The timing of the Broadway production of Sanaz Toossi’s English couldn’t be better. While the Trump administration dehumanizes and deports immigrants, English, which won a Pulitzer Prize, uses immersive storytelling and a winning cast to tell their stories. The audience joins a group of Iranian students in a classroom outside of Tehran as they’re struggling to learn English, pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language for various, sometimes-pressing reasons, and begin the immigrant’s journey. We see the effects of adapting to a new place (“You go years without making anyone laugh”) and speaking an unfamiliar language (“I sound like idiot,” says the student. “‘I sound like an idiot,’” corrects the teacher). The Indie editors’ picks below capture the drama of people leaving their homelands in search of something better.
In her memoir, The Strength of Water, Asian American author Karin K. Jensen charts, via her mother’s voice, how her family came to the San Francisco Bay Area from China’s Tai Ting Pong village. She traces their meandering route, from a full but poor life in their home village to San Francisco’s busy Chinatown, and shows how the family’s different generations adapted to life in the U.S. Our reviewer says, “Jensen relates all of this in richly evocative writing that sometimes achieves a plangent poetry. (‘A man’s wife was his property.…After each beating, Auntie would cry great sobs. Then she would be quiet for a while, and then she would gather herself to continue the day’s business.’) The result is an engrossing read that brings to life both the strength and adaptability of its subject and the wrenching changes she endured.”
When author Leah Lax came out as a lesbian while living as an Orthodox Jew, she was exiled and left with few resources to begin again. “I became an immigrant in my own country,” she writes, “blindsided with the acute desire of an outsider.” The experience led her to collect others’ stories of leaving and arriving in Not From Here: The Song of America. She captures a multitude of immigrants’ voices and experiences, from the brutal to the uplifting. “Lax almost always finds a note of hope in the stories she tells,” notes our reviewer. “‘This is a city of immigrants,’ a transplanted Brahmin Indian tells her. ‘Everywhere I look, I see someone from somewhere else. That, I think, is what makes this country great.’ In a time of political polarization on the subject of immigration, this book makes space for a much-needed deep breath.”
Erika Reich Giles recounts in her memoir, Becoming Hungarian, that in the mid-20th century, her family owned and ran a thriving factory in Szombathely, Hungary. In 1948, the Soviet-backed communists took the Reichs’ factory, leaving them jobless. A perilous escape to Austria ensued, and the family eventually joined a community of Hungarian refugees in Billings, Montana. “Especially during a time when immigration has become such a contentious political issue, this is an edifying remembrance, one that tenderly and intimately reminds the reader of the human stakes,” notes our reviewer. “A stirring account of the author’s search for identity amid dislocation.”
Chaya Schechner is the president of Kirkus Indie.
