Bookish Mewsings: The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende, translated by Francis Riddle

Narrated by Edoardo Ballerini and Maria Liatis

Fiction/Historical, 2023; 304 pgs/8hrs

Source: Own TBR

This powerful and moving novel from the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea weaves together past and present, tracing the ripple effects of war and immigration on one child in Europe in 1938 and another in the United States in 2019.

Vienna, 1938. Samuel Adler was six years old when his father disappeared during Kristallnacht—the night their family lost everything. Samuel’s mother secured a spot for him on the last Kindertransport train out of Nazi-occupied Austria to the United Kingdom, which he boarded alone, carrying nothing but a change of clothes and his violin.

Arizona, 2019. Eight decades later, Anita Diaz, a blind seven-year-old girl, and her mother board another train, fleeing looming danger in El Salvador and seeking refuge in the United States. However, their arrival coincides with the new family separation policy, and Anita finds herself alone at a camp in Nogales. She escapes through her trips to Azabahar, a magical world of the imagination she created with her sister back home.

Anita’s case is assigned to Selena Duran, a young social worker who enlists the help of a promising lawyer from one of San Francisco’s top law firms. Together they discover that Anita has another family member in the United States: Leticia Cordero, who is employed at the home of now eighty-six-year-old Samuel Adler, linking these two lives.

Spanning time and place, The Wind Knows My Name is both a testament to the sacrifices that parents make and a love letter to the children who survive the most unfathomable dangers—and never stop dreaming. [From the Publisher]

When I finished The Wind Knows My Name, I felt so many things. I had so many thoughts. And I am having a hard time putting any of them in writing. I was glad it was a book club pick because I needed to debrief afterward, and we had a really good discussion about the many themes in the novel, including forced displacement and separation of parents from their children, sacrifice, trauma, loss, and healing. We discussed the parallels throughout history up to today, including the role U.S. politics and policies have played in much of it.

Isabel Allende is a beautiful writer and has a way of creating characters that get under your skin and bringing settings and events to life. Is that not what fiction is supposed to do though? She does it so effectively. That first chapter, the lead up to and the events of the infamous Kristallnacht in Vienna 1938 was harrowing with the amount of violence and destruction, the hate and fear. Allende's descriptions of the political events leading up to that night played a part in that, I am sure. Hitler's rise, rhetoric, propaganda, and the ease with which he had walked into Austria and took it over helped pave the way and set the tone for what was to come. How easily those who committed the violence turned on their neighbors. We would like to believe that would not happen today, but the truth is it very will could. 

Allende writes about the El Mozote Massacre in El Salvador in 1981, in which farmers and villagers, among them women and children, were rounded up to be tortured and murdered all under the guise of a military act of rooting out leftist guerillas. Over 800 people killed, over half of them children. Allende's fictional character Leticia was fortunate. She was not there at the time her family was slaughtered. Her father was able to get her out of the country and they fled to the United States. Decades later, seven year old Anita and her mother would make their way to the United States from El Salvador, fleeing their own horrors. 

Isabel Allende weaves these three stories together seamlessly, their lives intersecting at just the right moments. Although each of their experiences are different, there are also many parallels among their narratives, especially that of Samuel and Anita. Samuel was forced onto the Kindertransport, leaving his mother behind, just as Anita was separated from her mother at the border, not knowing what happened to her. Samuel and Anita were young children, alone in foreign countries, not knowing the language, and forced to live in questionable, sometimes horrible conditions. Allende paints a very realistic view of what life was like for children in Samuel and Anita's shoes. The abuses they suffered are all too real. Anita has the added struggle of being blind, making her even more vulnerable. The interactions between Anita and Samuel were among my favorite scenes in the book. Anita was such a great character. She reminded me a bit of Anne Frank in her outlook on the world--both young girls, still hopeful despite everything going on in their lives. 

Of all the characters, I think Leticia was among my favorites. She went through so much in her own right, but at times she seems the most grounded later on in the novel. She was an anchor for the aging Samuel, there for him during the pandemic, and he was there for her when Anita came into their lives. I also really liked the social worker, Selena, whose determination and heart knew no limits. I was less enamored by the attorney, Frank, although he did grow on me after awhile. Then there was Nadene, Samuel's wife, who at times seemed larger than life. Nadene was such an interesting character. She and Samuel are almost polar opposites. She was so full of life while he spent much of his life quiet and unassuming. I loved how Allende ties all the characters together, sometimes in unexpected ways.

The Wind Knows My Name brings the refugee experience front and center, making it more personal through the eyes of her characters. This is a subject close to the author's heart, as she knows all too well what life is like being forced to flee your home country and try to acclimate and be accepted in a new one. As much as this is a novel of tragedy and loss, it is also one of endurance, hope, healing and found family.

I read and listened to this novel at different intervals. Edourdo Ballerini narrates the majority of the novel with occasional narration by Maria Liatis as the character of Anita woven through. The narrators did a good job of making me feel like I was right there in the novel.

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