The Summer My Father Died

M. M. Tawfik candygirl American University in Cairo Press In a novel he translated personally from Arabic to English, Tawfik situates the elements of American interventionism, intellectual identity, and Internet culture within the complex panorama of urban Cairo. An Egyptian scientist known as “the Cerebellum,” formerly of the Iraqi nuclear program, evades a renegade NSA agent while pursuing a virtual love affair with a seductive online avatar. Netica Symonette A Girl Called Nettie Dunham Books This autobiography tells the story of Netica “Nettie” Symonette’s ascent from humble beginnings toward a foundational role in the tourism industry of the Bahamas. She recounts her life with great detail in downto -earth language that contextualizes her simple determination. Symonette expresses patriotism and pride in her accomplishments as a Bahamian woman, always with an appealing sense of humility. July–August 2013 • 77 Nota Bene in this work. An imagined catastrophe resulting from explosions of beautifully designed German products plugged into many American kitchen outlets leaves us with no doubt about the narrator’s fears. Nor is there doubt about her sense of humor. A meditation on procrastination cites Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu and then has her wandering the apartment only to land in front of the refrigerator peering into a container thinking, “A la recherche des sardines perdus.” Katin wears her learning lightly, and in both word and image she conveys humor while revealing buried and not-so-buried fears. There is also a fascinating shift in perspective embedded in the movement of her tale. One moment she tells her son that the ground of Germany is soaked with the blood of Jews after he tells her that Berlin is where art is happening; the next she goes to visit her mother, with whom she still speaks Hungarian, and is told by her that Ilan is just like her, running and never caring who is left behind. These shifts in perspective are remarkably fluid, made more so by the fact that there are no frames to these illustrations. A page of drawings swings from an interior thought to a conversation to a dream, from a ground view to an aerial, and from present to past. Yet so compelling is Katin’s narrative that the reader is fully engaged and never set adrift. There is horror here, to be sure. On her first visit to see Ilan in Berlin, where he is living with his non-Jewish Swedish girlfriend, Miriam struggles between the comfort of modern Germany and the ghosts of the past. In fact, every time she spends a night in a German hotel, her body rebels in rather graphic ways. Making peace with the past and reconciling memory with current reality is at the heart of Letting It Go. After traveling the difficult journey with Miriam, the reader is much richer for the experience and has an equally hard time letting it go. Katin’s remarkable work gets under the skin. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Yudit Kiss. The Summer My Father Died. George Szirtes, tr. London. Telegram. 2012. 268 pages. isbn 9781846590948 Yudit Kiss (born Judith Holló) is a Hungarian-born economist based in Geneva. She grew up in Budapest during the decades known as the “Kádár Era,” named after Communist Party leader János Kádár, who experimented with the pseudo-consumerist one-party system known as “goulash Communism.” The Summer My Father Died is a colorful chronicle of her attachment to and conflicts with her father, a staunch Jewishmemberofthe CommunistPartyandardentbelieverin the future of Marxist-Leninism. Having read memoirs of people who resisted totalitarian governments in either their Nazi or Soviet edition, it is educational to learn something about the life and problems of a person born into a family that was among the prime benificiaries of the Communist regime. Yudit’s father, who had suffered persecution as a Jew during World War II, nurtured the belief that the new society managed to destroy old prejudices by creating equal conditions for all its citizens and, at the same time, for many years enjoyed the privileges of a party functionary. For him and his family, the Hungarian 78 worldliteraturetoday.org reviews uprising of

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