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.

Agnes Grey

Anne Bronte

Agnes tells her story in the first person, as if to a friend, in Agnes Grey [published 1847], written by Anne Bronte. She begins by telling us how isolated her world is, where she lives on the Yorkshire moors with her parson father, her mother and sister. She is anxious to see more of the world.

Because her mother was cut off from her own well-off family when she married a poor clergyman, he tries to increase their small means by an investment which founders. It doesn’t worry Agnes. As the youngest, she is kept from work. She decides to become a governess, to help with the family finances. When she is 18 she gets permission to do so and excitedly takes her first situation 20 miles from home.

The Bloomfields are somewhat privileged and have two young children, Tom and Marianne. The parents are cold and forbidding, but give Agnes no authority to work with the children. Tom and Marianne have no desire to learn in any case, and Agnes’ best intentions seem sport to them. Tom is encouraged by his elders to treat animals badly and one day comes with a nest of pigeons, telling Agnes how he plans to torture them. Agnes tells him he has no right to torment them for his amusement. She takes a large rock and smashes it down on the nest, killing the tiny birds. At the end of May, Agnes is told her services are no longer required.

Agnes returns to the parsonage, but she wants to try again. She finds a position with the Murray family, who are farther away. She is in high spirits, anxious to make her way alone. Her charges are the beautiful and vain 16-year-old Rosalie and her sister Matilda two years younger, who is big-boned and awkward, interested in nothing but horses. Two sons are sent away to boarding school. The family won’t set a schedule for the school and Agnes is at the daughters’ beck and call. Agnes finds that “nothing can be taught to any purpose without some exertion on the part of the learner.”

The Murrays live in a large house with a beautiful park. At 18, Rosalie makes her debut. She flirts with all the men she meets and makes Agnes her confidant. “I detest them all,” she says, but her mother is angling for Rosalie to become the wife of Sir Thomas Ashby and the mistress of Ashby Park. 

With little entertainment in the country, the family often goes to church to hear the flamboyant rector Mr. Hatfield, and his quiet curate, Mr. Weston. Agnes is amazed by the contrast between them. When she has time, Agnes goes out to visit old Nancy Brown, who is having trouble reading her Bible. Nancy tells Agnes about the visits of the two pastors. Hatfield scorned and berated her, but Mr. Weston eased her mind with his kindness, exactly as Agnes suspected.

Walking out with her charges who rush ahead with their friends, Agnes is able to talk to Mr. Weston, telling him forthrightly, “I have no friends in my present position, though I am quite sociable.” Rosalie, seeing them talking, turns and flirts herself. But Agnes begins to see him as the one light in her lonely life. She has no one to whom she can speak her mind. 

When Hatfield proposes marriage to Rosalie, she scornfully turns him down. She does receive an offer from Sir Ashby, which she accepts. But even afterward, she flirts, especially with Mr. Weston, preventing Agnes from talking to him. 

Agnes’ mother writes to say that her father is doing poorly. Agnes goes home, but not in time to see her father alive. Mrs. Grey hears that her family will take her back and provide for them if she repents her marriage. But Mrs. Grey will not do this. She intends to start a school and asks Agnes to join her in teaching. Agnes returns to the Murray household to say goodbye. She meets Mr. Weston, who says it is a pity Rosalie should be thrown away on such a man as Ashby, known to be a rake. He asks after Agnes’ mother and says goodbye, asking whether Agnes would be pleased to see him again some day, raising her hopes that she will.

The school where Agnes teaches with her mother goes well, but Agnes receives a letter from Rosalie, who begs her to come and visit Ashby Park. Rosalie has come to appreciate Agnes’ plain speech. Agnes goes for a few days. She is not allowed to dine with the lords and ladies, but finds that Rosalie is miserable, detests her husband, hates her mother-in-law and refuses to be consoled by her tiny daughter. Agnes asks for news, but hears nothing about Mr. Weston, who has left the parish.

With almost a year since she has seen Mr. Weston, Agnes tries to console herself. She walks by the sea as often as possible. One beautiful morning she runs into Mr. Weston, who has with him the little terrier Snap, whom Agnes thought lost. After that he calls often on Agnes and her mother, as he has a parish quite near. Soon he asks Agnes to be his companion, they are married and have three children. “And now I think I have said sufficient,” she tells us.

The writer of this story, Anne Bronte, was only 26. It was published when Anne was 27. It is a study in values, in which Bronte contrasts her own values for quiet, introspective study with worldly desires for wealth, admiration and titles. All of the characters are seen through this clear lens, to which Anne Bronte was led by her own experiences.

Anne was known to tell the truth plainly, as Agnes does. She wrote: “Oh Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts – this whispering 'Peace, peace', when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience.”

Ella Baker

Ella Jo Baker was born in 1903 into a relatively well off African American family. Her grandfather, Mitchell Ross, had been able to purchase 50 acres near Littleton, North Carolina, using this land in a cooperative manner to help his neighbors. Ella’s mother was a stern, assertive religious leader, commanding respect in her efforts to “lift as we climb.”

Ella herself became an excellent student, completing high school and college at Shaw Boarding School and becoming valedictorian of her class. She was an excellent debater, but she thought educated people should make space for the working poor and tenant farmers who were often illiterate. She refused to become a teacher, partly because it was expected, and also because education was funded and controlled by whites.

Instead, a cousin helped Ella move to Harlem, where she became seduced by its vibrant political life. She lived near the 135th Street library and went to lectures at the YWCA. She became national director of the short-lived Young Negroes Cooperative League, but it lacked capital. Ella took writing and organizing jobs but never had much money. In 1936 she worked on the Workers Education Project, part of the WPA. Every spectrum of radical thinking could be found in the WPA, as people learned, studied and argued about the problems of the day.

Ella married her college sweetheart T. J. Roberts and lived with him in New York for 20 years before their divorce. But Ella was reticent about her private life and continued to go under the name of “Miss Baker.” She adopted her niece when Jackie was nine, educating her in New York. 

In 1940, Ella Baker joined the fast-growing NAACP as an assistant field secretary and later was the national director of field services. Baker traveled all over the South, believing relationships were the building blocks of activism. She especially enjoyed people in such difficult places as Birmingham, Alabama, and Shreveport, Louisiana. She stressed patience and process. People could grow into confidence. But Baker said what she thought, making the NAACP leadership uncomfortable. She left in 1946, but she did not cut her ties completely.

In the late 1940’s and 50’s, Baker continued to work in New York on various jobs, especially in education, demanding integrated schools and parental participation. She was never a communist, but she wasn’t anti-communist either. She never took static positions. Nevertheless, she was monitored by the FBI.

Dramatic events in the South led to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955 and suggested the potential for wide-spread action. With Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison, Ella Baker formed In Friendship to help with funding for these actions. This group met with Martin Luther King to find ways the movement might expand, leading to the organization of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957 in Atlanta. Baker moved to Atlanta and set up the office. Her contacts all over the South helped make it successful.

But Ella Baker was never comfortable in the SCLC. Dr. King’s larger than life persona took over, which kept others from leading. Baker felt people’s reliance on a messianic leader made them more dependent. She wanted to help people vote and document harassment, to work from the bottom up. But in the SCLC a patriarchal ethos took over and women’s work was constantly undervalued. Baker believed she worked for a movement, not an organization. She was a radical humanist, unfalteringly confident in common people. She left the SCLC in 1960.

Beginning in Greensboro, North Carolina, students ignited a blaze of sit-ins all over the country. Ella Baker nurtured this movement. In April, 1960, 200 student leaders collected to form the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee. Baker insisted the group be independent of existing groups. She found office space for them and did much of the writing during the first hopeful summer. She was able to fund herself with a job at the YWCA. 

After their involvement in the bloody interstate Freedom Rides begun the next year, SNCC activists were seen as the shock troops of the movement. There was constant disagreement and discussion, in all of which Ella Baker participated. She insisted on a politics of action, which empowered local people, but she also felt thinking and analysis must be part of the work. By 1964 the group was planning Freedom Summer, when hundreds of volunteers from the north converged on Mississippi to teach and help voter registration.

For the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegate challenge, Ella Baker staffed the Washington office and traveled with Fannie Lou Hamer to tell her story. The group’s rejection of the Democrats’ lame compromise on the convention floor was a turning point for the movement, leading to black separatism.

In the 1970’s asthma and arthritis slowed Ella Baker down, but she never stopped, opposing political repression and persecution, and war and colonialism abroad. She also spoke to women’s groups. Her radical democratic humanism gave meaning to her every action. She died in New York in 1986.

Since her death, countless movement activists have testified to Ella Baker’s mentoring. Her quiet presence was always felt. She raised questions, taught by inquiry and example, by teasing out what was always available in people. According to her biographer Barbara Ransby, “Baker’s leadership helped create a space where the traditional hierarchies of race, class and gender could be turned on their heads,” particularly in SNCC in the 1960’s.

When I studied the civil rights movement recently, I was thrilled by stories of this humble woman who was unintimidated by anyone, who operated with confidence and authority and ignored convention. It seemed to me she was fighting my battles as well as those of the movement, against those who try to keep us small and unimportant; fighting for reality and humanity. Ransby’s book, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision [published 2003], tells the story of the movement from Ella’s point of view.

Sasha Grady Blake

Jennifer Egan

Sasha’s story is that of a girl born into a difficult family, who develops many problems of her own. She wants nothing more than redemption and transformation, however. Her story is told, by the many people who knew her, in A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan [published 2011].

As a little girl, Sasha is described by her uncle Ted, who wanted to rescue her from her ferocious parents: a fragile face, long red hair, green eyes. At five she seems more grown up than she should. She leaves home at 17, running away to Japan with a musician, then to Hong Kong and China. Her uncle is paid by a stepfather to find her in Naples. “I meet people everywhere I go,” she tells him. But he sees that, in fact, she is alone, empty-handed, and manages to convince her to come home.

We next catch up with Sasha in college where she has fallen in love with Drew, a down-to-earth guy from Wisconsin. She is a little older than most of the students and no longer as self-destructive. One night Drew does Ecstasy with Rob, who is also close to Sasha. Rob has been a pretend boyfriend for her, keeping her step-father’s detectives at bay. Sasha is protective of Rob, told him after a suicide attempt, “we are survivors.” But Rob is not. That night he drowns in the East River. This blows Drew and Sasha apart.

In the next years, Sasha becomes the assistant of a successful music entrepreneur, Benny, who is very dependent on her. Benny says she smells like apricots, including the slight bitterness. Benny wonders why she hasn’t married. She is also a kleptomaniac, living alone in the East Village in an apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen. Sasha tries to overcome her problem by talking to her therapist, Kaz. She won’t talk about her father, who left when she was six. “I am always happy,” she says. She has goals, works out and studies languages.

After many years, Sasha and Drew find each other again. Drew has become a doctor and works in Pakistan. Sasha packs up her New York life and never looks back.

They move back to the United States, to the desert and have two children, Allison and Lincoln. Drew has a clinic and often treats undocumented people. Allison says it is a mystery to her why her parents love each other so much. She asks her mother to tell her all the “bad and embarrassing things she has done.” But Sasha spares her daughter the relics of her past.

Sasha makes sculptures in the desert from trash and old toys. The weathering and disintegration of these sculptures are part of her art process. She also makes collages of found objects and little pieces of her family’s life. “They may seem casual and meaningless, but they tell the whole story.”

One evening, wandering the East Village, the memory of Sasha comes back to two men who knew her in New York. “I was crazy about her,” one says, while the other longs for her and his younger self. Time is the goon who has robbed them all.

From tales told by her daughter, we learn that Sasha has indeed found love and contentment. To me she is emblematic of all those who have struggled with poor circumstances and made something of themselves in the end. She remains a whiff in the air of New York, a sweet memory to her uncle, and a solid presence to her children, having found the redemption and transformation she wanted so badly.

Hildegard von Bingen

Hildegard von Bingen, who lived from 1098 to 1179 A.D. was given into the care of the anchorite Jutta von Sponheim at the age of eight. She and Jutta made their vows to the church six years later and were interred in two small rooms off the Benedictine Abbey of Disibodenberg in Germany, with only a revolving screen to connect them to the world. Hildegard had visions from the time she was quite small, which is thought to be one reason she was given to the church.

Jutta taught Hildegard to read and write, but Hildegard did not feel she was well-versed in theology. Jutta was deeply renunciate, flagellating and starving herself, until she died in 1136. Other well-born maidens had joined them, and at Jutta’s death they looked to Hildegard as their new magistra. In a bid for freedom, Hildegard helped them dress in fine gowns with their hair unbound. The young women were freed from their walled-in rooms and began helping in the abbey gardens, in the scriptorium and the infirmary.

With the help of others, Hildegard began to transcribe her visions in a document entitled Scivias. It was copied and illuminated, coming to the attention of other priests and even the pope. When she was to be questioned about her work in 1147, she wrote to Bernard of Clairvaux, who defended her work to the pope. It was highly unusual that a woman should write anything and heresy was a dire offense. But Pope Eugenius favored Hildegard’s work, calling her “God’s Sibyl.” The Pope requested that Hildegard continue, finishing Scivias, its title meaning “Know the Way.”

Wanting more autonomy for herself and her nuns, Hildegard asked for and was given land at St. Rupertsberg to build her own abbey.  When the abbot at Disibodenberg did not want to let them go, Hildegard fell ill and could not leave her bed. Finally, in 1150, they were allowed to leave. The new buildings did not exist, however, and Hildegard and about 20 nuns lived in privation there until they were built.

Hildegard was especially close to Volmar, a Benedictine monk she had known since childhood. He became provost at the new convent, plus Hildegard’s confessor and scribe. She was also especially close to Richardis von Stade, who helped copy and illuminate her writings. When Richardis was invited to become abbess of another convent, Hildegard was distraught. Richardis did move, but died a year later. Hildegard learned from this attachment, recovering to write the lyrics and music of a morality play, the Ordo Virtutum, which was performed at the time the new abbey at St. Rupertsberg was consecrated in 1152. Hildegard wrote that she was a “feather floating on the breath of God.” By this time Hildegard was 54, considered old for her time.

After finishing Scivias, Hildegard continued to write, documenting the herbal remedies used in her convent and what she knew of the causes and cures of disease. She wrote a great deal of liturgical music. She also documented further her visionary theology, which she felt came from “the Living Light.” 

By 1155, Frederick I, known as Barbarossa for his red beard, became Holy Roman Emperor, King of Germany and Italy. He was finally able to counterbalance the power of the church. He did not bother Hildegard or her convent at St. Rupertsberg, however. Hildegard went on four preaching tours all over Europe and also wrote letters to many European leaders. The treasure trove of her writing illuminates much about medieval times for scholars. Hildegard also founded a convent at Eibingen in 1165. She died in 1179 at 81.

Hildegard’s importance has resulted in much study and published material, as well as documentary films about this “unruly mystic.” I recently read a fictionalized biography, “Illuminations: a Novel of Hildegard von Bingen” [published 2012] by Mary Sharratt. Though she doesn’t hesitate to see Hildegard through 21st century eyes, Sharratt imagines Hildegard’s feelings as though she were a gifted and  courageous woman, operating on the authority of her visions. There is some value in this, as of course Hildegard was human. Though she must have felt very differently than we do, she created a new culture around her mostly through her own effort.

Recently the Scivias Institute has created a pilgrimage route in Germany to help tell Hildegard’s story, the Hildegard Way. It is 140 km along the Nahe River incorporating stops at the ruins of the Disibodenberg Abbey, a vaulted cellar at St. Rupertsberg and the abbey at Eibingen. All signage is in English and German.

Franny Keating Mehta

Ann Patchett

Franny is the prettiest baby. At her christening in Glendale, Burt kisses her beautiful mother. When Franny is six, her mother divorces her father and moves with Burt to Virginia, taking Franny and her sister. Franny’s story is told in Commonwealth [published 2016] by Ann Patchett. 

Franny’s step-father has four kids, who spend their school year in Torrance, California, but arrive in the summers to spend time with their father. While Franny and her sister would rather be in California, these four are happy to be in Virginia where the circumstances are less straightened. Thrown together without much supervision, these kids do as they please, giving their youngest brother Albie drugs and alcohol to keep him out of the way. 

One day at their grandparents’ ranch, Cal, the oldest, is stung by a bee. Since he has given his Benadryls to Albie, he has no way to prevent his allergic reaction. The girls think he is pretending, but when it becomes clear that Cal is no longer breathing, Franny’s sister comes up with a story which the girls must stick to. “We weren’t there. We were in the barn with the horses.” They don’t know what has happened, but do not want to be blamed.

This tragedy ends the communal summers. Franny goes to Catholic school, spending only two weeks a year with her father in California. When Albie sets fire to his school in California (no one is hurt, but his mother can no longer cope with him), he is sent to live with his father. The only two kids left in the house, he and Franny form a bond.

Franny, at her father’s request, goes to law school, but drops out after two years. She loves to read, but does not know what to do with her life. Living with a friend named Kumar Mehta, she works as a waitress in an up-scale hotel in Chicago. One day Leo Posen, a well-known author whose books Franny adores, walks in. Franny pours him drink after drink and finally has to escort him to his room as he is too drunk to find it. Posen is giving lectures at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He sends Franny a bus ticket, asking her to come to a party. Franny goes.

Though there is a 32-year difference in their ages, Franny loves Leo Posen and lives with him. She is grateful he would choose her and he finds her indispensable, the electricity in his life. She tells him stories of her childhood, of the six step-siblings thrown together and of Cal’s death. Leo Posen writes it all down in a novel which becomes a smash hit. Franny and Leo enjoy the never-ending book tour, the adulation. Leo takes a wonderful house on Amagansett for the summer. Too many guests come, forcing Franny into an unwelcome hostess role.

During the summer, Albie turns up. He has read the book and recognized what his siblings did to him. He has made little of his life, becoming an itinerant, usually a bike messenger. Franny apologizes, sorry that she has told Leo the story. She again bonds with Albie and eventually leaves Leo.

Returning to Chicago, Franny works at a law library, but also as a bar maid at the hotel she worked at before. When Kumar comes upon her, he immediately takes her into his firm, hoping that they will again love each other. He has lost a young wife who gave him two children before she died. It is not long before Franny and Kumar marry.

As their parents age, Franny and her sister take turns coming out to be with their father when he has chemo treatments. At Christmas one goes to Virginia to celebrate with their mother’s family, the other to California to be with their father. Franny’s mother has married for a third time, but Franny doesn’t take to this family as quickly as she did to her mother’s second husband. She protects her own family of Kumar and his two sons. By this time, her sister Caroline has a law practice and children; Holly lives in Switzerland in a zendo; Jeanette is a bio-medical engineer with a West African husband and a baby in Brooklyn; and Albie too is married with a child.

The story of Cal’s death and it's telling, in a novel and then a movie, reverberates throughout the lives of all the characters. Time, the distances they all travel, and the “inestimable burden of their lives” all play a part. Though we see through the eyes of several characters, Franny’s is the narrative most clearly told. Family makes up her life and her love for each of her ever-branching family members is clearly visible.

Ann Patchett has said that “all of the books that I write are about society building … How do we assemble these characters and make a little biosphere community?” The “commonwealth” made up of the characters in this book is complex. Each retains his or her authenticity. They are knit together by failure and forgiveness, yearning and intimacy in ways that make the book feel extremely current.

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

Sarah Winnemucca’s grandfather, Captain Truckee, was delighted when white men first arrived in Nevada where the Piutes were living. He went off to California to learn from them and fight in the Mexican-American war. Sarah’s mother was terribly frightened of them, however, and half-buried Sarah and her sister in the woods, so that they would not be eaten. Sarah, born 1844, tells her story in Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, published in 1883.

Sarah was a wild little girl, fighting with her grandfather when he took them with him to work on a ranch in Stockton. “I cannot make friends with the white people,” she told him. “They are so much like owls with their big, white eyes.” She did get used to them, however. The whites paid Sarah and her family in horses and money for their work when they went back to Nevada. In her book, Sarah tells us much about the Piutes’ customs and their thinking. “My own people are kind to everyone who does not do them harm,” she said. "There is never any quarreling in the tribe, only friendly counsels. The sub-chiefs are appointed by the great chief for special duties. There is no quarreling about that, for neither sub-chief or great chief has any salary. It is this which makes the tribe so united and attached to each other, and makes it so dreadful to be parted. They would rather all die at once than be parted."

At 14, Sarah and her sister were taken into the house of Major William Ormsby near Carson City as companions to his daughter. Here Sarah learned English and to read and write. Though she does not mention it in her book, her family traveled and performed as Piute royalty for the next few years. At the deaths of her mother, sister and grandfather, Sarah lived with her brother Natchez and began interpreting between the whites and native Americans.

In the next few years Sarah traveled between reservations set up for the native Americans, often under the protection of the U.S. army against white settlers. The Piutes liked the military men, as they understood discipline. The agents, however, who were supposed to be representatives of the U.S. government, usually enriched themselves, taking advantage of the native Americans. Sarah is especially dismissive of “Christian” agents who have no real regard for those on the reservation.

In 1875, Sarah was invited as interpreter to the Malheur agency in Oregon by Sam Parrish and his wife. Parrish was not a Christian, but he treated the native Americans fairly, showing them how to farm. They built a dam and irrigation trenches as well as a mill. His wife started a school at which Sarah taught. Sarah and her family clearly thought assimilation the best course for native Americans and willingly participated when treated well.

After four years, however, the Parrishes were replaced with an agent named Reinhard who was their opposite. “I have to do the government’s will,” he said while deducting payments for food and clothing from their pay. Sarah was discharged for reporting Reinhard. People at the agency were starving and expected food and clothing from the government, as they did from their own chiefs.

By 1878, the Bannock native Americans went on the warpath in Oregon. Some of the Piutes joined them. Sarah agreed to try and talk to them. Given the command of two men by General Oliver Howard, she said to them: “It is no use to be afraid; we have come to see them and see them we must, and if they kill us we have to die and that is all about it, and now we must have something to eat.” She felt the Piutes were prisoners of the Bannocks. She went back to General Howard, begging him to save her people. Acting as scout, translator and messenger, Sarah tells this part of her life as if it were an adventure story.

A year later, the Piutes were being held at the Yakima reservation as if in a concentration camp. Sarah lectured in San Francisco and other places regarding this. With her father and brother, she went to Washington, D.C., to intercede for her people. “Don’t lecture,” she was told. Her powers of persuasion were well known! Sarah met with the secretary of the interior, Carl Schurz, who gave her a piece of paper allowing her people to go back to their home and guaranteeing them land of their own. When she got back, however, the agent, James Wilber, would not let them go. “You have put the devil in your people’s heads,” he told her. She did not hear more from Schurz.

Feeling she had betrayed her people, Sarah went back to lecturing about their plight. She married Frank Hopkins in 1881. In 1883, with help from Mary Peabody Mann and Elizabeth Peabody whom she met on her tours, Sarah published Life Among the Piutes. She started the Peabody school near Lovelock, Nevada. After Frank’s death from tuberculosis in1887, Sarah lived with her sister in Idaho until her own death of the same disease in 1891.

Dynamic and known all over the west, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’ honesty was respected by all who worked with her. Some native Americans disagreed with her about assimilation to the white culture, but like her grandfather, Sarah believed in education. Sarah’s book is an adventure story in which she is the hero, while at the same time relaying much about the way the native Americans felt during this fraught period.

Ifemelu

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The main character of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah [2013], Ifemelu grows up in Lagos, Nigeria, of Igbo parents. Her mother spreads a cloak of Christianity around herself, attributing all good fortune to God. Her father is devoted, but becomes depressed when he loses his job as a civil servant.

Ifemelu meets Obinze in secondary school. She finds it so natural to talk to him. He is rather quiet, a table tennis champion. They are both Igbo and trust each other. They both go to university in the east, in Nsukka, where Obinze’ mother is a teacher. But when Ifemelu’s aunt moves to the United States, she sponsors Ifemelu, helping her find scholarships to complete her education. 

Ifemelu goes to school near Philadelphia, constantly amazed by her American roommates. She has much trouble finding work, however. Impoverished, she eats rice and beans and keeps to herself. During this period she finds herself answering an ad for helping a tennis coach “relax,” and stops communicating with Obinze. Finally, she finds work as a child care provider in a well-off family. 

Obinze has always studied the United States and wanted to go there, but his visa is denied and instead he goes to London. In England he stays with a cousin, works menial jobs and pays a marriage broker to find him a British wife so that he can get proper papers. Just as he is about to marry, however, he is apprehended and deported back to Lagos. 

Thinking about why Nigerians were so anxious to leave home, Obinze says, of residents of Europe and America, they “understood the fleeing from war, from the kind of poverty that crushed human souls, but they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him who were raised well fed and watered, but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, were resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave; none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice and certainty.”

Back in Lagos, Obinze is at first mortified. He has been devastated by Ifemelu’s silence. But then he becomes attached to a “big” man, simulates wealth and becomes wealthy. Obinze finally marries a beautiful girl, Kosi and they have a daughter.

Ifemelu is courted by a sunny, charming rich relative of the white family she is working for. Curt is full of boyish enthusiasm. He takes Ifemelu hiking, camping and on weekends to Paris, buying her cashmere sweaters. Ifemelu is happy with him, contented, her naturally well-bred self showing through. But then she becomes restless, hungry for a feeling she does not have with Curt.

With Curt’s help she has found a good job as a journalist, but when they split up, she starts a blog, writing about how race appears to someone like her, who comes from outside the country. In Nigeria, Ifemelu had no sense of being “black.” She also meets, and lives with Blaine, a serious black intellectual, a professor at Yale. Blaine is high-minded, a “firm reed of goodness.” He and Ifemelu unite over Barack Obama’s candidacy for president, but once he is elected, Ifemelu decides to return to Lagos. She has been gone 13 years.

Lagos is trashy, hot and humid, but Ifemelu loves being back, feeling nostalgia for all that she has missed. She meets old friends and easily finds a job as a features editor on a women’s magazine. The owner of the magazine wants it to be competitive, but “wholesome.” The interviews are of rich women who boast of their wealth and their children. Ifemelu quits and starts a blog about “the small redemptions of Lagos.”

Finally Obinze and Ifemelu meet. “You haven’t stopped being honest,” he tells her. She is impressed with how understated he is. Despite his wealth, he has no need to dominate. They share their feelings about how “transactional” Nigerian culture is, how bombastic people are. “We have confidence, but no dignity,” Obinze says. They begin an affair, eager to see each other each day. 

Kosi will not let her husband go, however. She insists Obinze’ duty is to his marriage and daughter. His friends suggest he simply act in the old Nigerian way, keeping Ifemelu as a mistress. But Ifemelu is unpredictable and stubborn. Neither of them can act against their natural order. Obinze stops seeing her.

Ifemelu is at peace, nevertheless. She feels at home in Lagos. “She had finally spun herself fully into being.” When, after seven months, Obinze appears at her door, ready to divorce his wife, Ifemelu invites him in.

Ifemelu’s honesty, her natural dignity, seen in her story under so many conditions, reflects that of Adichie herself. Adichie has offered herself and her observations, without taking herself too seriously, to the world in many books and influential TED talks. Though she lives in the United States due to her husband’s work and her daughter, she also spends time in Lagos. I have loved getting to know Ifemelu.

Audrey Sutherland

Audrey Sutherland was known for the swimming and kayaking adventures which she summarized in her motto, “Go simple, go solo, go now,” and chronicled in several books. She was born in Southern California in 1921, spending summers in a cabin in the San Bernardino mountains built by her father. She lost him at age 6, however, and grew up very independent. 

Sutherland entered UCLA at 16, taking a degree in international relations. She and her sister also worked as riveters on the Liberty ships being built during World War II. She married and had four children, moving to a house on the north shore of Oahu in 1952. Her husband went back to commercial fishing in California, however, while Audrey and the children stayed in Hawaii. She worked at many jobs in education and counseling, notably working with the tenth grade children of U. S. army families.

Sutherland’s published adventures began in 1964 when she explored the wild north coast of Molokai, swimming while towing her camping equipment, food and wine on a rope. It was a hallmark of her trips that Audrey never stinted on food, most of which she dried and packed herself, while also using the fish, shellfish, seaweed and mushrooms she found along the way. Identifying wild food and monitoring it, along with water, for pollution were among the survival skills she learned and then taught to many others. Good wines she labeled and packed in 35mm film cans!

At 60, Sutherland planned a trip along the inside passage in southeast Alaska, island hopping from Ketchikan to Skagway, 850 miles, which became the book Paddling North. This book is a powerful, yet humble, account of the trip in her yellow rubber blowup kayak which she could pack into a duffel, yet load with supplies for many weeks, bottles of wine stowed fore and aft. It begins with the topographical maps she orders, choosing a route and convincing herself to go.

“On all my expeditions,” Sutherland writes, “I’ve kept a daily log. Not just the sailor’s course and weather, but also the thoughts, the small events, the jeering at myself and some detailed drawings. Long ago recollections are always distorted. Time empurples the prose and the only reality is recorded within a day or two. The writer will need to satisfy the grey, fragile lady at age 90 reading her memoirs from these salty pages.”

Not mincing words about the wind, cold and damp, Sutherland asked herself why she kept coming up to southeast Alaska (as she did for the next 20 years), when her home in Hawaii was in the most marvelous of all climates. “Because it isn’t overrun with people,” is the answer. In Paddling North, Sutherland details many interesting encounters with fishermen, students, park rangers. But her most intimate writing is about the cabins and camp sites she sets up, cooking and keeping herself as comfortable as possible. She is good at nesting, bringing her adventure down to earth.

While she records many animal and bird sightings, including wolverine, wolf and bear, on this trip Sutherland does not have any dangerous encounters. She writes of her fears, however. She uses her knowledge of tides and her topographical maps to keep herself located, but paddling eight hours a day, often against a headwind, was hard. The first half hour of the day was tough, but then she found her steady, rhythmic stroke. Stamina, not muscle strength, kept her going. She always had a goal for the day and at night rewarded herself with hot food and a carefully prepared bed. Finding a well-fitted out cabin among those she had rented through the Tongass National Forest or a hot spring were rare pleasures. She always tried to leave firewood ready for the next camper.

In the years to come, Sutherland traveled to Japan, Scandinavia, Ireland and France, as well as returning to Alaska. Some of her journeys are driven by literature, some by interest in natural phenomena, some by the desire to know more about wine and vineyards. Her only other writing, however, relates to informative books about kayaking. She continued to live in the same house on the north shore of Oahu until her death in 2015. One of her sons, Jock Sutherland, has been named among the 50 best surfers of all time.

Not myself an adventurer, what I found inspiring about her work was the nesting which she did as she traveled. Paddling North is full of useful ways of doing things and thinking about things, a thoroughly rounded story. Its tone is intimate and friendly. Being outdoors all day Sutherland became part of the sea and animal world. “I forgot I was human,” she writes.