The Curious Kidnapping of Nora W by Cate Green
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ An enchanting debut
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Nora is a wonderful creation
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Heart rending & heart warming
Funny. Poignant. Soulful. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Full of heart & chutzpah ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Exceptional - deserves 6 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A hilarious Franzen style take on family ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A beautiful story of love & kindness
⭐️ Winner of the Exeter Novel Prize ⭐️
“I am the oldest person ever to have lived in this world. I am the one who lived through their monster camps and brought the ones left of my family to London to make more family. I am the one to laugh at those angry, evil people and tell them, you see, I made it through. We made it through. This is enough. It is my world's record."
Family matriarch and Holocaust survivor Nora Wojnaswki is 18 days away from bucking history and becoming the oldest person in the world – ever – and her family are determined to celebrate in style.
But Nora isn’t your average supercentenarian and she has other ideas. When she disappears with her carer Arifa on a trip down memory lane in the East End of London, a wartime secret, buried deep for over 70 years, will finally be revealed.
Synopsis
Nora Wojnawski is 122 years and four months old and about to become the world’s oldest person ever. Her family is organising a ceremony to mark the occasion, complete with representatives of the Guinness World Records, but Nora isn’t interested. All she wants is to spend any time she has left with her only son, David. And when her great-granddaughter Debs goes to visit her just weeks before the event, Nora has disappeared. Debs tracks her down to the East London flat where Arifa, Nora’s favourite carer, lives with her own son, Nasir. Arifa and Nasir are Syrian refugees, but Nora is convinced that Nasir is her own son, David, in his teens when he and his parents arrived in London as Holocaust survivors. Debs tries to convince Nora to return to the old people’s home where she lived – and where her real son David, now ninety, still resides - and threatens to sue Arifa, but Nora refuses. Nasir reluctantly agrees to pretend to be David and even learns to feel affection for Nora, who teaches him to play poker, her favourite game. Nora takes him and his mother on a series of visits to the landmarks of her post-war life in East London, including the grocery she ran with her husband, now a street art café. Debs, still trying to organise the records ceremony, goes with them, accompanied by her five-year-old daughter, Amelia. Debs’ family is suspicious that Arifa is a gold-digger, especially some time later, when they discover that large amounts of money are missing from Nora’s account, although we later learn that these are bets that Nora has placed herself after Nasir has introduced her to online poker.
In parallel, during a visit to a Jewish cemetery in Whitechapel, Amelia and Nasir are playing tag when Amelia falls and is knocked unconscious. Panicked, Debs refuses to let Arifa near her daughter until she explains that she was a doctor in Syria. Amelia is taken to a hospital but remains in a coma and Arifa often visits, as does Nora, who, shocked by the accident, begins to recount some of her war memories, keeping one tragic event to herself. The three women grow closer and the world record ceremony is forgotten until Amelia comes out of her coma. Nora, Debs and Arifa then decide that the event will be held at the café on the site of the former grocery. On the big day, Nora tells them she knows Nasir is not David, but also reveals that Amelia’s accident had awoken a memory she had forced herself to forget: the death in the camps of her own daughter, Miriam, whose memory now lives on through Amelia, just as the spirit of war victims everywhere also lives on through Nora, her family, Arifa and Nasir.
Author’s note
The initial inspiration for The Curious Kidnapping of Nora W. was my late mother-in-law, Norma Celemenski née Kryger. Norma was born in 1925 in Lodz. She was still living in the city at the time of the Nazi invasion of Poland and was walled up inside the ghetto there along with her family and tens of thousands of other Polish Jews. Her father died there of starvation in 1943. Just over a year later, she and her mother were deported to Auschwitz. Her mother was shot and killed on the platform as she got off the train. Norma became a slave worker because she was deemed to have the young eyes and hands necessary for making precision bombs. One of her brothers was also murdered in the Holocaust. Another brother and her sister survived.
After the war, Norma became a refugee and later a nurse in Sweden. She eventually left to find her sister in France and then sailed with her husband, Heinryk, and their two young children to Montreal, where they ran a shop very much like the one in this novel, open 7 days a week (except for the Jewish New Year and Yom Kippur) and also called Henry’s Fruit.
Like Nora in the novel, Norma was resilient, determined - and stubborn. She lived well into her nineties and, towards the end of her life, some began to wonder if she might not actually be indestructible. It was her resilience and spirit that gave me the idea of writing about a survivor, a woman who might take a personal revenge against the perpetrators of the Holocaust by becoming the oldest person in the history of the world.
Two other women are also part of the inspiration for the book: Mahbubeh and Imane, both refugees from Iran and Syria respectively, who shared my family’s home for a few months when they arrived in France and who have become dear friends. Like Norma, they are paragons of resilience. Because of war and religious intolerance, they have been forced to leave their home, their country, most of their family and their friends. Yet rarely have I ever seen them with anything other than a smile on their lips.
The Curious Kidnapping of Nora W. is not a historical novel. It is not a novel about the victims of war and injustice. It is a novel about survivors of war and injustice and their lives as ordinary people with an extraordinary past. The friendship between Nora and Arifa is a small tribute to the three women who inspired it.
Cate Green's debut novel, The Curious Kidnapping of Nora W. was inspired by her late mother-in-law, a resilient and feisty Holocaust survivor who lived almost as long as Nora herself. Her own family, all Jewish, were lucky enough to have arrived in Britain from many parts of the world well before World War II.
Cate lived in Manchester and London before moving to France over twenty years ago. She now lives and writes just outside Lyon, France.
She is a broadcast and print journalist and copywriter with over twenty years’ experience in international radio, television and corporate communications.