The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende

 The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende looks at the immigrations system, then in 1938, and now in 2019, in this historical fiction novel due out in June. The effects of war on children, be it the Nazi takeover of Europe or the Civil War in El Salvador, are heart breaking as experienced by Samuel Adler, a 6-year-old Jewish boy during Kristallnacht and 7-year-old Anita Diaz, who is blind and has been parted from her mother at the border as the family separation order goes into effect.

Samuel was born in Vienna, where he lived with his mother and father, until his father disappeared and his mother found a spot for him on the Kindertransport train going from Austria to the United Kingdom. A violin prodigy, Samuel can take only his instrument and a change of clothes as he embarks on a journey eventually landing in the United States.

Eighty years later, Anita and her mother had sought rescue from the danger in El Salvador as they made their way to Nogales, Arizona. Soon her mother is singled out and removed from Anita, who “talks” with her late sister in a magical world in her mind.

Selena Duran, Anita’s case worker, partners with a lawyer from San Francisco, to find a solution for the child. Together they learn there is an unknowing family member in the States who could offer Anita a home, Leticia Cordero, an employee in the home of an aging Samuel Adler, tying the two immigrants together.

Allende’s latest work exemplifies the sacrifices of parents and the resilience of children in a harsh world where only the wind knows their names. The picture she paints with words about the conditions of immigration in America today is hard to imagine with people put into “coolers” and babies and children taken from their parents to dissuade immigrants’ ideas about the conditions in America.

Isabel Allende, bestselling author of The House of the Spirits and A Long Petal of the Sea, has been called "the world's most widely read Spanish-language author.” An exile from Chile herself, Allende infuses her books with realism.