An Orphan's Song

Rating:
Summary: Love and Lentil Soup
Review: Love is warm, love is lasting, and love can be stretched even farther than an army-sized pot of chicken soup---or lentil soup, in this case---to fill a heart with hope. Jean Becker's memoir of four little orphan girls who hold tight to each other until they find themselves together as a family again, reunited with their beloved aunts,uncles, cousins, and baby brother is a joy to read.

The sun-dappled watercolor on the book's cover is reassurance that this is not a maudlin story of pain and deprivation, as I halfway expected. How could a story about children losing their mother be anything but sad? Not so, in Jean Becker's memoir. I am pleased to report that the author proves that joy comes from the heart, and not from external circumstances.

Whose love is most powerful? A little girl's love for her sisters and baby brother? The grown-up's love for their sister who dies under tragic circumstances, knowing she is leaving her precious children behind? The elderly couple who wrap the homeless children of all ages from toddlers to teens in affection, feeding them from a bottomless kettle of lentil soup and clothing them in community donations?

It amazed me to read that, although life was meager for everyone in the 1940s, not just for children without parents, people still found enormous reserves of love in their hearts to share with strangers. Not everyone was kind and good. And the legal system was less than benevolent. Still, these little girls not only survived, but went on to become givers, not takers.

Jean Becker tells her story, just as it happened, without trying to shock or moralize. She doesn't leave anything out.

As a reader, my own unanswered question is simply this: decades later, and in a materially-blessed age, why doesn't the love of the adult community stretch to include every child and not just our own?