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ksoles
Mar 26, 2012ksoles rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
“No One is Here Except All of Us’’ opens in 1939 in the isolated Romanian outpost of Zalischik, where nine families, apprised of the war soon to envelop them, decide to reinvent the world. But, as the 11-year-old narrator, Lena, points out, “[l]iving in the new world would not turn out to be that different from living in the old one.’’ Thus, the reinvention ultimately becomes an indulgent game of make-believe. Ausubel certainly has a striking eye for detail and writes in luminous prose but her characters often behave in ways that are psychologically dubious. Spirited and intelligent Lena, for example, goes willingly when her parents give her away to a childless aunt and uncle and complies when her aunt insists she behave like an infant. She later marries a callow boy incapable of shouldering adult responsibility. When the war finally invades Zalischik, Ausubel captures the ensuing chaos with piercing lucidity. The narrative then splinters: Lena's husband ends up lazing around Sardinia while Lena herself flees from the village and starves with her two sons as they wander forests and farmland. Eventually, through another betrayal of character, Lena seeks out a second new world in America. On her passage, a fellow Jew informs her that Hitler has killed himself, the camps have been liberated, the war is over. “ ‘I don’t know what those things are," she admits.Here, Ausubel powerfully proves that Lena is a refugee not just from her family and home, but from the larger calamity of history itself. As a stylist, Ausubel astounds readers with her ambitious nod both to her family history and to the rich tradition of Jewish fabulists. But her most affecting prose comes not in flights of imagination, but in those passages when her characters confront the crushing power of the real.