaking—and then writing--of the circumstances, of the lives and deaths, that the author reconstructs what happened to these lost relatives, in order that the stories of their lives and deaths will not be lost.

The American stories are of success, for the most part, most notably in the case of Itel, who became in America Ida Rosenthal, founder of the legendary Maidenform Bra company. At last count, the author tells us in his epilogue, the American branch of the family numbered 101. Stories from Israel tell of the founding of a pioneer family, which numbered 32 at the time the book was written.

The further I read in The Family, however, the more I found myself becoming still, willfully contained, trying physically I suppose to barricade myself, so to speak, against the shocking reality both of the historical past and so much of the world’s present. The maps in the book of Eastern Europe and the Middle East focus on places once again torn by hatred and cruel strife.

Is it the privilege of having grown up in the United States that allows David Laskin to cast the stories of his family in universal terms? For me, this “journey into the heart of the twentieth century" reveals a heart broken time and time again. As Stephen Daedalus said to the dreadful Mr. Deasy, the pompous, self-confident, anti-Semitic headmaster in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It was the more astonishing to read Laskin’s even-handed last pages since I was going back and forth between the book and, drawing deep breaths and trying to sort out current events, an article called “The Liberal Zionists,” by Jonathan Freedland in the August 14 issue of the New York Review of Books. What Laskin writes in his epilogue is undeniably true but can be difficult to acknowledge when one’s relatives have suffered horribly for religion or ethnic background, and as I read the following paragraph again, I am once more astonished by it.

The pulse of history beats in every family. All of our lives are engraved with epics of love and death. What my family gained and lost in the twentieth century, though extreme, was not unique. War has touched all of us. Fate and chance and character make and break every generation. The Shoah was not the only genocide America is not the first land of opportunity nor will it be the last. Warring peoples have fought over the Holy Land for thousands of years, all of them claiming to have God on their side. In a family history written by Palestinian Arabs, Chaim and Sonia and their fellow Zionists would be oppressors; the Koran, not the Torah, would be the holy book; Jerusalem would be a besieged, stolen city. Open the book of your family and you will be amazed, as I was, at what you find.

Now, will I have the courage to read Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel?

Laskin is right. We are all touched by both love and death, we have all gained and lost, and no one in today's world has been untouched by war. Broken hearts are never made new, unbroken, but with enough love and good fortune they can mend time and time again, and so families and countries go on. We go on as individuals, too, for whatever span is given us. 

It's a soft, rainy, late summer morning. I'm here now. Wherever you are, you're there now.