In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years — across oceans, deserts, and mountains — but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known, and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator — the girl, grown into a young mother — must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future.
No One Is Here Except All Of Us
Ramona Ausubel reads a passage from No One Is Here Except All Of Us, about a Romanian village that tries to save itself from the horrors of World War II through the sheer force of imagination.
