Smuggled by Christina Shea

Published by Black Cat (a paperback imprint of Grove/Atlantic) on July 5, 2011

In 1943, five-year-old Éva Farkas is hidden in a sack of flour and smuggled by train across the Hungarian border. From there Éva is transported to a Romanian village that was once part of Hungary. Her father's sister, Kati, has agreed to keep her. Éva's mother is Jewish but the village has already been searched so Kati believes Éva will be safe. Kati gives Éva a new identity -- Anca Balaj, the fictitious niece of Kati's husband Ilie -- and tells Éva she is now a Romanian and must never again speak Hungarian. All of this is a dramatic and unwelcome change for Éva, who misses her mother, thinks her new name sounds like glass breaking, and lies in bed "feeling helpless against the invading Romanian." When Éva protests that she is Éva, not Anca, Ilie tells her that "Éva is dead."

So begins Éva's story, a story that is in some respects familiar and in others remarkably fresh. It is a bleak story that is both political and personal, a story that for much of the novel is dominated by isolation and oppression. While it takes place in a part of the world that changes repeatedly during the course of a lifetime, the story derives its power from the impact those changes have on a single person.

In 1947, after Romania falls under Soviet control, Éva secretly befriends a Gypsy boy but loses her friend when his family is driven out of the country. In the early 1950s, Soviet domination and fear of informants join racial and religious intolerance as the defining characteristics of Éva's environment, although growing discord between her aunt and uncle has a more immediate impact on her life. In the late 1950s, Éva feels oppressed by the Jewish members of the Communist League who interrogate her about her relationship with a childhood friend from Hungary. In the 1960s, Éva enters into a troubled relationship with a man she comes to view as a changeling because of the ease with which he transforms himself from passionate communist to passionate Zionist. In the 1970s, after she marries for convenience, she loses her place as a top tournament ping pong player after her husband defects.

With good reason, Éva often feels that her existence is precarious. She learns that it is unwise to trust others, no matter how similar their lives seem to her own. Smuggled illustrates how easily the oppressed can become oppressors, how quickly the informed upon can become informants. At various times during her life Éva endures beatings and sexual abuse. She makes compromises that are necessary to her welfare. Death and abandonment are constants in her life. In 1991, having survived fascism and communism, she feels worn out. When, toward the novel's end, a friend tells Éva she has to stop "peeking through her fingers," we wonder if it's possible for Éva to set aside her ingrained caution, to live without fear of living. Yet throughout the novel Éva is able to find small moments of pleasure: from perfecting her tennis game and losing herself in a ping pong match, from eating slices of banana and watching a cat play with a pill bottle. The reader's hope is that Éva will come to know the more fundamental pleasures of life, a safe home and a loving partner chief among them.

Éva's personality throughout the book is characterized by a protective meekness. She would like to stand up for herself and for others but her life has taught her that being noticed carries the risk of grim consequences. Near the book's end, however, there is a wonderful image of Éva riding on a train traveling over a great plain and feeling "as though she is moving along a deep seam, repairing." The novel also draws a lovely parallel between Éva and a little dove that returns home, bloody and battered from its journey but safely home nonetheless.

Christina Shea's writing style is as restrained as Éva's personality. Shea's prose is deceptively simple. She doesn't overreach; passion lurks just below the surface of her words. I particularly liked Shea's use of the novel Frankenstein, which Éva reads twice, once as a university student and again at the age of fifty. The first time Éva relates to the monster's desire to be loved in a cruel world while her second reading focuses on Victor Frankenstein's failure to take responsibility for his actions. I loved that change in Éva's perspective, as I love many other aspects of this book. It's awfully rare that at the end of a novel I want a character to step out of the pages so I can give her a reassuring hug. Smuggled did that to me. For that alone I must recommend it.

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