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Book Reviewed by:Compulsively readable, This Is How It Begins is a timely novel about free speech, the importance of empathy, and the bitter consequences of long-buried secrets.
In 2009, eighty-five-year-old art professor Ludka Zeilonka gets drawn into a political firestorm when her grandson, Tommy, is among a group of gay Massachusetts teachers fired for allegedly silencing Christian kids in high school classrooms. The ensuing battle to reinstate the teachers raises the specter of Ludka's World War II past - a past she's spent a lifetime trying to forget.
Radio host Warren Meck has been leading the Massachusetts campaign to root out anti-religious bias in public schools - but he believes in working respectfully within the political system, so he's alarmed and offended when his efforts are undermined by someone inciting violent action. Even worse, he fears the culprit is among his inner circle.
As Ludka's influential family defends Tommy under increasingly vicious conditions, a stranger with connections to her past shows up and threatens to expose her for illegally hoarding a valuable painting presumed stolen by the Nazis. Only one other person knew about the painting - a man Ludka's been trying to find for sixty years.
Dempsey's choice to imbue her characters with motives ranging the gamut from light to dark creates a fine literary chiaroscuro that enriches the reading experience. I truly enjoyed This is How it Begins' timely examination of the disturbing potential for desecularization of our Democracy...continued
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(Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
In This is How It Begins, Ludka Zeilonka, art history professor and survivor of the World War II Nazi invasion of Poland, rescued a valuable painting from certain theft or destruction at the hands of the Germans. She has kept it hidden for over 70 years, protecting it and keeping its provenance intact for posterity. As an idealistic young art lover she knew that if the prized painting of Chopin by a famous Polish artist fell into German hands it likely would have been destroyed and thus an important link in Polish art history would be lost.
This was not an unusual occurrence. As Nazis rounded up and executed Jews, they confiscated all their possessions and either kept or sold everything of value. Jewelry, cash, and valuable antiques ...
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Everywhere I go, I am asked if I think the university stifles writers...
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Eva Fogelman, PhD, author of the Pulitzer Prize nominee Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust
This is How It Begins superbly demonstrates the clandestine nature of rescue, and the irony that those who ought to be rewarded for their conscience and courage remain hidden, and live in fear. Reading this moving adventure compels us to bear witness to the past and present and think about our own complacency to everyday discrimination in our midst.
