About a month ago, I saw the French Canadian film Incendies when it came to the Albany area. The film follows twins, a sister and brother, who live in Montreal. Following the death of their Lebanese-born mother, they receive a letter from her employer, who is also her attorney and closest friend. The sister is instructed to find her father. The brother is assigned the task of finding their older brother. This dual mission takes them to Lebanon, to the violence that tore the country apart from the 1960s through the 1980s, and to dark, unanticipated family secrets.
This film, made for an adult audience, stayed in my mind throughout my reading of Anne-Laure Bondoux’s A Time of Miracles, translated from French by Y. Maudet, the winner of the 2011 Mildred Batchelder Award for outstanding children’s books in translation. Here, Bondoux—whose earlier novel A Killer’s Tears was a Batchelder Honor Book in 2007 —presents a young refugee boy struggling to survive in the war-torn Caucasus region following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Blaise Fortune’s caretaker, Gloria, tells him he was rescued from a terrible train wreck as a baby; his injured mother disappeared in the accident. Over the period of several years, Gloria takes Blaise from town to town in the recently-created country of Georgia, forever fleeing ethnic violence of Georgians, Russians, Chechens, and other groups vying for territory and political power. She promises she will return him to France and to his mother. The two travel through Romania and Hungary, and somewhere along the way to France, Gloria, too, vanishes. When Blaise arrives in France, in the back of a truck, he is treated as an illegal immigrant with the task of convincing French authorities of his supposed origins as a citizen of the country.
I won’t explain more, because A Time of Miracles is a powerful and surprising story that like Incendies has not received the attention it deserves in the United States despite its award. Readers will discover that many countries in Europe are debating the same immigration issues that dominate the news here. Those of us who have grown up with talk of the Soviet Union as the “evil empire” will see, on the ground, what has happened to some of the people apparently liberated from Communist rule. Not to say that the explosion of ethnic violence and terrorism in any way justifies the massive human rights and oppression of Soviet Communism. On the contrary, the suppression of free expression and debate in large nations with diverse populations has merely held enmities in check without dispelling them. Complicated family ties add to the tension and poignancy of Blaise and Gloria’s story. This jewel of a book is appropriate for readers in middle school and up and would greatly enrich any discussion of the Cold War and its aftermath.
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