Irina Ratushinskaya

Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, then part of the U.S.S.R., in 1954. She graduated in physics and married Igor Gerashchenko, a physicist. They worked for human rights in Kiev, photographing books and signing an appeal on behalf of the dissident physicist Sakharov. Both of them became Christians, though they did not acquire a Bible until 1980. Irina worked as a primary school teacher and her poems were published in samizdat. The two of them were arrested in Moscow at a protest in 1981 and held for ten days.

Irina was again arrested in 1982 and sentenced to seven years for “agitation against the Soviet regime.” While in prison, she smuggled her poetry out to her husband who published it. The poetry celebrated the small good things happening around her, such as frost on the windows. She became one of the most well-known Russian dissidents in her time. She was released early, in 1986, just ahead of the summit between U.S. president Reagan and Gorbachev, the Russian premier. She was 32.

I became aware of Ratushinskaya through my reading of The New York Review of Books, which featured her plight in prison, and then interviewed her in 1987 on her release. I was fascinated that she was close to me in age (nine years younger), and that her trials were going on half a world away from me. In my journal, on 11.12.87, I wrote:  “If I look at houses with lighted windows imagining that behind them ordinary, happy people live, how must it have been for her to look out at the mountains and know that beyond them were her husband and friends.” 

When her book Grey Is the Color of Hope was published in 1988, I learned exactly what her thoughts and experiences in prison were. In it she writes of the friendships she made with the other eleven political prisoners in “the small zone” in a notorious penal colony in Mordovia as they tried to preserve their humanity. They made gloves, tried to plant a few vegetables and, when one of them was sent to the horrifying Shizo isolated, unheated detention, tried to protect each other.

On the day she was released, October 10, 1986, Irina wrote in thanks to those who had kept her name alive:

Believe me, it was often thus:

In solitary cells, on winter nights
A sudden sense of joy and warmth
And a resounding note of love.
And then, unsleeping, I would know
A-huddle by an icy wall:
Someone is thinking of me now,
Petitioning the Lord for me.
My dear ones, thank you all
Who did not falter, who believed in us!
In the most fearful prison hour
We probably would not have passed
Through everything – from end to end,
Our heads held high, unbowed –
Without your valiant hearts
to light our path.

After her release, Ratushinskaya and Gerashchenko lived and worked in Chicago and then in London, where their twin sons were born. They wished to give their sons a Russian education, however, so they began attempts to reclaim their Russian citizenship. They returned to Moscow in 1998. There, Irina continued to write, her books translated into many languages. She died of cancer in 2017.

Nao Yasutani

At 16, Nao Yasutani begins a diary, telling of her life in Japan after she and her family had to leave Sunnyvale, California, because her father, a brilliant programmer, had lost his job. This diary, together with letters written by her great uncle Haruki Yasutani, a kamikazi pilot during World War II, washes up on a beach in British Columbia. Ruth, a writer, finds the packet wrapped in layers of plastic and begins a search to find out whether the diary and Nao are real.

The diary begins by telling us of Nao’s miserable family life in a tiny apartment in Tokyo. Her father can’t find work and her mother finally takes a job to support the family. After her father’s failed suicide, Nao has little faith in him. She misses California, where she lived from age 3 to 14. She can barely speak contemporary Japanese and at school she is first physically bullied and then ostracized with a mock funeral, which is filmed and put on-line. “In my heart, I am American,” she says.

That summer, Nao goes to stay in a mountain monastery northeast of Tokyo with her 104-year-old great grandmother, the nun Jiko. Jiko had been an intellectual and writer and Nao has great respect for the tiny woman. Jiko inquires into Nao’s anger and teaches her to sit zazen. “It can become your superpower,” she says. On the beach below the temple, Jiko encourages Nao to fight with the waves rolling in. She requires Nao to run up and down the steep temple steps every morning. 

All summer, Nao works in the temple kitchen, bathes in the hot springs and listens to her great-grandmother’s wisdom. “Up, down, same thing,” she says. “Not same, but not different.” Once when they are on a walk and Nao sees some scary girl bikers, she tries to hurry Jiko past. But Jiko takes her time and bows to them. The girls return the bow.

At the end of the summer the Obon festival, at which the spirits of the dead burst through the membrane separating them from the living, is celebrated at the temple. In the shrine room, in the dark, Nao believes her father has come, but it is actually her great-uncle Haruki. The man is quite young. He sings a French song and then is gone. Nao looks at a photo of Haruki to make sure and a letter slips out from the frame. It is the official letter of farewell he wrote to his mother, Jiko.

Back in school, Nao studies harder, but the bullying hasn’t stopped. After a particularly bad incident, she cuts off all her hair and goes to school in a hooded sweatshirt. In class she stands up on her desk, makes a loud cry and takes off her hood. She bows to her teacher and to her classmates and leaves.

Nao does not go back to school. At a cos-play coffeeshop, she meets Babette, to whom she speaks freely. Babette sets her up on some “dates” and she begins writing in her diary. Nao has very little hope and, like her father, plans to commit suicide after she has written down the story of her great-grandmother’s life. 

Jiko’s companion calls to tell Nao that Jiko’s last hours are approaching and she should come quickly. Nao takes the train and waits all night for the bus. In the morning her father joins her. Jiko writes a last character, the one for “life.” “For now and for the time being,” she says and dies. Nao and her father know that Jiko was speaking to them. “We must do our part,” says Nao’s father. “We must live.” They assist with the funeral and go home.

At home, Nao’s father begins a program which searches for every reference of a person’s name on-line and expunges it. He wants to clean up the cyber bullying of his daughter. Nao learns that her father was fired for raising the issue of conscience and wondering if he could build it into the game controllers he was working on, which were being purchased by the U.S. military. She also learns that her great uncle Haruki flew his plane into the ocean rather than aiming at an American ship.

Nao takes her equivalency exams and qualifies for an international school in Montreal, where she studies French. She remains determined to write down Jiko Yasutani’s story.

Nao’s story is confirmed by Ruth’s correspondence with an old friend of Nao’s father in Sunnyvale. In parallel with Nao’s story, we learn much about Ruth’s life on a remote island off British Columbia with her husband Oliver and their friends. Ruth gets so deep into Nao’s story she feels she has participated in it and Oliver tells her about quantum mechanics theories which possibly support this.

Much of Nao’s story is earthy and raunchy, the underside of being an adolescent girl in Japan. It is hard to read, but this part of the book is redeemed by the equally true stories of life in the temple with her “old Jiko.” We have the feeling that Nao is being absolutely honest about what she sees and feels, courageous in and of itself. We do not see her overcome her almost universally bad experiences in Japan, except through one defiant act. Later, we discover that she makes her way to Canada and a better life.

Learning of the anti-war lineage of her family makes Nao very proud. Ruth Ozeki tells her story in A Tale for the Time Being [published 2013], a rich evocation of both Japan and British Columbia. She puts together accurate science, everyday detail and characters with so much reality you feel you know them. Writing this open to actual, difficult life continually takes you by surprise.

Hester Prynne

The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merle 1861

Hester Prynne was raised in England, but married a scholar whose desire for knowledge took them to Amsterdam. From there, about 1642, Hester was sent to  New England. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who tells Hester’s story in The Scarlet Letter [published 1850], does not tell us how she managed there. It cannot have been easy to be a young woman alone among the Puritans in Boston.

We meet Hester, a woman with a rich coloring and abundant dark hair, emerging from the jail with a baby in her arms. She will not tell the name of the child’s father and is condemned to stand on a scaffold above the marketplace for three hours and to wear a scarlet “A” on her breast for the rest of her life. From the scaffold, Hester sees her long lost husband, standing with some Indians at the edge of the crowd. He comes to her when she is put back in prison, saying “The man who has wronged us both still lives. I will find him.” He makes Hester promise that she will not reveal their former relationship.

Hester goes to live in a thatched cottage by the seashore, making a living for herself and her child with her needle. She embroiders the scarlet letter with gold thread and dresses her child in beautiful clothes. At three, her Pearl of great price, is something of a fairy child, happy to play in nature, since she and her mother are shunned by the townspeople. She is beautiful and intelligent, but has a wild and defiant mood. Her mother has trouble disciplining her.

When the town fathers discuss taking Pearl away from her mother, Arthur Dimmesdale, the town’s beloved young minister, intervenes: “The child is all she has to bring her to God.”

For Hester, her isolation, shame and the scarlet letter itself are teachers. She thinks her thoughts freely. “The world’s law was not law for her mind.” Though Hester becomes a cold, dignified figure as her energy leaves her body and enlivens her mind, to the townspeople she has become an inexhaustible sister of mercy. She is humble, quick to give where charity is needed and a nurse to the sick. The “A” comes to stand for able. Her consciousness of sin also makes her a counselor for those who need one.

By the time Pearl is seven, Hester observes that the minister, Dimmesdale, is very ill. She notes that her husband, Chillingworth, has been living with him. She tells Chillingworth that she will tell the minister he was her husband and is now his enemy.

Looking for a chance to speak to Dimmesdale, Hester meets him in the forest. The minister confesses his misery at the fact that people imagine he is blameless, while he himself is wracked with guilt. Hester throws her arms around him. “I do forgive you. I am your friend. May God forgive us both.” She tells him that there is a larger world around them. “Begin anew,” she says. “Make thyself a new name!” Dimmesdale does not believe he can do this alone.

For an hour Hester casts off the terrible ”A” and the two imagine leaving on a ship together. They will make a new life for themselves in the Old World. Pearl, who has been playing by the brook, will not come to Hester until she puts the “A” back on her breast, however, and when the minister kisses Pearl, she runs to the brook and washes it off.

A ship sits waiting in the harbor, to leave in three days. Hester, with her child and Dimmesdale, plans to be on it. Boston takes a holiday when a new governor is to be elected and Dimmesdale preaches an especially powerful sermon on this day. After it, Dimmesdale struggles up to the scaffolding in the marketplace, begging Hester’s help. Once there he confesses his guilt. Pearl kisses him, her father, which brings her a sense of relief and Dimmesdale dies.

Hester and Pearl disappear and are not seen for many years. But one day Hester, a stately and solemn older woman, still wearing the gold-embroidered “A” on her breast, resumes living in the seaside cottage at the edge of town. It is observed that she is the recipient of tokens of love from a foreign country and that she is embroidering clothes for a grandchild. Clearly Pearl is married and happy, living elsewhere.

Hester herself resumes her nursing, bringing counsel and comfort to those who need it. She looks forward to the day when a “new truth would be revealed in order to establish the whole relation of men and women on a surer ground of mutual happiness.” When she dies, Hester is buried beside the minister Dimmesdale in the churchyard.

Hester Prynne comes to her redemption through solitary and free-thinking reliance on natural morality and common sense rather than civil law. She is resilient enough to walk freely through the town and become a help to others. Late in life, she returns to the place which has been most meaningful to her. She reminds us that none of us live for ourselves alone, and that service to others is more important than obsession with righteousness.

Maria Campbell

Maria Campbell tells her own story in the book Halfbreed [published 1973 and updated 2019]. She was born in 1940 near Spring River, Saskatchewan, the oldest of eight children. Part of a vibrant Métis culture (made up of descendants of European men who married Native American women), she was deeply influenced by her great-grandmother, whom she calls Cheechum. 

Cheechum was a Cree woman who married a Campbell from Edinborough, who came out to Canada to run a Hudson Bay Company store. He was terribly jealous of her, and flogged her because he believed he was not the father of her son. Cheechum left and became very self-sufficient, living on her own with her son. She was a niece of Gabriel Dumont, a general in the failed Métis rebellion of 1885, and never stopped hoping the Métis would rise up and demand respect and land for themselves.

Cheechum was a small, neat woman who taught Maria Cree ways with herbs and roots, basket making, dancing and the stories of her people. Though most Métis were Catholic, Cheechum refused to have anything to do with religion. She saw beauty in everything, felt time spent praying was wasted and found God in the world. She lived with Maria’s family, helping raise the kids though she was already in her 80’s.

Maria’s father taught her to set trap lines, ride spirited horses and do men’s work, while her convent-educated mother read to her Shakespeare, Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. They lived in a two-room cabin which Maria thought beautiful. Her father had built it on crown-owned road allowance property. In the summers they joined other Métis families, camping and collecting roots and berries which they sold in town. There was drinking and dancing and fighting. While Indians were passive and quiet, Métis people were raucous and fun. Even so, Maria hated to see them hang their heads around white people.

Maria went to school in mended clothes with her brothers and sisters. Their lunch pails held gophers, and bannock smeared with lard. Maria longed for her brothers and sisters to have toothbrushes, apples and oranges in their lunches, and cookies and milk in the afternoon. But her father began drinking after a failed political campaign, and her mother died giving birth to her last child when Maria was 12. Cheechum continued to help. At 96, however, she left, too old to cope with the small ones.

Maria was determined to keep her brothers and sisters together, even taking the littlest ones to school and hiding them in the bushes when no one was at home to watch them. Their father would be out on his trap lines, but he wanted the kids in school, so he hired housekeepers. The family refused to accept charity and were ashamed when people tried to help them. Maria quit school and worked as a housekeeper to bring in money.

At 15, Maria began to go to dances and out with men. When she became afraid the social workers would take the children away, she married Darrel, a man she didn’t love. Briefly they all lived together and Maria had her first baby. But Darrel called the agency and Maria’s brothers and sisters were sent to foster homes. Darrel took Maria to Vancouver, but they lived in very poor circumstances and Darrel soon left. Destitute, Maria turned to sex work, sending her baby to a convent to be cared for. 

Maria used drugs to numb herself and forget. She sank into worse situations. One of the men she worked for got her a job cooking on a ranch in Calgary when he went to jail. She was only 20, but proved herself. Though she wanted to stay out of trouble, she gambled and drank with the men. She tried going to hairdressing school, but the wages were insufficient, and by this time she had another baby.  Some people helped her. She was lonely for her family and felt she couldn’t go back a failure.

Working as a waitress, Maria felt she had met her life partner in David. They had a baby together too, but Maria didn’t tell David about her former life. She grew so worried he would find out, she was suicidal. After a nervous breakdown, she landed in a psychiatric hospital.

A condition of getting out of the hospital was going to Alcoholics Anonymous. Maria had spurned these meetings, but once there, she realized for the first time that she could break the cycle of drink and depression. At 24, she began turning her life around with the help of her sponsors, who insisted she face reality. Also, at  AA, Maria met the people would become part of the native movement in Alberta, both Indians and Métis.

Visiting her father, brothers and sisters in Saskatchewan, Maria felt conditions had deteriorated since she was a child. She also visited Cheechum, who was 104 and living quietly in her usual neat way. She was able to tell Cheechum everything. “You always had to do things the hard way,” Cheechum tells her. Maria had started a half-way house for young women in Alberta, where she offered a home and friendship, trusting the young women would then solve their own problems. Cheechum approved. “Each of us has to find herself in her own way.” Soon after this, Cheechum died.

David joined Maria and they had another child. Maria did street work and also interviewed people working in the sugar beet fields for a research project. Working with the Alberta Native Communications Society gave her new feelings of pride and hope. Written when she was 32, Halfbreed ends with her belief that people could set aside their differences and fight common enemies. The book propelled Maria into a life of activism and is taught in Canadian schools.

The native movements of the 1960’s were exciting, states Maria Campbell in an afterword, people inspiring each other. The elders demanded people reclaim their cultural history and become educated. Campbell has since been active in writing, teaching, theater and filmmaking. A video from 2020 shows the breadth of her activities and her warmth..

Told in an intimate first person, and read by the author as an audiobook, I found Maria Campbell’s book Halfbreed compelling in its honesty, particularly in telling us how low a proud young girl can sink and then pick herself up again. It is also revealing of the intensity with which our history is bound up with that of our family and people, whether we choose to recognize this or not. Throughout her book, Campbell writes of how Cheechum’s early teaching reverberated in her mind, helping her to find her own way.

Lorna Dugal Ridd

Amelia Warner, BBC production, 2000

Lorna grows up among the Doones, who occupy a valley near Exmoor in the 17th century. She believes she is the granddaughter of Ensor Doone, as she tells John Ridd when he meets her by chance while fishing. She is only eight, but a little lady with a sweet voice and large, dark eyes. Already she knows the violence of her kin. “They would kill us both, if they found us,” she tells John. “I never met anyone like you.”

Seven years later, John has grown large and powerful. He takes his uncle near the Doone valley and spies Lorna. She is nimble, smooth and elegant. “I felt I was face to face with fate,” he says. He cannot stay away. Lorna has a woodland bower where she comes to read every day. “But this place is very dangerous,” she tells him. “I’m not used to kindness.” She tells him her story. “All around me is violence, pain and reckless jokes and hopeless death. They call me ‘queen’ but I want to know what I am and why set here. You who have a quiet home and a mother cannot imagine what it is like.”

Lorna tells John Ridd that what changed her from child to adult, at 15, was the killing of a courtly young gentleman who appeared and told her he was her guardian. Carver Doone pinned him down, took him away and he was never seen again. John Ridd, a yoeman farmer, his family long resident in Exmoor, knows that his father too was killed by a Doone. John falls in love with Lorna, though she is too frightened to take the ring he has bought for her. The Doones mean to betroth her to Carver whom she hates. Sir Ensor will not let them force her, however.

John continues to visit Lorna, who puts out signs for him on the mountain. When Sir Ensor is dying, she tells him: “I shall not be taken by Carver. I shall die first.” At the time of Ensor’s death, winter brings a great snow and cold. John tries valiantly to.save his sheep and cattle. When he is able to go to Lorna, he finds her barricaded in a cabin with her maid Gwenny. They are being starved into submission. John has brought a mince pie which the two girls share. Because the Doones are drunk and celebrating, John brings a little sledge, puts the girls in it and carries them off to his farm.

At the farm, Lorna slowly revives. She loves the kitchen, “the cheerful fire, racks of bacon, the richness and the homeliness and the pleasant smells.” Her bright young wit and high spirits emerge. The Doones come to the farm and Carver shoots at Lorna in the garden, but John’s family is harboring soldiers due to unrest and none of them are hurt. Jeremy Stickles, a king’s man, tells John he has found that Lorna was kidnapped by the Doones, her mother and brother killed. She is actually Lady Dugal, very wealthy. This sickens John, as he already felt he was aiming above himself in wanting to marry her.

When John returns from helping his uncle, he finds Lorna has gone to London, becoming a ward of the court until she is 21. She leaves John a message, pledging her love. But then he hears nothing from her for a year. During this year the country rises against James, the king, who is a Catholic. John gets mixed up in the fight, but not because he wants to. He has gone to look for his brother-in-law, the noted highwayman Tom Faggis. Jeremy Stickles saves John when he is about to be shot, and takes him to London to clear his name.

Amelia Warner, 2000

In London, John goes to church, where he sees Lorna in attendance on the queen, walking modestly in a white dress. She sends him a note, requesting he come and see her. She begs to know why he has not contacted her. They find that Gwenny had not sent the letters Lorna wrote to John. Gwenny believes John too low-born to attach himself to Lorna.  

But Lorna tells John how unhappy she has been at court. “I have made up my mind that you must be my husband.” She likes his manners better than those of the court gallants. “Neither of us is very religious or educated. Nothing stands between us but worldly position.” She wants to abandon her wealth and honor. Circumstances create an opportunity for John, however, who saves the life of Lorna’s guardian. The criminals are also notorious traitors and the king rewards John with a knighthood.

John goes home and leads an expedition against the Doones, as the countrymen are finally sick of their violence. All the Doone men are killed except for Carver and his father. Lorna comes home to John’s farm, having bought her way out of chancery. “I am my own mistress!” she tells the family happily.

Lorna’s spirit, so dampened by her childhood, rises. But both she and John have an abiding fear that they are too happy for fate to ignore them. They marry in a wedding attended by all the country people around them. A shot rings out as the parson pronounces them man and wife. John is horrified by the blood on Lorna’s white dress as she sinks. He rides after Carver Doone and fights him near a slough, watching as Carver sinks into the mud.

At the farm, clever cousin Ruth manages to save Lorna. John is also injured, and Ruth must save him too. John, as narrator, tells us no more of his life with Lorna, but says that whenever they felt too happy, he had only to remind her that she was once “Lorna Doone” and now deserves the life and home she has won.

Though Lorna Doone, [published 1869] by R. D. Blackmore, with violence and peril for all the characters while ending happily, may seem to be an unapologetic romance, I loved the thickness of its characterizations, its rich prose and the wealth of country lore. Its chief strength is the insistence that alliance to a good, honest, gentle man is worth more than high rank and wealth. Lorna’s story is more one of being, rather than doing, but she exhibits courage, dignity and faithfulness in clinging to her love for a farmer and the beauties of nature in which they live, despite her high birth.

Lisa Fittko

Lisa Fittko was born in 1909 into a large Jewish family in Hungary. Moving to Berlin at a young age, she witnessed the rise of the Nazis and became a member of a socialist group which composed anti-Nazi literature. This was dangerous and, though she played loud opera music to disguise the sound of her typewriter, Lisa had to leave Germany. She met her husband Hans Fittko, a gifted journalist in Prague. Hans was also wanted and the Fittkos moved around, to Zurich, Amsterdam and Paris, continuing to smuggle anti-Nazi literature into Germany.

As the Nazis approached, the French interned most foreign nationals. Lisa was sent to a poorly-organized camp in Gurs with thousands of other women. As chaos increased, however, she managed to escape with a friend and made her way to Marseilles in the spring of 1940. She met up with Hans and they stayed in the village of Banyuls-sur-Mer at the edge of the Pyrenees. 

Independent and resourceful, Lisa looked toward Spain for an escape route. The mayor of the town provided her with a tiny hand-drawn map of a route over the mountains known to smugglers.

The first group of people Lisa led over the route included the writer Walter Benjamin. “Benjamin was the European mind writ large, exactly what the Nazis wanted to obliterate,” suggests Jay Parini in his book Benjamin’s Crossing [1997]. “I lost my way repeatedly,” Lisa said. “When you are up there, all you see is mountains.” This trip took ten hours, but as she grew used to it, Lisa could do the route in three or four hours. She was 31.

Walter Benjamin made the perilous journey with Lisa’s help, but committed suicide on his first evening in Spain, due to his ill-health and fear of being repatriated.

Working with the American Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, the Fittkos stayed on for more than six months. Every few days they led a group of refugees posing as vineyard workers over the mountains on the route Lisa found. No one was captured on these trips. Though they didn’t count, it is thought that the Fittkos were instrumental in the escape of 1,500 people. When the Vichy government took over, it became too dangerous. The couple took a ship to Cuba in November 1941.

In Cuba Lise worked as a secretary in an import-export business and Hans became a diamond cutter. After the war they would have liked to return to Germany, but as socialists, they were not allowed. Lisa and many of her family met up in Chicago. Hans died in 1960, but Lisa continued to be politically active. Living in Hyde Park, she was a peace activist and continued to speak out for racial and economic justice. The Obamas attended her 90th birthday party. She lived until age 95.

Lisa Fittko was surprised to find that what she had done as a young woman had historic value. She wrote and published two books about her war-time activities: Escape through the Pyrenees [1991] and Solidarity and Treason: Resistance and Exile [1993]. I did not know about Fittko until I read Jay Parini’s fictional depiction of her. I also found an interview with her from the 1990’s in which she is thoughtful and articulate about many of the details of this time period. History takes time to unfold. We are still learning from 20th century chaos in Europe.

Roser Bruguera Dalmau

Isabel Allende

We first meet Roser Bruguera as a seven-year-old goatherd who beguiles Don Santiago Guzman with her intelligence when he meets her roaming the hills of Granada. One day however, he finds her shivering with fever in the cold. He takes her home and, when she recovers, finds that her family doesn’t want her. She is very musical, can pick out tunes on the piano. Don Santiago adopts Roser, sending her to Barcelona for musical training.

At the university, Roser is befriended by Professor Dalmau, her music teacher, who opens his home to her. Of the two sons in the family, Victor who is training to be a doctor, and Guillem who is a soldier, Roser falls in love with Guillem. When he comes home with typhus from Republican battles with Franco’s forces, Roser nurses him back to health. She becomes pregnant before he returns to the front, but he is killed on the River Ebro. Victor knows this, but he can’t bear to tell Roser. He asks a friend, the Basque ambulance driver Ibarra, to take his mother and Roser over the Pyrenees into France when it becomes clear the Republicans are losing.

Roser is uncomplaining and brave, hiking through the mountains when Ibarra’s motorcycle gives out. They are cold and hungry but stay with smugglers along the way. The French don’t want the refugees. Roser is sent to a women’s concentration camp on a beach with no facilities. A Swiss nurse who is trying to save children sees that Roser is pregnant and takes Roser to live with a Quaker family where her healthy son Marcel is born.

Guillem’s brother Victor accompanies wounded soldiers to France. Conditions are hostile for refugees and when Victor hears that a ship is being readied to take some to Chile, he applies. Told that families will be given first priority, he hunts for Roser. He tells her that Guillem has been killed and that, if they marry, they might be able to repatriate to Chile. Pablo Neruda, who is preparing the ship, the Winnipeg, says they need pianists in Chile.

The refugees arrive in Chile on the day World War II begins in Europe to a huge welcome.  At first Victor, Roser and the little Marcel are taken in by a wealthy family. They live together as brother and sister, starting a bar where Victor works while completing medical school, and Roser makes her living playing the piano. She is realistic, does not look back, though she longs to play serious music. She helps Victor with his depression and nightmares after the horrors he has seen.

Victor falls in love with the young daughter of the wealthy family they are hosted by, but he hides his affair, not wanting to damage the love and respect he has for Roser. When the girl gets pregnant, her family whisks her away to the country. 

After World War II, a letter comes from Carme, Victor’s mother. She had slipped away during the retreat from Spain but was found by Andorran smugglers. Victor, Roser and ten-year-old Marcel go to visit her. Roser’s only fear, of heights, emerges on the airplane. “Clench your teeth and carry on,” is her method of coping.

Roser realizes her dream of creating an orchestra of ancient musical instruments partly with help from Venezuelan benefactors. Venezuela has a lush culture, fueled by oil at this time. Roser also has an affair, with Aitor Ibarra, who had led her out of Spain. It makes her young and playful, but they too protect their marriages. 

Victor is unpolitical, but admires Salvador Allende and often plays chess with him. He and Roser provide a safe house for Neruda when he falls from grace. When Allende wins a presidential election in 1970, Chileans are euphoric. But things are chaotic in the country. When the military steps in, Allende is killed and thousands are arrested and tortured. Victor spends 11 months in a concentration camp before Roser manages to find him. He has saved the life of the camp commandant. Victor and Roser ask for asylum in Venezuela. Roser’s son Marcel is studying in Colorado. Victor’s mother has died.

By this time Victor feels a passion for Roser. They fall in love like adolescents. Roser tells Victor about her affair, wanting no secrets between them. She is beautiful and sensual in her 50’s. She dresses “with the discreet elegance which was her trademark.” When Franco dies in 1975, they go back to Spain briefly, but it is unrecognizable. Roser says, “I am fed up with being an outsider. I want to go back to Chile.” They live in Venezuela nine years.

In 1983 Victor’s name is on a list of exiles allowed to return to Chile. He goes back to a prestigious job in a private clinic, but also works in a shantytown. The degree of inequality is staggering. Roser’s Ancient Music Orchestra give concerts in parks and she also teaches music in the shantytowns. They find an old stone and wood house at the edge of Santiago where they live with their dogs. Marcel comes on weekends for barbecues. Gradually Victor goes back to public life as democracy returns.

Roser’s health begins to fail, however. She stoically undergoes treatment for her terminal cancer at Victor’s request. He is terrified to lose her. The stone house is their sanctuary. Roser listens to music, plays with the cat. At last she begs Victor, “Let me go. I am happy. I am not afraid, but don’t take me to the hospital.” She dies in 1991.

Roser’s story is told in A Long Petal of the Sea [published in English in 2020] by Isabel Allende. Allende has many personal connections to this fictional story, having been an exile herself from Chile and Venezuela. Though it is clear where Allende’s sympathies lie, in this book she tells a balanced, realistic story, standing back far enough from the action to show the whole lives of several major characters. Though Roser may be a little flecked with stardust and her circumstances paved with fortuitous meetings, I am willing to grant her her truth.