Bøger af Margot Benary-Isbert

Two rooms all to themselves, it was almost too good to be true! For this was postwar Germany, filled with starving, homeless people trying to stay alive amidst the rubble, and to the Lechows the two freezing attic rooms in Mrs. Verduz' house on Parsley Street were an unbelievable stroke of luck. No matter that every stick of furniture and even the cracked dishes were borrowed from a grudging but kind landlady, that food was so scarce they were nearly always hungry, that Matthias, loving the stars and growing things, was assigned to construction work by the Labor Office. Now that there was a roof over their heads, Joey and Andrea could attend school, and perhaps Father, if he was still alive, would find his way to them from the prison camp in Russia. The Ark paints an honest, realistic picture of the terrible aftermath of war in a defeated country. Most of all, it is the story of courage the courage of real people who, caught up in the adversity that shattered their lives, can still look at the future with hope and at the past without bitterness.

January 1948 began a wonderful year for the Lechows. With Father newly returned to Western Germany from a Russian prison camp, they were together again and could enjoy a measure of security and happiness in The Ark, their railroad car home on Rowan Farm. t was a year that held for sixteen-year-old Margret in particular, both joy and sorrow. She found real satisfaction in entering Mrs. Almut's Great Danes in two important shows and in raising several young animals which were her very own. The year brought Margaret new friends as well "€"among them the resourceful young schoolmaster with his plan for rebuilding a bombed out farm, and the American woman, working in Germany with the Friends' Service Committee. As in The Ark, her previous book about the Lechow family, Mrs. Benary mirrors the slow changes of the season, come war or peace, the burgeoning of life in the spring and with it a renewal of hope. Once again she creates real people whose joys and disappointments are universally understood, and above all she leaves her readers a sense of courage and faith all too rare in books today.