Welcome to Litsy!

An elderly man reminisces about a young boy that made a brief but pivotal appearance in his life. He developed a bond with an imprisoned boy about his age - despite a language barrier, they share a grief and aloneness that feels like kinship. Told mostly in order, with some flash-forwards, it uses lush language to unfold a little-known moment the country's history, through the eyes of this young boy who was impacted by one of the Jewish refugees.

Before going to bed I thanked god for his great kindness, for his mercy in giving us an evening without a father hammering down his hand, his feet, beside us, beside my mother, upon my mother, upon me.

Feelings of longing and regret permeate this lyrical novel in which a Mauritian man in his 70s looks back on the time he was 9, in 1944, when he befriended a Jewish boy who was detained with other refugees in a prison camp. All of my senses were affected by the vivid prose. It portrays a little-known aspect of WWII in Mauritius and also showed me what things can give a child inner strength. A gorgeous translation from French by Geoffrey Strachan.

[David] showed me his medallion & talked to me about the Star of David while I, poor simpleton, poor kid born in the mud, I was hopping mad. A likely story. And I suppose this forest is called the forest of Raj, eh? How could a star have his name? Could he tell me that? Did he take me for an idiot or what?
My friend gripped his star firmly & told me this David was a king. So what? Raj also meant king!

And I was thinking about my brothers […] I know that the man I have become owes them a great deal, for Anil and Vinod loved me in the simplest and most devoted manner possible, never letting our perpetual poverty embitter and warp our feelings.

This journey could have united us even more, nourished hopes of bright new dawns, we could have been pioneers, people might have spoken to us with admiration, the first family to leave Mapou entirely of their own free will, because we wanted something better, refusing to believe all the tales that said this was our destiny: rain, mud, dust & poverty. But no, we were simply a family at our wit‘s end, poleaxed by immense grief, and so we fled.

Someone would begin the singing and the others would join in, never very loud, never in protest, just a murmuring through the lips, a caress on the tongue, a bare melody, softly brushing the vocal chords and apart from this, apart from this music that hovered over that prison with its dirty, ignoble walls, nothing stirred, and it was like a secret they were sharing that linked them from note to note, from refrain to refrain. ⬇️

Sunlight and rain were now essential, pleasant, and gentle things, nothing like those monsters at Mapou, which overturn the earth, get into your stomach, crush your heart, and kill children.

A wonderful and poignant book about how we process death, poverty, abuse, and injustice as small children and how we then carry that processing through life. Who knew a boatload of jews fleeing Hitler were imprisoned on Mauritius? This is the story of an unlikely friendship between a Jewish and a Mauritian boy.

A sad truth...

A book, coffee, and cookies. Afternoon reading break nirvana.

Starting this Mauritian book today with tea...

A haunting, beautiful novel set against the backdrop of a little-known WWII event: the detainment of approximately 1,500 Jews on the island nation of Mauritius after they were turned away from British Palestine. Highly recommended!