Jakob's Colours
By: Lindsay Hawdon
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton General Division
Published: 2015
Place of publication: London, England
Language: eng
Number of pages: 320
ISBN-13: 9781444797671; 9781444797664
Subjects: Family reunification; Romanies; Young men; History; Holocaust survivors; Fiction
Description: This heartbreaking and tender novel will appeal to readers who loved Sophie's Choice, Schindler's Ark and The Book Thief. Austria, 1944. Jakob, a gypsy boy - half Roma, half Yenish - runs, as he has been told to do. With shoes of sack cloth, still bloodstained with another's blood, a stone clutched in one hand, a small wooden box in the other. He runs blindly, full of fear, empty of hope. For hope lies behind him in a green field with a tree that stands shaped like a Y. He knows how to read the land, the sky. When to seek shelter, when not. He has grown up directing himself with the wind and the shadows. They are familiar to him. It is the loneliness that is not. He has never, until this time, been so alone. Don't be afraid, Jakob, his father has told him, his voice weak and wavering. See the colours, my boy, he has whispered. So he does. Rusted ochre from a mossy bough. Steely white from the sap of the youngest tree. On and on, Jakob runs. Spanning from one world war to another, taking us across England, Switzerland and Austria, Jakob's Colours is about the painful legacies passed down from one generation to another, finding hope where there is no hope and colour where there is no colour.
Table of contents: title: "Inspired by the lost voices of the Romany Holocaust, this is a book like no other"; title: cover. Austria, 1944. Jakob, a gypsy boy; title: half Roma, half Yenish; title: runs, as he has been told to do. With shoes of sack cloth, still bloodstained with another's blood, a stone clutched in one hand, a small wooden box in the other. He runs blindly, full of fear, empty of hope. Spanning one world war to another, taking us across England, Switzerland and Austria, this novel is drawn from the Porajmos, also known as The Devouring or Gypsy Holocaust, which claimed a higher percentage per population than the Jewish Holocaust.