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A review by introvertsbookclub
Homelands: The History of a Friendship by Chitra Ramaswamy
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