Imagine that your native land is invaded not once, but several times by opponents who are much more powerful and ruthless.  In the first invasion, tens of thousands of your nations finest minds are deported to camps thousands of miles away.  The next invasion is by another opponent who to win your favor, executes tens of thousands of your fellow citizens who made the mistake of being born into a different religion.  To complete the job of cleansing your land, many of your neighbors to worked with the first invader are also executed.  A couple of years later, the first invader returns and again, executes or deports your fellow citizens who co-operated with the second invader.  Fast forward two generations and the first invader is finally expelled but during that time, everyone who has lived under the expelled regime has lived, worked or in some manner supported the hated invader.

Whom do you trust?  Who was a spy or informer for the invader?  Who was married to someone who profited from working with the invader?  Will the invader return?  Is the new system honest or will it be staffed by those who worked for the invader?

Sofi Oksanen, a Finnish- Estonian playwright and novelist is now published in twenty-nine countries and has written a novel that looks at those questions and others.  An elderly woman is taunted by young boys who throw rocks at her house on her old dying farm.  Why?  Did she collaborate with the hated invaders?  Was she an informer?  What is her secret?  Then, a young woman in fancy city clothes appears in her yard and for the rest of the book, each mentally dances with the other, prying and gradually learning the truth that binds the two.

The story will make the reader question how does a nation which, like the nations in Europe formerly occupied by the Soviet Union, begin the healing process and acceptance of the challenges generated by the past.  Who, having lived for decades under a repressive police state is free from guilt and is there an acceptable line beyond one should not have crossed?  At the same time, there is a valid call for Justice and who will be the ones to carry out such measures as are set? These questions and others are not often discussed by those who have studied totalitarian states or even whose which have not gone to that extreme.  The amazing thing is that it appears that overall, those nations which have suffered have found a way to deal with the past and have arrived at a way of moving forward without using the fearsome methods that were used on them.     

The British and German empires had the wonderful ability to turn futility and defeat into a glorious adventure. For the Germans, and outstanding example was the legend of the Langemarck when youthful German infantry rushed against the French lines, singing their national anthem, and capturing thousands of French regulars. The reality was quite different in that while a thousand French reservists were captured, the young Germans suffered about ten thousand killed and wounded in an unimportant battle. Years later, the myth would be used by the Nazi regime to fire the imagination of those in the Hitler Youth.

The British, because of their far-flung empire had more glorious defeats which they could use to inspire British boys. It must have worked as generations of youth ventured forth to pacify, tame and Christianize the colonies of the Empire. One of those defeats was the Artic expedition of Captain Sir John Franklin in 1845-48. He had at his disposal two specially designed ships with food and fuel enough for three years and a desire to find the fabled Northwest Passage. He failed and all the men of his ships died of scurvy, TB, various other illnesses and eventually resorted to cannibalism in a vain attempt to reach rescue.

History can be the best of subjects or the worse depending on your individual mindset, for any event in history can be a huge puzzle that can and does cause debate years and years after any given event. History is not as bad as the saying about economics (ask four economist a question as to what will happen and you will receive five opinions), for at least with history there are certain proven facts, records, confessions, etc.

In this historical novel, the author pulls on diaries, interviews, memoirs, and other sources to provide the reader with an excellent overview of numerous personalities (Churchill, Halifax, Goebbels, Goring, Beaverbrook, and others), their strategies, fears, personalities, and so on and how by interacting with one another, they created the saga of the Battle of Britain. How close to defeat was England at that time and how great the burden on the shoulders of men like Churchill, Beaverbrook, and others as they had to hold together and create a national will against not only the forces of Hitler, but also against those within their own country and even cabinet who wished to take a different course. How easy it would have been to simply make some sort of deal with Hitler in the vain hope that he, who had broken every agreement, could be trusted.

Originally published in 1932, this excellent little novel is still in print, thus testifying to its excellence.  A story set in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the main characters, three individual men, spanning 3 generations face first their sudden leap into the nobility by the grandfather as a young man, then the solid life of a district bureaucrat of his son and finally the life of the grandson who is cut out for either the military or the bureaucracy.

Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland has taken a key event in the history of France and created a novel that is a thriller and educational.  Written from the perspective of a key player in the events, the reader is drawn into a world of the “deep state” before the term was used.  It serves to remind us that those who have power seldom are ready to relinquish it, especially when they know no other life and possess no other skills that those they have acquired in the acquisition of their power.

 After their loss to Germany in the war of 1870, the French nation was torn between a paranoid fear of another German attack (a preventative war) and the French desire for revenge.  France, which had always been the predominant military land power on the continent was humiliated; it was other people’s lands which were despoiled and looted, not the sacred soil of France!

To achieve their desire for revenge, which included repossessing the key provinces of Alsace and Lorraine which the French had taken from the Germans centuries before, the French military was lavished with money and prestige.  They represented the honor of France and stood for the glory which had to be taken back from the new German empire.

In 1895, a Jewish officer of the General Staff was convicted in a secret military trial of passing secrets to the Germans.  Sentenced to life on Devil’s Island, he was isolated from the world; his wardens were not allowed to speak to him, he was chained to his bed at night, his view restricted by high wooden fences, his mail restricted and censored, his was a living hell of a punishment, especially for a man convicted on forged evidence. 

The rest of the story is well known, how another French officer by the name of Picquart gradually comes to realize that the prisoner, Alfred Dreyfus is innocent of the charges and that Major Esterhazy was in fact the real traitor. Shocked by the injustice done to Dreyfus, Picquart reports his findings to the army powers that be only to find out that they had known of the injustice but had decided that to save the “honor” of the army, nothing was to be done.  In fact, new evidence was “discovered” which further condemned Dreyfus.  What follows is an example of a handful of brave men including Picquart who fight against powerful forces within the government who use every tool at their disposal including humiliation, intimidation, and violence to cover up their crime against Dreyfus.  What is the importance of one man against the needs of the State?

In this excellent novel, we see nobility in the acts and courage of a man willing to lose all in the pursuit of justice.  We see prejudice in the antisemitism of France at that time. We also see courage, fear, and determination, not in fictional characters, but in those who lived these trying events. I can see readers finishing the novel and wondering which of those traits they would possess in a time of trials.

This is a fine novel, filled with interesting characters, well developed and all connected through their living in the Yacoubian building, a large, multi-family building that has seen better days in Cairo. From the street level to the roof where many families make their home, we trace the daily struggles, small victories, and disappointments which we could fine in any large city today. That is part of the beauty of this novel, for we sometimes forget that it does not matter if we look at Cairo, Paris, Tokyo, that the human condition is in the end, the same. And, it has not changed that much throughout history.

We find an idealistic young man whose dreams of become a police officer are crushed due to the fact that his father is a common man; in response, he becomes radicalized. There is an aging playboy who is rolled by his latest “sweetheart,” demonized by his sister and faces an uncertain future. A Christian shirtmaker who dreams of making the finest shirts in Cairo and the wealthy businessman who reaches too high. The female characters work and dream of the same things as in the West and face the same hurdles with a bravery that equals that of any individual around the world who faces poverty and few opportunities.

If you have never been to Egypt (visit, it is a fantastic nation filled with wonderful people), this little novel will open the country to you and make you feel at home.

The author has published other successful books, but he makes his living as a dentist in Cairo. The stories are based on the location and characters that he has known through his life and perhaps that is why you will feel so close to them; he writes about them with a feeling of respect and love.

If you are looking for a bit of escape, invest some time in this little gem.

Imagine that it is about 1850 in the United States and the British, who have the finest army in the world, invade the U.S. through the East Coast. The citizens of the area who have not been threatened by any enemies since the war of 1812 are more interested in trade and welcome the invaders who promise more states rights and low taxes. Additionally, the great slave holder families of the South provide monetary and physical support to the British invaders. Meanwhile, in the West, the small U.S. army faces an uprising of all the Indian tribes but this time they are united and number two hundred thousand. Additionally, the Mexican army joins the Indians and begin a campaign of pillage and murder across the southwest U.S. Only small groups of soldiers remain faithful to the central government, but they form the basis for a national renewal that eventually drives the British out and pushes back and punishes the Indian and Mexican forces. Large parts of the nation are desolated with farms destroyed and hundreds of towns and villages burned to the ground. Now switch this scenario to the Polish Commonwealth in the mid-eighteenth century.

Instead of the British invading, you have the Swedish army, the finest in Europe and victors during the terrible Thirty Years War. Instead of the Indians, you have the Cossacks, and the Mexicans are really the Tartars who are invited in by the Cossacks. Tens of thousands are killed as Ukrainian peasants join the Cossacks, attack the Poles, and slaughter the Jews who are seen as oppressive minions of the Polish overlords (in fact, until the Holocaust of 1939-45, this time was remembered in Jewish history as the greatest Jewish tragedy since Biblical times). Meanwhile, the Tartars capture a hundred thousand Ukrainian peasants and march them off to the Crimea where they were sold as slaves in the vast slave markets. To make matters worse, the most powerful Lithuanian prince helps the Swedes while the Russians stand on the border, ready to invade when the Poles are finally defeated.

When I was a little boy, my Grandmother will tell me stories of when she was a young woman in Warsaw Poland; how the young girls would flirt with the Russian soldiers who occupied the city, how she hesitated to go out at night as the Cossacks made it a habit to ride down the street, striking anyone with their nagaikas unless they were really drunk in which case they used their swords on anyone in their way, etc.  One thing she especially remembered, was that a chapter of Sienkiewicz’s epic novel, With Fire and Sword was serialized in the Warsaw newspapers and there was always a rush to purchase a copy; it was the Netflix of its day.

Sienkiewicz would win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905 for his novel which took place in seventeenth century Poland, when Poland was the largest country in Europe. Sweeping across the steppes, it is an adventure story centered on the Cossack revolt which was led by Bohdan Hmyelnitzki (also spelled Khmelnytsky). The Cossacks aligned themselves with the Tartars and Great Khan of the Crimea and the revolt which lasted off and on for several years, was only one of numerous wars fought in what is today the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and what was prior to World War II, eastern Poland. It was the bloodiest of the revolts and was responsible for the largest number of Jewish deaths until the Holocaust. The Cossacks encouraged the native Ukrainian population to join the revolt and Poles and Jews alike were hunted down and killed in their tens of thousands. While the Ukrainians were used as cannon fodder by the Cossacks, who looked down on the Ukrainians, the Tartars were given free rein to capture as many Ukrainians as possible who were then forced to walk to the slave markets in the Crimea and beyond.

About once every decade I treat myself to Anatoli Rybakov’s wonderful trilogy (Children of the Arbat, Fear and Dust and Ashes). Rybakov himself, like his main character, Sasha, was arrested in 1933 and sent to Siberia for three years. That was before the main Stalinist terror and purges which only a couple of short years later would have merited a term of ten or twenty years. After his release, he was barred from most major cities as his internal passport showed that he had been convicted of a crime against the state. Working odd jobs, he was called up into the army after the German invasion of 1941and was twice decorated. After the war, he continued to write but it was not until Gorbachev and glasnost that the first of his trilogy was published at which time, he won international fame. He continued to write until his death in December 1999 at the age of eighty-seven.

The trilogy traces some of the idealistic youth of the early 1930s in the Soviet Union, as they hoped for a better future. Most were members of the Soviet youth movement, the Komsomol which served as a propaganda arm of the Party, aimed at molding strong Soviet citizens. The book traces the lives of various members, such as Sasha who was convicted of anti-Soviet propaganda when his poster at school was deemed to mock various Party members at his school. Some students keep their belief in the Party, one becomes a member of the NKVD and manages to survive the great purge of the secret police while another is thrown into poverty when her high Party ranking father is arrested in the middle of the night.

Time can be cruel as it leaves behind many important things. This book, The Cruel Sea is on such loss for it is seldom read any longer. Set in the Atlantic during World War II, it is a story of ordinary men called upon to do extraordinary deeds. Most of the men are young, a lieutenant of twenty who is called upon to be second in command, other junior officers who a few weeks earlier were bank clerks or shoe salesmen. The recruits don’t have any experience, and many cannot remember port from starboard but are responsible for staffing guns, handling depth charges and being on call to fight fires. At the top, on the bridge, is a retired captain who must mold his crew into a fighting unit while patrolling the hostile north Atlantic.