government institutes a family separation policy to deter refugees. He travels alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes, his violin and hopes for reunion with his parents.Įighty years later, Anita Diaz rides a different train with her mother when they leave El Salvador to escape being slaughtered by military gangs who invade their town and massacre everyone in it. With the help of family allies, Samuel's mother manages to evacuate him to England. He's five years old and living in Vienna when his father disappears during the Nazi purge of Kristallnacht. Allende's narrative commingles past and present, and follows their migrations to the United States and the day when the immigrant from Vienna - Samuel Adler - and the refugee from El Salvador - Anita Diaz - finally meet. The Wind Knows My Name is a tale of two child immigrants- a boy who escapes Nazi occupied Vienna in 1938 and a girl who escapes military gangs in El Salvador in 2019. She discovers something in Nogales, via El Salvador and Vienna: the human capacity for hope and decency in the midst of despair. In her latest novel, Allende disrupts the mainstream narrative about our southern border. This story is a fable joined by today's hard news. In a literary career spanning five decades Allende's storytelling walks a lyrical romanticism on roads imposed by social and political turmoil. I wanted to find what she discovers in our borderlands, to see if it's as dearly held as my memory of a childhood bedroom window opening southward to a daily breeze of blended language, barking dogs and Grandmother's whistled greetings to her neighbors. When I learned Isabel Allende's new book, The Wind Knows My Name, is set in my hometown of Nogales, Arizona, among other places real and mystical, I put it on the top of my reading list.
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