“A Mind of Winter”

Shira Nayman

Akashic Books, $15.95

    “I do not fail to see the irony in it — being taken, once again, for someone else.” So begins “A Mind of Winter,” the second novel by Shira Nayman. It commences like one of those P.O.V. video games where one sees out of and controls the movements of the viewfinder (all too often in video games, over the barrel of a gun) but one cannot see oneself. We, the readers, do not know if the first-person narrator is male, female, young, or old. The narrator is nameless. We see out of his or her eyes without knowing who is steering our perspective. Clearly this is intentional, as the book is, foremost, about identity: mistaken, taken, lost, sought after, invented, constructed, and found.

    The novel takes place, mostly, in the decade following World War II. It is (somewhat confusingly) discontinuous in chronology, geography, and narration. The locale jumps from the North Shore of Long Island to Shanghai to London to Germany and back, while at the same time switching from the 1950s to the late ’40s to the war years and back. Each of the first-person narrators (there are three: “Oscar,” Christine, and Marilyn) tells a part of the story, but because the narrators are inventing new or improved personas out of their pasts, and each has reasons for dissembling, hiding, and manipulating both the past and the present, the storyline becomes blurred and confused. Add to this the fact that Christine, during much of her narration, is falling into the tunnel of opium addiction, so her view of events begins to feel slippery, obscure, addled, and dark.

    Oscar tells us in his prologue (summer 1951, Long Island): “We could not be more different from one another — Christine, Marilyn, and I. And yet, I see us as three comparable figures, up against the same squall. Only this too: I may be battling alongside them, but I am also the eye of the storm, the terrible, still center. Not merely one of the hurricane’s combatants, but somehow also its source, and therefore, as it happens, a void, which is to say, nothing at all.”

    Oscar also informs us: “I stand accused of murder. A crime of war. A crime, to be precise, against Humanity.” We do not know if he is guilty of the crime, we do not know what the crime is. We don’t know if there are extenuating circumstances. We don’t even know if he actually did the thing he is accused of. And it is not until the very last pages of the book that we get even an inkling of just what it is he might be accused of. But the accusation hangs over the novel like a sword of Damocles. Is Oscar, who started as Robert and becomes a Harcourt, a Nazi? Whom did he murder? During the war? After?

    The next section takes place four years earlier in Shanghai. It is mostly concerned with the British-American expatriate community. Christine narrates. She smokes opium with Barnaby, her lover. His use of the drug is clearly casual and recreational. Her need for the pipe is a physical discomfort. She is twitchy and greedy for it. Eventually, the opium that he brings to share with her is not sufficient for her deeper needs, and she must go to Han Shu’s cafe, one of Shanghai’s opium dens, to actually buy it.

    Christine is a beautiful Englishwoman. But she is down on her luck and running out of money. Her landlord wants the rent, and her clothes are getting shabby and dirty. She smokes more and more opium and one begins to fear that she will have to become a prostitute to support her habit. Instead, at least for a while, she makes an accommodation with Han Shu and becomes a kind of madam/English teacher to his harem of barely pubescent Chinese prostitutes. In return for teaching them spoken English, literature, and manners, she gets room, board, and enough opium to lose herself in a hallucinogenic haze every evening. She eventually takes Han Shu as a lover. The irony here is that Christine’s mother was a kind of casual prostitute, taking in different men all the time.

   The gentlemen were always gone by the time I awoke, and my mother would be transformed — hair in pins and rags, bustling about the small kitchen, tending to eggs sizzling in lard, the loose housedress only emphasizing her lovely shape. . . .

   And when the men started coming into my tiny, private space — occasions when the gentlemen lavished on my mother too many glasses of the amber stuff, so that she would end up draped across the green brocade couch. . . .

    But what Christine tells Robert of her childhood is none of this. She creates a false self, a lovely and gentle story about an innocent little girl in a white cotton dress. We don’t know at this point that Robert is also a false self.

    In the next section of the novel, we are returned to Long Island in 1951, but now the narrator is Marilyn, who, we are told by other characters, physically resembles Christine. Marilyn is a wartime photographer putting together a book of the wartime photos of others. She is married to Simon but living at Oscar’s North Shore mansion and having an affair with Barnaby. Of necessity, Marilyn too has a false self: the one that she presents to her husband, and even the one that she shows Barnaby. He tells her ironically, “As for the truth quotient: that’s not for me to judge. Besides, isn’t that the business you’re in? The photographer, going about the world with a camera — teasing the truth out of things?”

    While Marilyn and Barnaby are sneaking about the mansion and its grounds, meeting for secret trysts even while her husband is present, there is someone else sneaking around too. At first Marilyn wonders if it is Simon, trying to spy on her. But eventually she learns that it is someone from the Department of Justice, the Office of Special Investigations. These agents investigate war crimes. He is meeting secretly with Oscar, and sometimes they speak in German. The mystery mounts.

    The writing in “A Mind of Winter” is sometimes quite poetic and lovely. When Oscar is taken in by an English family whose son, whom he resembles, died in the war, he says, “You might think that my precipitous success in the [family] company was spurred by a desire to repay my hosts and mentors for their extreme generosity and faith. I wish I could claim this as a motive. The truth is, I was driven by what felt like a demon: ugly and vengeful, greedy and frothing with lust. A demon with appetites I did not understand or care to understand.”

    “A Mind of Winter” is a novel filled with false selves, falsehoods, and layers of lies and deceits. At one point Oscar muses, “Does the erasure of deceit result in the revelation of truth?” I suspect that is Ms. Nayman’s very own question, and one that she handled . . . deceptively herself. As the author, she withholds much information until the very end of the book. We are left very much in the dark about essential elements of the story, especially the particulars of Oscar’s history. It seems information that is coy to withhold.

    Shira Nayman is a clinical psychologist who has taught literature at Columbia and psychology at Rutgers. She lives in Brooklyn.

    Michael Z. Jody, a psychoanalyst and couples counselor in New York City and Amagansett, regularly contributes book reviews to The Star.

Poetry Pops Up

    Poets, prick up your ears: A new venue to air your verse has made itself available, open mike and all. On Tuesday starting at 5:30 p.m., Phao restaurant on Main Street in Sag Harbor will inaugurate Poets’ Prix Fixe with a couple of journal-published East End writers, Lucas Hunt and Michelle Whittaker, both of them associated with the M.F.A. program in Southampton. The organizer is Teri Kennedy, known for putting together shows of performance art and readings at Ashawagh Hall in Springs.

    Mr. Hunt, Corn Belt-bred, came out last year with his second volume of poems, “Light on the Concrete,” from the North Sea Press. Ms. Whittaker has won a Pushcart Prize honorable mention. The artist Michelle Murphy, for one, has signed on to read, and for those who might feel microphone jitters, a free beer or glass of wine awaits as enticement.

    Also in Sag Harbor, farther up and across Main Street, Mr. Hunt has rounded up other poets for a gathering at BookHampton on Sunday: Rosalind Brenner, whose new book is called “All That’s Left: Poems and Paintings,” Kathryn Levy, the founder of the Poetry Exchange and the New York City Ballet Poetry Project, and Matt Frazier, whose first collection is to be published by the Spring Press. The readings start at 4 p.m.

“Vanished in the Dunes”

    In the mood for a thriller set in familiar environs, rendering them strange and new? “Vanished in the Dunes: A Hamptons Mystery” might fit the bill. It’s the debut novel by Allan Retzky of Amagansett, and he’ll read from it on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. Take a businessman recently scapegoated and canned from his international trading firm and a beautiful resident in psychiatry at a Manhattan hospital, toss them together in a Hampton Jitney, and stir.

    Oceanview Publishing will officially release the book around the Fourth of July.

   James Joyce enthusiasts will commemorate the author’s life and his novel “Ulysses” on Saturday at a Bloomsday celebration at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor. A “Joyce-inspired performance”  with Joyce portrayed by Mark Singer, an actor and vocalist, will be part of it.

    “Ulysses” follows the events of an ordinary day in the life of the fictional character Leopold Bloom in his home city of Dublin. The title refers to the hero of Homer’s “Odyssey,” and there are parallels between characters and events in both works.

    Bloom is the only child of a Hungarian-Jewish father and an Irish-Protestant mother. The novel shows every aspect of his life and personality, positive as well as negative, and follows him from 8 a.m. on June 16 to the early hours of June 17, 1904.

    Joyceans celebrate Bloomsday each year on June 16 with re-enactments, performances, readings, and other events. It is believed that Joyce chose June 16 to commemorate the day of his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle.

    The first Bloomsday celebration took place in Ireland in 1954 on the 50th anniversary of Leopold’s now-famous day. Two writers, Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien, visited locations from the book, reading parts of it and drinking at pubs along the way. It is said that the original celebration ended when the writers became too drunk and began to heatedly debate the novel’s meaning.

    Last year, for the first time, thousands of Bloomsday enthusiasts followed @11ysses on Twitter as “Ulysses” was summarized and tweeted 140 characters at a time. Each tweet represented eight pages of the book.

    The South Fork has been home to many Irish immigrants and, of course, numerous writers. “There is a sense of the idyllic, of the melding of Old World with the New that draws writers here,” said Douglas Light, who will be reading from his novel “East Fifth Bliss” at the Bloomsday celebration.

    John McCaffrey, a writer with family roots in Wainscott, will also read. “My grandmother and grandfather came from Ireland and found a lasting home on the eastern end of Long Island,” he said. “The work that I’m going to read is about my grandparents and about their assimilation here.”

    Mr. McCaffrey said he plans to get into the spirit at Canio’s by wearing an Edwardian costume. “I encourage everyone to” dress in costume, he said. “We just want people to come and have a good time.” The free event starts at 5 p.m.

   It’s almost that time again: sun hats and sunglasses, white linen donned by the yard, the inevitable chardonnay in clear plastic tumblers, and tumbling-down bons mots beneath the spreading limbs of an old Norway maple. In other words, Fridays at Five at the Hampton Library in Bridgehampton.

    The series of author appearances returns on July 6 with Lucette Lagnado reading from her memoir of growing up in a family of Jewish-Egyptian immigrants who fled the rule of Nasser. Ms. Lagnado, who lives in Sag Harbor part of the year, is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, and she’ll be followed on July 13 by a longtime mover and shaker at that paper, Warren Phillips of Bridgehampton, and his recent book, “Newspaperman: Inside the News Business at The Wall St. Journal.”

    Finishing up that month will be Louis Begley with the latest installment in his Schmidt series of novels, “Schmidt Steps Back,” on July 20, and the science writer Dava Sobel and her new exploration, “A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos,” on July 27.

    August brings Lynn Sherr and “Swim: Why We Love the Water” on the 3rd (she’s written about in this section this week) and, on the 10th, Robert Caro and “Passage of Power,” the continuation of his monumental Lyndon Johnson saga. On Aug. 17, Kati Marton will be on hand with “Paris: A Love Story,” and the sportswriter Mike Lupica will wrap up the series on Aug. 24 with two new young-adult novels, “Game Changers” and “True Legend,” the latter of which, about a basketball phenom, is due out in September.

    All readings feature question-and-answer sessions, hors d’oeuvres, and libations. They start, as advertised, at 5 p.m., tend to last an hour, and cost $15. A group of five tickets can be had for $60.

“Mission to Paris”

Alan Furst

Random House, $27

    The specter that haunts the Europe of Alan Furst’s novels is a cataclysm beyond the imagination of his characters. But it is agonizingly real to his readers. Millions of men, women, and children will die after his story is told because of the greed, stupidity, ego, nationalism, and pure malevolence of characters we have met on his pages. Mr. Furst’s protagonists can’t stop the slaughter because they are not the standard cardboard heroes in formulaic thrillers; they are decent, urbane men over their heads in a web of evil. Mr. Furst’s superb novels of historical suspense and political adventure are in a genre of his own.

    Of course, Mr. Furst has his own conventions of mood, style, and plot. His latest, “Mission to Paris,” typically transports us into place with its opening sentence. “In Paris, the evenings of September are sometimes warm, excessively gentle, and, in the magic particular to that city, irresistibly seductive. The autumn of the year 1938 began in just such weather and on the terraces of the best cafes, in the famous restaurants, at the dinner parties one wished to attend, the conversation was, of necessity, lively and smart: fashion, cinema, love affairs, politics, and, yes, the possibility of war.”

    We will soon be dining at those cafes and restaurants and parties and we will be drawn into the curious silence around the one verboten conversation — the tens of millions of dollars, in francs, that the Nazi government’s propaganda apparatus has been spreading around the salons and boardrooms of the influential.

    Some of that “German money” is marked for the former Franz Stalka, an Austro-Slovenian who had emigrated to America and reinvented himself as Frederic Stahl, a Hollywood actor typecast as “a warm man in a cold world.”

    Stahl is a quintessential Furst leading man, lonely, flawed, competent (two Oscar nominations!), and ultimately driven by a romantic disposition and a spiny integrity.

    He is in Paris to star in a movie called, amusingly, “Apres la Guerre,” about the aftermath of the war to end all wars. The Nazi propagandists, aware of his Viennese birth, exert pressure on him to visit Berlin. They think an American star making a movie in Paris giving awards at a German film festival would help the larger scheme of encouraging French passivity to the massing Third Reich war machine. Stahl brushes them off until an official at the American Embassy suggests that such a trip might just be useful. There is information to be had. Risky, yes. And yet, if you really are an American you will want to do your part. . . .

    Somehow, Mr. Furst makes all this nuanced shadow play seem urgently compelling in the manner of Joseph Conrad, Eric Ambler, Graham Greene, and John le Carré, writers whose mixture of cynicism laced with hope he matches. If there is a downside to Mr. Furst it is that he makes it impossible after reading him to waste any more time on all those flatulent best-selling “thrillers” in which the entire world hangs in the balance while a “maverick” federal agent disarms a bomb, kickboxes an assassin, or joysticks a drone while giving lessons in tantric sex.

    Which is not to say that Stahl, like most of Mr. Furst’s protagonists, doesn’t end up with a small gun in one hand and an interesting woman in the other.

    Mr. Furst’s books are great reads on two levels; they are beachy page-turners and, if you are willing to slip into his sly, dry realpolitik, they are sophisticated meditations on government, power, powerlessness, and the danger of history ignored. One can find a subversive message here. Our leaders may well be inept, corrupt, even foolish, but we are worse if we simply give up or wait for the hero on the white horse.

    The choice of era is instructive and a fine parallel to our own. Money was being made, warnings were being ignored, incompetent leaders were being followed, and everyday people who could have made a difference were passively complicitous or in denial. And we didn’t even get German money.

    Mr. Furst has written a dozen novels set in that tense and perilous time he has recreated so convincingly. Each novel stands alone without benefit of a continuing hero or city, yet he manages to keep them fresh without a convoluted plot. It is the smells and tastes of the city that perk and sustain our interest as well as the historical and political references. There are never chunks of hasty explication or characters talking like textbooks. We come to care about those characters, too. Will Stahl be able to save his new love, the costume designer Renate, and get back to the safety of the Warner Brothers studio?

    The style is smooth, occasionally elegant, more often plainly direct. And the sense of impending doom colors everything noir. Even while dining in Maxim’s or trying new positions with his fling, Kiki, one imagines a black-and-white world.

    You can’t just read one Furst novel. Among my favorites, soon to be a BBC America mini-series, is “The Spies of Warsaw,” in which a French nobleman, Lt. Colonel Mercier, his leg stiff from a World War I wound (it hampers his tennis but not his lovemaking), becomes the military attaché, the resident spymaster, in Warsaw.

    He’s more comfortable with a gun than the actor Stahl, but the woman in question, a lawyer for the League of Nations, is the standard Furstian handful with a complicated past and a dicey future. Poland is shadowy and intriguing and the spycraft is enthralling. Now I even know how to safeguard my passwords: shave a small patch from my dog’s back, write my passwords in indelible ink, then just wait for the hair to grow back. First Mr. Furst is entertaining, then informative, finally invaluable.

    Alan Furst lives in Sag Harbor.

    Robert Lipsyte’s memoir, “An Accidental Sportswriter,” was just issued in paperback. He lives on Shelter Island.

“A New Yorker at Sea”

Nick Catalano

Aegean Press, $11

    By his own account, Nick Catalano was inexactly cut out for sailing. In this self-published book, the author early on notes that “the idea of sailing and the dream of adventure were always more appealing than the actual conditions at sea.” He finds that “sailing in any wind over twelve knots gave [him] the willies.” In local waters, that should keep him chronically on edge. Further, he “couldn’t master knot-tying, got very nervous at docking,” and feared his crewmates might “discover his on-deck ineptitude.” But Mr. Catalano gets kudos for persistence.

    It soon becomes clear that “A New Yorker at Sea” is a reconstruction of sailing notes and a manuscript going back at least 20 years. The book offers a short, easy-to-miss frontispiece — a disclaimer of sorts — seeking to remind us that the dated subject matter still has relevance, and some of it does.

    Considering the danger and discomforts of Mr. Catalano’s misadventures, it’s no wonder his book is fraught with foreboding and mood swings, from anxiety to self-celebration. There is no even keel. But then, stress comes with the territory if, for example, you are trying to race a yacht in a hurricane.

    The first chapter finds the author crewing aboard the 30-foot sloop Cassandra, racing east down the Atlantic coast of Long Island. So is Hurricane Bob, which struck the East Coast in August 1991. Cassandra appears to have “finished first” by default, at an unspecified location in Long Island Sound. Competitors were scattered, dismasted, or capsized that day by the storm. A race like this one was most likely canceled.

    Then, in a brief, five-page account, the author begins to emerge, this time with bravado: “Sailing in forty knots of wind should have terrified me, but there I was, urging the boat onward with the madness of a modern-day Ahab.”

    The next three pages deliver a cursory account of island hopping in the Windward Islands of the Caribbean: St. Vincent, Bequia (a sailing hotspot favored by the trust-funded), the lovely Jost Van Dyke, and St. John. These disconnected snippets suggest that the author is certifying his experience while, paradoxically, discrediting his own seamanship.

    Mr. Catalano refers to sailing people as “yachties” throughout this book. The author, whether or not a yachtie himself, ends the introductory pages with a peculiar insight: “In addition to the physical challenge of sailing, there’s the stress of making sure you operate according to Hoyle, or some wise ass will always be ready to criticize so he can score points with his guests and aggrandize his macho personality.”

    These rudderless narratives finally arrive at the book’s larger storyline in chapter three. It begins with a cram course on famous sailors, particularly circumnavigators like Joshua Slocum, Francis Chichester, Robin Knox-Johnston, Susan Hiscock, and Bernard Moitessier. Why? Because the author has been requested to replace a crew member aboard the 52-foot cutter Bravura, which is attempting to complete its own circumnavigation of the world. The yacht is progressing, with difficulties, up the Suez Canal.

    Next we find Mr. Catalano among the ruins of the city of Suez. Aging wreckage from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 is strewn about the Canal Zone. He fulminates against Egyptian cab drivers and hotel service. He calls to mind the Palestinian terrorist hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and the murder of the wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer. Our narrator is, as a supposed friend to Israel, an ugly American, like it or not.

    Clearly we are in another time zone in a different era. And for the first time, the book’s recurring lapses in continuity tumble us into an exotic and interesting read.

    At the Suez Yacht Club, the narrator makes his rendezvous with the cutter Bravura, the boat’s owner, and another crew member. Formal introductions aboard the boat bring the reader another surprise. Nick Catalano, the author-narrator to this point, introduces himself as Joe Pisano, the replacement crew member.

    So it is that Nick Catalano loses his place as narrator and acquires a pseudonym. (Notes on the book’s back cover help to confirm the Pisano transformation.) Through this rather facile name change, a fictional character takes the author’s place. “Virtually all of what follows is true,” writes Mr. Catalano in the book’s introduction. Hence, permission to embroider on the facts has been granted.

    In any case, the yacht Cassanda will need all the help she can get on this voyage, which carries us through to the book’s unnerving surprise ending. The yacht’s engine is cutting in and out, and they are short on motor oil, beer, and water. Behemoth — and oblivious — oil tankers bear down on them in the narrow canal. At a pier, they are accosted by armed men on horseback. If they ever get out of the Suez Canal Zone, engine repairs will have to wait until reaching Malta, well over 1,000 miles away.

    As it turns out, Mr. Catalano — as well as his doppelganger, Joe Pisano — has one practical yachting skill: He can steer a straight course. While clumsy with nautical terms and rigging, the man can hold a steady rhumb line. That is, he can steer a prescribed compass bearing to keep the ship on course, toward their destination, Malta.

    How much seat-of-your-pants deepwater adventure fills the next 120-odd pages? Enough. During the period described, Middle East tensions were potentially dangerous. So was cruising the stormy Mediterranean without GPS navigation, prior to its invention. An unlucky boat might be blown off course and encounter, for example, a Libyan gunboat. (President Reagan launched air strikes on Muammar el-Qaddafi’s forces in April 1986.)

    While the author is not a natural raconteur, he has brought back from decades past a nautical tale nobody else can tell. And one nobody could enjoy without the advent of self-publishing. Happily, even if this nautical memoir was not written for posterity, it will not be consigned to oblivion.

    Nick Catalano teaches literature and music at Pace University. He is the author of “Clifford Brown: The Life and Art of the Legendary Jazz Trumpeter” and lives part time in East Hampton.

    Jeane Bice is a writer and sailing instructor who lives in Springs.

Drumm TV

    The Star’s Russell Drumm can be seen reading from his forthcoming novel, “A Rogue’s Yarn,” on LTV this week — specifically, tomorrow at 1 p.m., Saturday at 4:30 p.m., Sunday night at 10:30, Tuesday at 11 a.m., and on Friday, June 8, at 1 p.m. The novel, the story of an aging homeless surfer living in Waikiki with a dark secret, will be out first as an e-book this summer.

    The hourlong reading was recorded not long ago at the Montauk Bookshop, where Mr. Drumm was joined by another surfer, Claude Mayers of Water Mill, who read a number of poems, some from “Vault of Poems.” Published in 2011, the collection covers his work from 1968 through 2010. Music is part of the TV program, too, courtesy of the bands Gold and Gunmetal, 9th Wave, and Clouds at Dusk.

“No Go Sleep!”

    That eternal concern of parents and nemesis of children, sleep, will be considered anew on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, when Jules Feiffer and Kate Feiffer, his daughter, present their new children’s book collaboration, “No Go Sleep!” In it, a little one, awake in his crib, is cajoled to conk out by animals, a passing car, even the sun, which promises to come back to play the following day.

    The book follows up the duo’s “My Side of the Car,” from last year, a recollection of an odd “weather event,” as the forecasters say, in which it rained only on the driver’s side of Mr. Feiffer’s car on a trip to the zoo. The legendary cartoonist, who lives in Southampton of late, will also sign copies of his 2010 memoir, “Backing Into Forward,” which was released in paperback last month by the University of Chicago Press. What’s more, Mr. Feiffer’s cover illustration for Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth” will be available for sale in signed, limited-edition prints. The 50th anniversary of the book’s publication was recently celebrated.

  “An Uncommon

Journey”

Deborah Strobin and Ilie Wacs

Barricade Books, $24.95

     Just as many people believe that the name of every victim of the Holocaust deserves to be remembered in perpetuity, so, too, it is held, the story of each survivor deserves to be told and heard. Both gestures are rooted in the dual needs to honor and to remember.

    Deborah Strobin and Ilie Wacs, in their joint memoir, “An Uncommon Journey: From Vienna to Shanghai to America — A Brother and Sister Escape to Freedom During World War II,” shed light on a story of survivorship less often told but nevertheless worthy of being heard.

    Between 1937 and 1941, approximately 20,000 European Jews fled to Shanghai, China, seeking refuge from the ever-tightening noose of Nazi oppression. The Wacs family, residents of Vienna, was among them — Moritz, a skilled tailor, Helen, a shy housewife and mother, and their two children, Ilie and Dorit. In August 1939, heeding the stern warning of one of Moritz’s gentile employees (who seemed to know that war would begin on Sept. 1), the family boarded the last ship to leave Vienna for Shanghai before the Anschluss.

    Part of this book’s uniqueness is its format. While the overall story is told chronologically — from childhood in Vienna, which Dorit (Deborah) is too young to remember firsthand, to competent adulthood in the United States — the narration alternates between sections headed “Brother” and those headed “Sister.” They often cover the same material, though from different viewpoints, which adds nuance. Each contributor has a distinctive voice. That those voices are quite different is jarring at first, but, ultimately, it leads to a clear understanding of precisely who each of the authors is.

    For Ashkenazi Jews from central Europe, settling into life in Shanghai was by no means easy. In addition to the obvious differences of language, culture, and climate, there were also the issues of poverty and the hardship of war that had to be faced daily. Soon after the Wacs family’s arrival, the Japanese occupied Shanghai. Along with a number of other people, Jews were forced to relocate within a one-square-mile area of the Hongkou district that was designated as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees. In other words, a ghetto.

    Interestingly, the Japanese occupiers remained unresponsive to pressure from their German allies when it came to sending the Shanghai Jews back to Europe. Mr. Wacs writes that one reason for this may have been that, during the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the only money Japan was able to raise in Europe was from Jewish sources.

    Although life in the Shanghai ghetto may not have been so harrowing as in the Warsaw ghetto or others, it was nevertheless grim. The Wacs family occupied an apartment of one and a half rooms, with a communal toilet outside. Even boiled water had to be purchased daily. For cooking, a large flowerpot was turned into a makeshift hibachi.

    Eventual liberation came in 1945. Mr. Wacs writes: “Then on July 17, 1945, I will never forget the date, American bombers made their usual noon appearance, high in the sky. Only this time, instead of flying over, they opened their cargo doors, and bombs fell like rain. Until that moment, despite all our hardships, I had considered myself a spectator of the war, staring out my window, drawing the life below. As the ground shook and Mutti screamed for me to ‘Run!’ it occurred to me that I might not be around to see what happened next.”

    His sister, Ms. Strobin, eight years younger, has the following recollection of the same event: “We heard the planes before we saw them, and I could tell they were American planes. American planes were like a bullet, buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, while Japanese planes were squeaky and clunky sounding. Mutti yelled at both of us, ‘Get downstairs!’ but Ilie wouldn’t budge, he wasn’t finished with his drawing. . . . He was trying to capture the moment in charcoal. . . . As the bombs began to land, he kept drawing.”

    Relief from war’s end was short-lived. It wasn’t long before the Chinese Communists began their takeover of the mainland. According to Ms. Strobin, “Once again, we were on the last ship out. Last boat out of Vienna, because of Papa’s stubbornness, and, for the same reason, we were among the last people to leave Shanghai.”

    The remainder of the book is an account of what happened to the authors and their parents in the many years that followed. It is an intimate, sometimes poignant, look at a family that kept going, out of affection and loyalty to one another and despite the cruel vagaries of history.

    A worthwhile subtext is how both of the authors came into their own. Mr. Wacs had an easier time of it. His talent as an artist was discovered while the family was in Shanghai. Through the intervention of a sympathetic member of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, young Ilie was sent to art school in Paris. This led to a successful career in the fashion world — in Paris and as a well-known designer of fine ladies’ coats in the U.S. Eventually, he retired from business to devote himself to producing art. His family’s experience as stateless Jews who fled for their lives has had a significant effect upon his work, which has been exhibited, among other places, here on the South Fork.

    For Ms. Strobin, the road to self-discovery and fulfillment was less direct and took longer. Over time, however, she morphed from a shy, insecure refugee girl into a confident and accomplished woman who has written a record of significant achievement as a fund-raiser, most notably in the area of stem cell research.

    Two aspects of the book require comment. The first is the question of proportion, always a difficult thing to achieve. The authors’ wartime experiences and reflections occupy well less than half of the volume. Inasmuch as this part of their story holds the most potential for the greatest interest, one wishes it had been longer. Also, the book could have used a better proofreader; there are a number of missing words and small grammatical errors that should not appear in any published work.

    These concerns notwithstanding, however, the authors’ stories stand on their own and speak for themselves. Papa and Mutti would be justifiably proud of their progeny.

    Ilie Wacs lives in Sagaponack.

    A weekend resident of East Hampton, James I. Lader regularly contributes book reviews to The Star.

   Should you pick up the new Southampton Review expecting familiar contributors, you’d be right and wrong. First of all, who’s going to complain about opening a journal to more poems, four of them, by Billy Collins? That star of versification known for a peerless sense of humor is here contemplative — digging up an old toy truck in his backyard and thinking of the past, or pondering the oddity of the writing life.

    Jules Feiffer, another returnee associated with Stony Brook Southampton, the journal’s publisher, not only changes up his distinctive cartooning with a portfolio of sketched and watercolored superheroes, in doing so he brings a welcome reminder of his tutelage under the late Will Eisner, the creator of the revolutionary strip “The Spirit,” who with his 1978 “A Contract With God” more or less invented the so-called graphic novel. Mr. Feiffer’s take is characteristically witty — a hangdog costumed hero, for instance, eyes downcast: “Superhero Without Motivation.”

    Also in the spring edition, well reproduced across its glossy pages, is a series of colorful images, mostly of an oarsman plying the waters, from “What Shores, What Seas,” a book by Barry McCallion, an East Hampton artist.

    Four watercolors by Walter Bernard, “waterscapes” all, from a pond near Northwest Creek to the Bridgehampton surf, are eye-catching, appearing suited to wall-mounted immensity. A closer look reveals they average only about 7 by 11 inches, however, leading to helpless speculation that if Mr. Bernard had simply substituted feet for inches he’d be sitting atop a mound of coin worthy of Scrooge McDuck.

    There is, of course, much more: an eight-and-a-half-page poem by Kenneth Koch and an interview with his second wife, Karen Culler Koch, cartoons by Gahan Wilson and Michael Maslin, a memoir by Jennifer Brooke, a documentary filmmaker who lives in Sag Harbor, on her experiences with a sperm donor, and fiction by Rachel Pastan, the author of the novels “This Side of Married” and “Lady of the Snakes.”

College Writing Awards

    College students. Might there be any reading this page? Well, you family relation out there, here’s something of interest to pass on: Suffolk Community College is sponsoring creative writing awards for college writers. They come with prize money and online publication for the winners in four categories: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and one-act play.

    The original, previously unpublished work must be submitted with no name on it. Poets have been asked to submit three poems, one per page, each with a title. For fiction writers, it’s one story up to 10 pages, double-spaced. A complete piece is preferred over an excerpt. The same length requirement applies to creative nonfiction, which includes memoir, “lyric essay,” and literary journalism. (That piece written for English class? The one where you argue counterintuitively that Wordsworth came not to praise nature but to wage war on it? Forget it. No academic prose will be accepted.) And last, plays can be up to 20 pages in a standard format.

    Students can submit work in more than one genre. The reading fee is $5, which is waived for Suffolk Community College students. All submissions must go through the following doozy of an online address: thescccreativewritingfestival.submishmash.com/submit.

    There’s time, as the deadline is Feb. 15 of next year. But if the last-minute all-nighter works for you, go for it.

Kids’ Lit Workshops

    Interested in writing for children? Space remains in the first session of children’s literature workshops from July 11 to 15 at Stony Brook Southampton’s coming conference, called Summer Arts Southampton.

    Emma Walton Hamilton is directing the workshops. Leading the young-adult novel session will be Cynthia Leitich Smith and Greg Leitich Smith. Peter H. Reynolds, an author and illustrator, will lead a picture book workshop, and the middle-grade novel session will be led by Kate McMullan, a Horn Book Award-winning writer who lives in Sag Harbor.

    The workshops are open to new, established, and aspiring writers, the college said in a release, and involve lectures, group discussions, and more. Applications and further details can be found online at southamptonarts.org.