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BOOK REVIEW                       JOHNSON

HISTORY DISTILLED AS ART

AND MY HEART WAS AT HOME. By Ethel Shapiro-Bertolini. De Rusha Lithography, Los Angeles. 365 pages. $5.00.

THIS NOVEL has a Shavian opening, with its eight main characters sitting in a row across the stage. They are actually not on a stage, but on a speakers’ platform, facing a sizable audience. The effect, however, is like the staging of a play or a pageant. 

The theme of the novel is the long, drawn out battle this group wages to remain in the United States. For they are all “aliens,” as the quaint expression goes, though they have lived here all their adult lives-and they have become “undesirable” by reason of protest and dissent. They objected to the Korean War and took part in various other campaigns to make America more moral and more livable. 

The eight are a composite hero-all ages, all countries, both sexes. Even Virginia Woolf in her Orlando did not achieve that much!

The method is to give the life stories of these eight notable people, while intertwining their biographies as they carry their joint struggle. The title is from a line in a moving poem by Chaim Schwartz, which is worth quoting:

I kept my ear close to the ground, and I heard
calamities, accidents-all that occurred-as well as the tread on each serpentine street;
the symphony-march of a million swift feet;
and its marvelous music-it set me ablaze 
And my heart was at home for the rest of its days.

This is a patriotic poem by another foreign-born citizen, and expresses the love that these eight aliens felt for their adopted country, a love that stirred them to want to make it better-with confidence that this could be done!

The material is truly epic. The battle against deportation rages for years. In nationality the characters include a Korean, a Montenegrin, a Lithuanian woman and her husband, a Hungarian, a Mexican, and a Rumanian Jewish brother and sister. In the course of the story there are victories and partial victories and defeats, “voluntary” deportations and favorable verdicts, a death and marriage. One 

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Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 20:56:09 ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 21:04:55 ----------- In the second paragraph, "dragons" should be "drawn": The theme of the novel is the long, drawn out. In that same paragraph, "as the quaint expression goes, through..." through should be "though." ---------- Reopened for Editing 2024-02-13 21:50:24