VAN
WERT - Seven contestants from area schools will vie for the Queen
Jubilee XLVIII during the Van Wert Peony Pageant, to be held this
Friday, March 31 at 7 p
1:44
“In Iraq every friendship is a risk. You never know who might turn you in for something as small as a joke, or an offhand comment. Perhaps it will be your best friend who gets your tongue cut out. Perhaps it will be a colleague at work. Perhaps they don’t want to betray you but the mukhabarat will harm their children otherwise.”
I’m Betty Martin with Martin’s Must Reads and that’s a quote from Gina Wilkinson’s novel
When The Apricots Bloom. Ally Wilson is married to the Australian Deputy Ambassador to Iraq. As the story begins she and her husband have just arrived in Iraq and choose to conceal that Ally is an American who has worked as a journalist. It’s 2002 and American journalists are not permitted in the country. Ally’s mother, who died when she was five, spent time in Iraq and Ally is anxious to learn more about her mother.
27:30
This week on 51%, we hear the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler s ghettos. We also speak with an author about life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein s regime.
Of the legions of stories of World War II and the Holocaust that shape our understanding of those history-changing events, one of the most extraordinary has remained hidden: the daring resistance efforts of Jewish women in the ghettos of the Nazi occupations. In the new book T
White Walls: A Memoir about Motherhood, Daughterhood and the Mess in Between. Her essays have appeared in the
New York Times, the
Washington Post, and
Gina writes, “Huda paced her backyard, trying to brush off her spat with her husband” […] “It was almost midnight when Huda gave up waiting for Abdul Amir to come home and crawl into bed. Above her head, the blades of the fan pushed warm air around the bedroom. She lay on her back and catalogued the noise of the night: the buzz of the fluorescent light in the foyer, the gritty wind scraping at the windows, listening for the dull snap of a lock or the tread of heavy boots on her driveway” […] “These days her husband’s black moods were worse than ever. Earlier that evening, when he arrived home from work, he’d been slumped in front of the television, still wearing his baggy pajama pants and singlet. // ‘I’m hungry,’ he’d grunted, eyes trained on the TV screen. ‘What’s for dinner?” (10). A typical family scene, but dangers abound right around the bend.