A review by booksinbedinthornhill
The Report by Jessica Francis Kane

4.0

This review contains SPOILERS. The Report is very-well written, but I'm confused. The author asserts her work is fiction, so I'm assuming the Barbers and Mrs W. and Baby Saul/Paul don't really exist. Why does this fiction book turn the Bethnal Green tragedy into an antisemitic incident, the result of Ada Barber pushing and then trampling over the Jewish refugee woman on the tube-station steps? I recently watched a YouTube documentary that blames the noisy weapons testing in nearby Victoria Park for the panic which caused the crush in the tube station. Witnesses in the video testified to the horrendous noise and lights which they assumed were German retaliation for a recent air raid on Berlin. The novel acknowledges the Victoria Park testing but doesn't present it as a cause of the crush, as there was no generalized panic on the night of March 3, 1943, in Bethnal Green. The novel presents Dunne (the report-writer who learned about Ada's actions on the night of the incident from Ada's young daughter, Tillie) as deciding not to write about 'the true cause of the incident' in the report so as to avoid the creation of bad feelings amongst the survivors. But grown Paul asks the question, "What would you have done if the situation were reversed, if the Jewish woman had pushed a gentile woman, thereby initiating the tragedy?" The Report presents an interesting premise (as "anti-refugee feelings" did exist at the time) but why create a version of events like this if it has no basis in fact? I want to see antisemitism uncovered where it does exist, but why bring it into an historical event if it didn't play a part?