Far to Go

“I wish this were a happy story”, this tale begins. It’s a good warning. This is the tale of the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Nazis in early WW2. Patel and Annaliese Bauer, their son Pepik, and nanny Marta are all shown adapting or not to the creeping evil that washes over their country- the gradually increasing restrictions, the enclosing sense of panic, the compromises one and all make- including the narrator of this story.
It is so well done! Though most of the characters were unsympathetic, I could not help but feel for them all, tied as they were to a doom so all-encompassing.
Throughout the book there are excerpts from the family letters, unfailingly ended with a postscript of their name, date of death, camp where show more killed.
I have been aware of the tragedy of Ww2 all of my life, I even lived in Germany for some time and was vaguely revolted by the way the fruit trees were so fertile (all that blood meal?). But this story affected me quite strongly and it is for that reason I highly recommend it. It is far too easy as time goes on to forget the inhumanity that occurred (and to be fair, is still occurring, with different victims and perpetrators). Sometimes a good story brings it all back, reminds us of how close we dance to a similar situation as fascism returns, as prejudice creates violence, as we watch it go by without comment. This story is a good, involving, and thought-provoking slap upside the head.
The ending has surprises but it will be the characters that pull you on.
Definitely worth a read. show less

What happens in Prague is the heart of the story, which I won’t tell you about in fear of spoiling it for you, and this book suddenly turns into a constant thriller. To say that this book is a page-turner is the understatement of the year. I was up all night reading this book in one night, sick with worry, grieving for characters and the fate I was expecting them to have. Not even I could imagine what was going to happen to them next, and I fancy myself a great predictor of books and movies. Prepare to be terrified, and arm yourself with plenty of tissues, because this book takes you everywhere. Far to Go should be read by anyone who enjoys not only historical fiction, but good books in general, as Pick really knows how to tell a story.

I chose to read this book because it was long-listed for the Booker Prize this year.

It was with some misgiving that I began reading. Here are my shameful thoughts presented to you in all honesty..."Not another book about the Holocaust...How many do I have to read?" My Jiminy Cricket conscience tells me - "Never enough". After all, I only have to read the stories, don't I? And perhaps it might be a good idea to tell them to my children - even though they are well beyond bedtime stories. And this is not the stuff of bedtime stories.

Do you wonder, as I do, how memories/history will change once our slim connection with the past evaporates? As the generation before you dies and you are pushed to the front line? What orders should you give ? show more What philosophy should you bequeath to the next generation? My children perceive me as ancient, of course. The way I perceived my mother as ancient. The 1940s to my young eyes were so funny and old-fashioned in terms of dress and hopelessly romantic love songs (think "We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when"). And yet they were only 30 years ago when I was a teenager. Now my kids are close to 20. It's hard to imagine that they must see the 1970s as funny and old fashioned. What must they think of WWII and the Nazi atrocities? It must seem very far away and hard to believe.

And so, yes. Reading Far to Go wasn't easy - and yes, to a degree, we all know how it will end. But I didn't know about the Kindertransport. So it is a story from a different angle. And the angle is further fractured and complicated by the author's own connection to the tragedy which she chooses to present at this point in time in a fictionalised form.

It is a story about making difficult decisions. About trying to read "history" as it happens. About deciding what to pack. About sacrifice.

It is ultimately a story about identity. And what is identity but a jumbled up mass of stories that people have told you about yourself or you have told you about yourself. What if someone questions your identity? What if your identity becomes dangerous to own? What if you thought you were something and then you are told years later that in fact you are something else? How does that change you? Which bit of you is real?

It is a good story. And one that leaves many questions. The best kind really. show less

This novel treads familiar ground: the fate of a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia with the dismemberment of the state in 1939 following the Munich Agreement and the eventual occupation of Prague, followed by the relentless Aryanization of society with restrictions increasingly placed on personal, professional, academic lives of Jews, the loss of friends and businesses, the personal degradations and even murder on the streets, the increasing isolation; and it ties in the heart-breaking but life-saving Kindertransport that took thousands of Jewish children to safety in Britain and beyond. Pick tells the story largely through the eyes and thoughts of Marta, a nanny-housekeeper to Pavel and Anneliese Bauer and their son Pepik, non-observant show more Jews who consider themselves completely assimilated, although Pavel starts to feel the tug of his Jewish roots as his world compresses.

At first, with the surrender of Sudentenland, some Jews take flight, but Pavel is determined to stay. He owns a textile factory and while Anneliese says that she feels, “Like a rabbit in a hole”, Pavel clings to the belief that he only has to make himself “indispensable” to survive, a mistaken calculation that thousands of others were to make all across Europe because they did not understand that “indispensability” was, at best, a temporary reprieve; in the end, economic calculations did not outweigh racial policy. The net closes tighter around the family until finally they try to escape, but they are betrayed and turned back at the French border.

The story is told largely through the eyes of Marta, the nanny, but the perspective shifts with interludes of first-person narration by an academic who specializes in testimony of Holocaust survivors, especially those from the Kindertransport, and we gradually learn of a closer connection between this woman and the Bauer family. It is, as I said, an oft-told story, but what gives this novel its strength is that it is made quite clear from the beginning that there is no happy ending, that the Bauers will have their lives disrupted and betrayed and destroyed. It is a novel about the evil that can be done by omission as much as sins of commission, about slights perceived where none were intended and revenged with terrible consequences. It is about losing moral compass and committing desperate acts to survive. It is about the inherent instability of life and that the only thing that can be truly counted on is change. It is also about the impossibility of ever truly understanding or knowing the past, of ever finding a true causality in events because those causalities, those linkages are undecipherable in the past, even more so than the present. As Pick puts it:

“…the train of memory starts to move forward. Slowly at first, but gathering speed. The landscape drifts by like the last wisps of a dream. In the early morning hours the train begins to move into the opposite of memory. Into a future time when someone will look back at us now, wondering what our days were like and why we did the things we did. Or why we did not act, as the case might equally be. Someone will be unable to make our lives make sense. The train has no answers, only forward momentum. We open our eyes. It is moving very quickly now. Moving always ahead. It never arrives. “ (September, 2010) show less

I must say, the UK cover of this book tells the story in a glance. I believe that's the first thing I noticed.

Novels about the Holocaust are nothing new, and I got to a point some time ago where I just quit reading them. Although it is an essential time that should remain as a period to never forget, at some point I got to where a) I felt saturated, having seen many of the same content and literary conventions reappearing again and again and b) I just had to turn away from the emotional toll some of these books brought on. I do have a few on my tbr shelf yet to read (Austerlitz and Panorama to name a couple), but in general I don't make this type of literature my first choice of reading material. Truthfully, had this book not been on show more the Booker Prize longlist this year I probably would never have picked it up, and as it turns out, that would have been a crying shame. Although it has many of the same elements from other Holocaust literature, there are some fundamental differences I didn't expect in Far to Go that set it apart.

Far to Go alternates between two times and two places: Czechoslovakia on the eve of and during the Nazi invasion and occupation, and modern Montreal. In Czechoslovakia, we meet the Bauer family, an ordinary upper middle-class family, living a normal life: Pavel, Annaliese and their young son Pepik, who is watched over by his nanny Marta. Pavel owns a textiles factory that allows his family to live well. Annaliese, who grew up in Prague, wears the most current fashions, sports "large Greta Garbo sunglasses and fresh red lipstick," and falls well into her social role as wife of a wealthy industrialist. Annaliese has had some tragedy in her life: she lost her baby daughter when she was only three weeks old. It was Marta who took care of her afterwards, and who takes on most of Pepik's upbringing as well. The fact that the family is Jewish isn't a major factor in their lives -- Pavel's self identity is more tied up in his love for his country and pride in his forbears.

But the Nazis begin to roll into Czechoslovakia. As they hear about and witness events by Nazi soldiers and ordinary people being caught up in the anti-Jewish rhetoric, and as the factory is taken over, Annaliese realizes that her family may not be so safe, and begins to try to convince Pavel that it's time to leave. Marta, who is not Jewish, is involved in a secret affair with Ernst, a married man, Pavel's foreman, and good friend to the Bauers. As the Nazis begin to get closer to home, she begins to sense a strange shift in him, one that runs contrary to the Ernst she thinks she knows.

While up to this point the novel employs several familiar components of other Holocaust literature, Pick intersperses a modern-day character in between the ongoing story of the Bauers that keeps this book from becoming like so many others. In Montreal, a woman named Lisa is busy pursuing her life's work, the collection and documentation of stories told by those who escaped the Holocaust as young children thanks to the Kindertransport program. As the Kindertransport Association website notes, this effort began after

"... the atrocities in Germany and Austria, the untiring persistence of the refuge advocates, and philosemitic sympathy in some high places – in the words of British Foreign Minister Samuel Hoare “Here is a chance of taking the young generation of a great people, here is a chance of mitigating to some extend the terrible suffering of their parents and their friends” – swayed the government to permit an unspecified number of children under the age of 17 to enter the United Kingdom. It was agreed to admit the children on temporary travel documents, with the idea that they would rejoin their parents when the crisis was over. A fifty Pound Sterling bond had to be posted for each child “to assure their ultimate resettlement.” The children were to travel in sealed trains. The first transport left on December 1, 1938, less than one month after Kristallnacht; the last left on September 1, 1939—just two days before Great Britain's entry into the war, which marked the end of the program. By that time, approximately 10,000 children had made the trip."

Part of Lisa's work involves letters sent to these children and to those who took them in by the parents left behind; the book actually opens with one of these that will immediately draw in the reader to find out more, and more letters and stories are scattered throughout the novel that could tell the story in their own right.

Lisa explains that the Kindertransport story is filled with ambiguities: while she's found many examples of things having worked out for these relocated children, the bulk of the stories are "cases of trauma and upset." Many of the children arrived speaking no English, to poor families, and have had "everything solid ... pulled out from under them." The addition of this researcher, who admittedly can't always "frame the world in objective terms," as academics are supposed to, and the Kindertransport at the heart of this novel, provides the novel with an added dimension. These elements set it apart from the more conventional aspects of the Bauer family story, as does the novel's end.

Far to Go is a wonderful book. What I appreciated most about this novel was not so much the story itself, but something else that may not seem so obvious as you're reading through it. I came away with this feeling that the book works so well because Alison Pick chose a subject that is important to her, and that although she's going to make some money on this book, in many ways it rises above the simply commercial. While she wants her readers to connect with their feelings about the Holocaust, there's so much more here than just riding the wave of emotions you feel about that time period to get you through the novel. I may get torched for saying this (and flame away), but sometimes I've spotted this approach in a few books set during the Holocaust. There is a real story at work here -- how the Kindertransport affected those who made it out, those who were left behind, and those who made room for these children in their homes. There are, of course, also the events leading up to the need for its creation. I don't mean to imply that Far to Go is at all clinical in the telling, because the opposite is true -- unless you're cold and unfeeling, the novel will unavoidably tug at your emotional heartstrings. I've often noticed that sometimes the best writing happens when an author is passionate about what he/she writes, and that is definitely the case here.

So go get a box of tissues and have nothing else planned while you're reading this book. You will not want to put it down. show less

So, thought you’ve read every tragic tale to come out of the Holocaust? Think again.
Alison Pick’s story, a mixture of fiction and pieced together truths, takes us into the heart-breaking, emotional mine field of Kindertransport, Czechoslovakia; an attempt at saving the young and innocent from Nazi death camps.

As Jewish businessman Pavel Bauer and his wife Anneliese become aware of Hitler’s intentions for their country, the need to remove their six year old son Pepik from increasing persecution and danger becomes imperative and very risky. The Bauer’s first cautious effort fails and it is at this point that the story began in earnest to capture my attention.

Pepik’s nanny Marta, a Christian and loved family member is a show more frustrating character in many ways. Caught up in the turmoil, she finds herself struggling with moral decisions she is far from capable of and unfortunately readers are side tracked into her self-centered world.

Pick’s tale is no more harrowing than many Holocaust stories, and early on suffers from a bad case of analogyitis, but Pepik’s journey from family security to the terror of something unknown is enough to carry this book to its surprising conclusion, and highlights once again the many wrongs that were never made right in WWII.

The fact that this story has some truth and documentation is a powerful plus and overall Pick has done an admirable job in the telling. show less

Far to Go is written by a Canadian writer , who based her book on her grandparents escape from Czechoslovakia during the second World War.Alison Pick, the author, not only based her book on her grandparents' experiences, but also has done quite a bit of research on the topic of Czechoslavakia during WW11, and also on Kindertransport.

Far to Go by Alison Pick is quite broad in scope, covering the time period leading up to WW11 and also the early days of WW11 in Czechoslovakia . She covers the topic of Kindertransport . Kindertransport, which I'd not been aware of before reading this book, was a rescue mission that took place about 9 months before the outbreak of WW11. The Kindertransport mission involved the transport of about 10,000 show more children from Nazi Germany, Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia to the UK, where the young children were placed with UK foster homes, hostels, and farms. The vast majority of children survived the Kindertransport , but few of the children were reunited with their parents after WW11, because the vast majority of the parents were killed during WW11.

Anyway, although Far To Go involves the topic of Kindertransport , as well as getting into modern day feelings of one child who was a part of Kindertransport effort, the story tells so much more.

Although relatively broad in scope - it's also a very personal story, focusing on one family, a relatively secular Jewish family in Czechoslovakia in 1939. Annelise and Pavel Bauer are a fairly affluent young couple , with one child, Joseph, or " Pepik" as he is nicknamed , and they employ a non - Jewish nanny named Marta Mueller.

It was so interesting to read about the personal reactions of each of these people as war threatened. One of the members of the family is nearly ready to denounce the Jewish Religion - another embraces the traditions and Jewish Religion more strongly then ever in the face of the war on the Jewish. The denial or lack of denial as to what is happening in Czechoslovakia is also very interesting as it varies from person to person. The impact the of threatened war on the marriage is very realistic and the reaction of the young child to all of what is happening is also explored. Marta, the nanny, is both an observer and participant to all of what is happening. I found it to be a eye opening and insightful reading. It was a sad truth to see the Bauer family deceived by close friends who were a part of the Nazi movement.

I did not find the use of a present tense narrator along with the events taking place in 1939 to be confusing at all. In fact it added an element of both mystery and eventual enlightenment.

This is a wonderfully written, engaging story from which I learned much about Czechoslovakia during WW11 . I found it to be a real page turner - such is the mystery of what will happen next. I found myself very involved with the family making choices and suffering during pre WW11. None of the characters are perfect , but all are sympathetic to some degree.

All in all - a wonderful read. 4stars. Far To Go is Long Listed for the 2011 Man Booker prize . show less