Flight of Ashes

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Single mother Josefa Nadler is a journalist at the government-run Illustrated Weekly in East Berlin. One day Josefa is sent to B., an industrial city, to write a routine monthly profile of a hardworking comrade. There she finds horrific working conditions, dying trees, scarred workers and a mission she cannot refuse. Instead of writing the expected puffery, Josefa records and submits the true story. Everyone, from her superior to the comrade-in-charge, tries to compel her to change the article. What ensues is a poignant tale of a woman's battle to be herselfimpatient, honest, emotional and a dreamer like her peasant grandfatherin a society where people think and move like robots. In light of recent events at Chernobyl, this is an especially timely novel, right up to the ironic twist at the end. (October)

Library Journal

Josefa Nadler's grandfather burned to death in a Polish cornfield set afire by the Nazis. Nothing so terrible happens to her 30 years later when, as a journalist, she runs afoul of the East German bureaucracy. But surely her spirit is singed. Her initial ``crime'' is refusing to modify her muckraking account of a polluted industrial complex. When her article is rejected, she compounds her felony by appealing to authorities beyond her superiors. Josefa's efforts to retain dignity and sanity compel attention and stir compassion. Little else in the novel does. Her loneliness as a divorced mother; her starchy colleagues, selfish lover, Orwellian antagonistsall are comfortably novelistic cliches. The central events do, however, achieve an admirable crescendo of intensity.Arthur Waldhorn, English Dept., City Coll., CUNY