Smuggled: A Novel

SMUGGLED is an historical novel set in Eastern Europe between 1943 and 1991. Eva Farkes is a young Jewish girl caught in Hungary, when her parents decide to hide her in a flour sack and send her over the boarder to relatives in Rumania. Once there, she acquires a new identity, Anca Balaj, and is forced to forget her parents. She is only five years old.I have read other books from this depressing era, and found it hard to keep going. But somehow, author Christina Shea made me keep my nose to the page as I followed Anca grow up, engage in unhappy love affairs, lose a child and all the other painful things that life flings at us. This is especially true if one was unfortunate enough to be living in Communist Eastern Europe. Anca gradually sees her adopted country Rumania grow poorer and poorer, until one day, the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu is deposed and executed. Anca loses no time in packing up her few belongings and heading back to Hungary, where she becomes Eva Farkes once more.The rest of the story I will leave for you to discover. Suffice it to say that Ms. Shea has written a compelling narrative that is so compelling because almost everything is filtered through the viewpoint of this woman who never loses hope, and whose stoic courage keeps you turning the pages. Five stars.

Eva Farkas had a tough life. During Second World War at age five she was smuggled out of Hungary to Romania in a flour sack. In Romania she was forced to get the new false identity of Anca Balaj and leave everything about Eva Farkas behind. She was supposed to live with her paternal aunt and her husband for a couple of months, until her parents came for her, but they never came, her mother was capture in Hungary and later died in the train that was transporting her to a concentration camp and her father killed himself.Now Anca/Eva has a new identity, new language, new country, new culture and a new family. She grew up with her aunt and uncle as normal as was possible under her circumstances and the circumstances of the time. Anca learned that she had to study very hard to become somebody in a communist country. She excelled in school and was selected to go to the university and from there on she tried to do her best with what she was given in life, good or bad without matter. But Anca always felt as an intruder in a country that wasn't hers, always worrying that somebody would find out of her illegal documents or even worst discover that she was a Jew passing as Christian.Smuggled was my first book by Christina Shea. I really didn't know what to expect from it and to be honest I wasn't expecting to like it as much as I did.We met Eva/Anca as a very young child in the early 1940s and see her grow page by page until she is a woman of 50 in the 1990s. I liked that Eva/Anca really felt like child when she was one. Her behavior and reasoning was the expected from a young girl, and when the years start to pass and Eva/Anca is growing we see the normal changes time has on a person, her personality evolves and adapts making the changes felt real and believable.Eva/Anca has lived through so many difficult situations. When you think life is settling for her, something happens and changes her life drastically, this happens more than once. She just experiences glimpses of happiness throughout her life. Eva/Anca is living during tough times, the Romania after Second World War is no a nice place to be. The communism under the regime of Nicolae Ceau'escu was one of the worst in the whole world and she lived through those times.Eva/Anca was always looking for that place call home; even though she has been "the Romanian Anca" for the majority of her life she was never able to really grasp that identity, she felt she didn't belonged anywhere and after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 she seizes the opportunity to return to Hungary to discover her roots.I loved her amazement when entering Hungary, how she finds everything so enticing and new. Through her eyes I could feel her awe at discovering new things. Simple things for us now days as pavement roads, bananas or a purse with the coke brand imprinted on it, but for her, a refugee who lived all her life in a impoverished communist country all those new things are magical and alluring.The secondary characters are shadows compare to her, they came to her life for a reason, sometimes good ones sometimes not so much. Their interactions made her the woman she becomes, but none of them really shines in the story, even tough I would have liked to learn more about what happened to some of them in the future.I had a little problem with the pace, sometimes "years" drag a long for a while, when others flew with barely a mention. It also took me a little bit to get into it, this was because at the beginning the book is told from different points of view but sometimes it was not easy to differentiate when there was a change and I was seeing a new character's POV. This may be because I read an ARC and the final book is edited better... I hope that is the case.I really like Smuggled, notwithstanding that the end is a satisfying one this is not a nice book, definitely not one of those love in the clouds books, is harsh and real, set in times that make me feel glad and lucky I was born when and where I was born. Wars are not pretty and seeing all the "side effects" a war has on a society years after is finished would make you been thankful for your current life.I recommend Smuggled to readers with interest in historical fiction and adult fiction. I hope to read more books by Christina Shea.

Eva Fakas is five years old when her parents smuggle her out of Hungary to live with her aunt and uncle in Romania. She is renamed Anca Balaj and must start life again. This her story as she grows up, eventually returning to Hungary and becoming Eva again.This is a book about survival. It is a tragic look at life post-WWII in a country that was immensely impacted. Having no first-hand, and barely any second-hand experience with war, I found the descriptions depressing. I couldn't imagine living through it, and I marvel at everyone who did.Eva/Anca was a strong woman who struggled to be herself in a life that was created. The descriptions of her life was a child were my favourite sections. They felt the most powerful and real. I found that as she aged, I became more and more removed from the story.At one point, Eva/Anca remarked that she didn't really like her friend because he was a changeling, changing to survive whatever situation he found himself in. I found this hypocritical. Eva/Anca did the exact same thing everytime her situation changed; she adapted to survive in the least damaging way. I think it was at this point that I began to dislike Eva/Anca. By the end, I knew I didn't like her, but the story is so emotional and tragic, that I feel guilty for that. The story demands that I pity and like her, and I just don't.This story is not for the faint of heart. Life in Hungary and Romania is hard and many unhappy events occur. I don't want to give examples because I don't want to give away anything that happens, but I will say that whenever someone could take advantage of a situation, it seemed like they did.

At the age of five, half-Jewish Eva Farkas is smuggled out of Hungary as the country descends into Fascism in the later stages of World War II. Her father - who is not married to her Jewish mother - sends her over the border to Romania to live with his sister and her husband on a farm. There she acquires a new identity as 'Anca', and has a somewhat loveless childhood and adolescence. Going to university appears to promise freedom, but as Communism tightens its hold on Romania Anca/Eva's life becomes increasingly fraught with problems, and full of disappointments. Only after the fall of the Iron Curtain, when she returns to Hungary as a fifty-year-old woman, does she get a chance of happiness.I should have loved this book: I'm fascinated by World War II, Central European politics and what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. And factually there's plenty of interest. The trouble is that Shea doesn't (on the evidence of this book) have much of a storytelling gift. Her characters are simply not very interesting. Eva/Anca goes from being a loudmouthed and rather irritating child, who seems oblivious of the situation around her, to a sullen, unsmiling adult who appears to feel very little for anyone else. One does feel sorry for her, because of the way she is constantly exploited by men, but she's not an easy character to sympathise with until the book's final part. And here her sudden transformation into a loving, maternal figure doesn't really convince, bearing in mind how we've seen her so far. The other characters are poorly realized, the women all oppressed, the men all sexual opportunists, usually with dodgy politics, apart from American Martin in the final scenes. I don't think there's a single really interesting character in the entire book.There are other problems too. Shea tries to cover too much history too quickly, rushing the reader from one era to another. Anyone reading this who doesn't already know a lot about Central European politics from 1940 onwards would get very confused. The many unpleasant sex scenes may highlight how women suffered under Communism, but they get horribly repetitive. I'm getting a little tired of American novels about World War II and Communism that end with an American man arriving - like Bacchus to Ariadne - to set everything to rights. Here the ending feels too sweet and too contrived compared to the grimness that precedes it.Above all, this book is singularly joyless. True, life behind the Iron Curtain was pretty awful for many people. But, as Slavenka Drakulic (admittedly a Croatian) noted in a book title, people did manage to not only survive Communism - but even to laugh. There's no laughter in this book, precious little tenderness until the arrival of Martin and very little friendship or delight. I'll give this novel three stars for the sheer diligence of the research - but it felt to me something of a joyless slog, and I was glad when it was over.