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lenin_lover_69's review
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
reflective
sad
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment and Death of parent
Moderate: Genocide, War, Violence, and Child death
georgie_mb's review
challenging
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Beautiful, poignant, heartbreaking and loving.
Never have I read a non-fiction book with such grace and flow. The parallel between these two lives, and the way they flow into one another is truly amazing to read about.
As well as telling the story of Henry and Ingrid as German Jewish refugees and Chitra the daughter of Indian immigrants, this also feels like a dedication of love to the places that have touched their lives: predominantly Glasgow and London.
I feel like this is a book that everyone should read - the way the history is told is not overwhelming, almost as if you are watching it all in a dream-like state. Also, it’s a reminder of how the past should still be affecting us now, and making us learn lessons from it.
Pr product as part of the Canongate May readalong
Never have I read a non-fiction book with such grace and flow. The parallel between these two lives, and the way they flow into one another is truly amazing to read about.
As well as telling the story of Henry and Ingrid as German Jewish refugees and Chitra the daughter of Indian immigrants, this also feels like a dedication of love to the places that have touched their lives: predominantly Glasgow and London.
I feel like this is a book that everyone should read - the way the history is told is not overwhelming, almost as if you are watching it all in a dream-like state. Also, it’s a reminder of how the past should still be affecting us now, and making us learn lessons from it.
Pr product as part of the Canongate May readalong
Content Warnings
Graphic: Antisemitism, Grief, and War
Minor: Death of parent, Dementia, Genocide, and Pandemic/Epidemic
introvertsbookclub's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
medium-paced
5.0
‘Homelands’ is one of those books that you finish and immediately want to buy a copy for every person you know and then write a letter to the author thanking them for telling such an incredible story. It is also a story so personal and unique, full of overlaps and coincidences and parallels, that only Chitra Ramaswamy could have told it in this way, and that makes it even more special.
Although the book’s main focus is Henry Wuga’s escape from Nazi Germany as a teenager and his experience in Scotland ever since, this is only one part of the wider story that the author weaves. She tells parallel tales of evacuation, migration, discrimination, facism, racism, and government failure, and within them stories of family, separation, reunion, love and grief. The story of her parent’s migration from India to London several decades after Henry arrives in Glasgow, serves as a reminder of the way that seemingly separate histories are in fact influencing one another and repeating.
Henry’s story reveals many details about life before, during and after Nazi Germany, but even more illuminating are the descriptions of the treatment of Jewish refugees in Britain. The investigation of these refugees as potential German spies and the existence of camps into which some of them ended up (in Henry’s case simply for writing home to his parents) and which rivalled the concentration camps in their awfulness, shocked me. Reading about how a man, a family, a community, would try to recover from the wounds left by the Holocaust became its own story of personal and familial courage.
Henry and Chitra’s families are at the centre of this story, their love and grief influencing the shape and flow of the book. And so to is their friendship. It is an unlikely friendship, and it speaks to the ability to find connection between people who seem different to one another, and undermines the ideologies of division that reoccur in the history and in the present that this story takes place in. The book manages to avoid so many of the cliches of Holocaust writing, and to be sensitive and respectful as well as honest and emotional. The book is important for the way in which it reexamines history, but also for the quieter stories it tells of family and community and all of the different shapes these bonds can take.
Although the book’s main focus is Henry Wuga’s escape from Nazi Germany as a teenager and his experience in Scotland ever since, this is only one part of the wider story that the author weaves. She tells parallel tales of evacuation, migration, discrimination, facism, racism, and government failure, and within them stories of family, separation, reunion, love and grief. The story of her parent’s migration from India to London several decades after Henry arrives in Glasgow, serves as a reminder of the way that seemingly separate histories are in fact influencing one another and repeating.
Henry’s story reveals many details about life before, during and after Nazi Germany, but even more illuminating are the descriptions of the treatment of Jewish refugees in Britain. The investigation of these refugees as potential German spies and the existence of camps into which some of them ended up (in Henry’s case simply for writing home to his parents) and which rivalled the concentration camps in their awfulness, shocked me. Reading about how a man, a family, a community, would try to recover from the wounds left by the Holocaust became its own story of personal and familial courage.
Henry and Chitra’s families are at the centre of this story, their love and grief influencing the shape and flow of the book. And so to is their friendship. It is an unlikely friendship, and it speaks to the ability to find connection between people who seem different to one another, and undermines the ideologies of division that reoccur in the history and in the present that this story takes place in. The book manages to avoid so many of the cliches of Holocaust writing, and to be sensitive and respectful as well as honest and emotional. The book is important for the way in which it reexamines history, but also for the quieter stories it tells of family and community and all of the different shapes these bonds can take.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Antisemitism
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