“One evening, during that painful time, Samuel announced to Anita and Leticia that he had something important to tell them. ....He told the woman and the girl about his traumatic childhood, about losing his family and being exiled to a strange and hostile place, about being an orphan, always lonely, always in fear, until Luke and Lidia Evans came into his life, bringing him comfort and love. ...Finally, he opened his violin case, pulled out his medal, and placed in in Anita’s hand.”
Those are some lines from the epilogue of Isabel Allende’s novel The Wind Knows My Name. When the story begins, Samuel is a young Jewish boy in Vienna in 1938. After weeks of hoping the Nazis will return his father, his mother makes the heart wrenching decision to send him to England to wait out the war. Samuel never sees his mother again and grows up in foster homes and orphanages until he moves to the United States to pursue a career in music.
Eight decades later, seven-year-old Anita Diaz and her mother flee their dangerous home in El Salvador, seeking refuge in the United States, but it’s 2019 and there’s a new family separation policy. Just like Samuel, Anita is moved from camps to foster homes while she waits to hear news of her mother. Social worker Selena enlists the help of an American attorney to secure asylum for Anita and hopefully reunite her with her mother. This is a realistic depiction of what asylum seekers are still enduring today.
If you’re looking for a story that, as the jacket says, “is a testament to the sacrifices that parents make,” then you must read The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende.
