The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende
The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende is her most recent novel, and one that explores themes of immigration, of children alone, and what it is to be a family.
We meet Samuel Adler in Vienna in 1938. As war comes closer Samuel’s parents make the difficult decision to send their son to England on the Kindertransport. Samuel then spends the next twenty years in London, living with a couple who become parents in every sense – except that they are not his own.
Samuel is a musician and eventually comes to the United States. We meet him again in his later life in Berkeley, California where he has lived for many years. Here we meet Leticia who has come to the United States from El Salvador, and Selena a social worker assisting immigrants.
We also meet Frank, also a lawyer, representing high powered clients in cases that Frank finds more and more despicable. Selena makes a presentation to Frank’s firm, she stalks about migrants, the separation of children from parents – she is hoping there will be lawyers willing to give their time to helping her clients.
One of Selena’s clients is Anita, a seven-year-old who is without her mother, who seems to have disappeared after they were separated.
What follows is the story of the search for Anita’s mother, and the Covid years. Samuel isolated in his home, no longer able to see his students. His housekeeper becomes his only company.
Of course, the paths of all these characters will intersect, and Samuel who knows only too well what it was to be a child alone is immediately willing to help Anita in any way he is able.
The Wind Knows My Name is a novel of our own time. The not so long ago Covid years when Samuel “has taken advantage of the long lockdown to distance himself from people he didn’t like and free himself from the obligations that no longer interested him”. What he finds instead is a rewarding life and a future he could not have imagined.