900 Miles

by James Lockhart Perry

Rachel Blaustein is an attractive but lonely old woman living in a hotel in Geneva, Switzerland. She is estranged from her daughter and an unknown quantity to her grandchildren. She discovers that she is going to die and realizes that she first needs to make peace with her daughter Marnie.


The ensuing reunion is anything but peaceful. Marnie is the mirror image of her mother, with the same blend of passion and cold steel. They hate the loss of each other, but the issues that divide them remain huge. And those issues boil down to what happened to Rachel in the war.


In 1940, Rachel, a Viennese Jew, walked 900 miles with her mother and brother from Bruxelles, Belgium, to Geneva, Switzerland, to escape from the Nazis. Along the way, Rachel stumbled into the Dunkirk evacuation, was lost, imprisoned, and released, shot at by soldiers and fighter pilots, nearly executed as a looter, and almost killed in a truck wreck. And all before her fifteenth birthday.


The deprivations that wore down her mother and brother transformed the girl Rachel into a young woman of astonishing strength -- and hardness. The final betrayal at the Swiss border forever changed her relationship with the brother she once idolized and sent her rocketing inevitably into a thirty-year collision course with her daughter.


Rachel understands that the only way into her daughter's heart lies through the children Jake and Allie. Yet those children, naïve and sheltered though they might be, have as much to teach their mother and grandmother as they have to learn about who they are and where they come from.

ebook

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

James Lockhart Perry was a Texan born on Valentine's Day in 1892 into the wilds and woolies of East Texas. Daddy Jim, as he came to be known, never worked the oilfields that erupted all around and became so potent a symbol of the crude, brash, lawless state the rest of us recognize. Instead, he patiently farmed the rice fields, married the fine-looking Missouri-bred schoolteacher Dora Mae, and built a beautiful yellow house in the tiny hamlet of Markham for his three lovely daughters Adrienne Lavonne, Audrey Louvelle, and Anita Lorraine. He also built a legend in his lifetime for tireless inner strength and placid outer humility.

So the author's use of Daddy Jim's name for a pseudonym serves as homage as much as anything to the towering gentle spirit of that pioneer and his brave people. The only historical connection Daddy Jim and the author share is that Daddy Jim died on the author's twelfth birthday, thirty-three days before John Fitzgerald Kennedy set off with Jackie of the pink pillbox hat for Dallas. And the fact that both author and rice farmer have loved Daddy Jim's granddaughter to distraction.

The smartest thing the author ever did, apart from forcing the granddaughter to marry him, was to buy her a camera. Since then the couple has stretched the meandering, shutterbugging progression of their lives around the globe, until twenty years ago when they finally settled down on the beach south of Los Angeles, California. Where the surf rolls in with the same steady, timeless rhythm of the rice waving in the breeze of Daddy Jim's long vanished fields.