Smuggled
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The harrowing yet hopeful life story of a Jewish girl’s escape from Nazis, growing up under communist oppression, and finally reclaiming her true identity.
In a narrative sweeping from WWII rural Romania to 1990s cosmopolitan Budapest, Christina Shea’s Smuggled tells the story of Eva Farkas, who loses her identity at five years old when she is spirited across the Hungarian border in a flour sack to escape the Nazis.
When Eva arrives in Romania, her aunt and uncle greet her with a startling proclamation: “Eva is dead.” Her new name is Anca Balaj and she must never speak another word of Hungarian. Living with a dangerous secret under Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romanian Communist Party, Anca meets others who are forced into hiding—an abortion doctor, a homosexual, another secret Jew. But when the Iron Curtain falls, Anca reclaims the name her mother gave her. She finally returns to Hungary, a country changing as fast as the price of bread, where her lifelong search for family and identity comes full circle.
An intimate look at the effects of history on an individual life, Smuggled is a raw and fearless account of transformation, and a viscerally reflective tale about the basic need for love without claims.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shea's second novel (after Moira's Crossing) begins strongly enough in 1943, when precocious five-year-old va is smuggled out of Hungary. To save va's life, her Jewish mother and gentile father drug her, tie her into a flour sack, and ship her by train to Romania. There, her father's sister takes her in, rechristening her Anca Balaj and speaking to her only in Romanian. Shea then forces Anca into situations to make political points about Ceausescu, communism, loyalty, and brutality. The once-willful child becomes a passive adult, and the story charges ahead, dragging her along with it. Emphasizing va/Anca's role as a victim is a carousel of unsavory lovers, including an abusive coach who breaks her jaw and a concentration camp survivor who supplements his dentist's income with "post-mortem extractions" of golden teeth. Though Shea writes vividly and has clearly done her homework, the story serves history better than fiction. va's eventual return to Hungary is marked by overwrought imagery and labored plotting, the opposite of what is needed: a glimpse into this woman's soul.