Stolen Lives
Joyce Yarrow
All Bilingual Press (2024)
ISBN: 979-8989794621
Reviewed by Justin Gaynor for Reader Views (06/2024)
Much of the world’s suffering, I have come to realize, results from people (often old men) sitting around and inventing something called “policy.” Not all policy is bad, of course; policies created and negotiated by the people who are affected are often helpful. Truly awful policies tend to result from decisions made by people with little understanding of the issues and no personal skin in the game. Joyce Yarrow’s “Stolen Lives” illustrates this in a way that will leave you shaking your head, and possibly shaking with rage. How else to respond to a systemic policy of stealing women’s babies, telling the mothers the child had died shortly after birth, and then giving the children away to more ideologically pleasing parents?
If only this were pure fiction; but unfortunately, that is exactly the policy carried out by Francisco Franco’s government for many decades after the Spanish Civil War. The original victims were women who supported the wrong side during the war; with time, this expanded to include unwed mothers, mothers in prison, and other so-called undesirables. What Franco and his enablers failed to realize is that most mothers will stop at nothing to protect their children.
This national trauma is nicely fictionalized by Yarrow in this second novel of her Zahara Series, after “Zahara and the Lost Books of Light.” We meet Alienor Crespo, an American-born journalist who calls Seattle home but often covers stories from her base in the southern Spanish city of Granada. I read this book hoping to learn something about the Spanish Civil War and I was not disappointed. The war itself, however, was mostly presented as background; the focus was really on the fates of the unfortunate families ripped apart in the years up until the 1980s when this atrocious practice finally ended.
The story starts fast and describes multiple generations of a family through multiple shifts in time and place. I was a bit confused at first, perhaps because I had not read the first book in the series. By page 64, however, Yarrow lays out the first family tree, making things more clear; as more characters enter the book the family tree is presented again twice more to help keep the reader on track.
Central to the story is a secret link that Alienor has to her ancestors; I will not reveal it here, but it allows her to resolve the fates of several people. The biggest parts of the story belong to her great-uncle Ja’far, a Muslim who married a Jew in 1946, and her aunt Lea. Ja’far and Lea’s fates were intertwined not only with Franco’s government but also with Russia, where many leftists fled after Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War.
Alienor Crespa is a modern woman, and readers should expect some foul language and a casual attitude toward drugs and alcohol. Not to mention sex, or as she cleverly puts it:
There’s nothing like shared danger to bridge the gap between ‘pleased to meet you’ and ‘what’s for breakfast.’ p. 25
Joyce Yarrow has a point to make in “Stolen Lives” and has spun a fascinating tale to help us understand the magnitude of the tragedy. The characters essentially exist to serve the narrative; this is less a character study than a fictionalized piece of actual history. As the story progressed, the way the different characters’ fates were linked led to a truly sweeping family epic.
Anyone who has suffered either from war or family-hostile policies will not be able to read this unmoved.
The organization SOS Bebes Robados at http://www.sosbebesrobados.es has been working to provide justice for the families that suffered under Franco’s family separation policies as described in this book.
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