Review by Frank Plowright
Refugee adapts Alan Gratz’s 2017 novel aimed at young adults, and this version pushes all the right buttons. In times when increasingly few distinguish between migrants and refugees, Gratz makes the distinction of refugees fleeing from persecution via spotlighting three different eras and making it very clear why the subjects need to flee their homelands.
The protagonists are all fictional, but experience real events and can mix with people who actually lived. Josef is a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany during the 1930s; Isabel lives in Cuba in 1994 when the people are starving and in 2015 Mahmoud’s Syrian homeland is experiencing a violent uprising against a dictator caring little for his people. What they have to endure is told as three separate stories with their pages interspersed as per the sample art. All live in desperate times and all their lives are endangered by the brutality of those running their country. In Josef and Isabel’s case this is directly via police or equivalents, while Mahmoud’s hometown is a rebel stronghold targeted by missiles, but none of them are able to change their circumstances in any way other than leaving their country and hoping to find refuge somewhere else.
The perils are drawn with an appropriate level of clarity for younger readers by Syd Fini, yet he’s still able to bring home how the featured youngsters endure conditions unimaginable to most readers, even in poorer English speaking communities. Remaining true to what happened to some people leads to some startling images, such as Josef’s bar mitzvah occurring on a boat under a Nazi flag and a portrait of Adolf Hitler, and Fini’s art also has an emotional pull.
While telling individual stories, Gratz makes clever connections, Josef’s family leave Germany for Cuba, while Mahmoud’s family make for Germany 75 years later as the country accepts Syrian refugees. Other connections are revealed later, and they’re even smarter.
Gratz frequently switches between short segments of three stories, which too often leads to sensational cliffhangers, and because sea journeys feature for Josef, Isabel and Mahmoud, they can be similar. These, though, the only times when intertwining three stories is limiting. Each child has to grow up very quickly, and they’re additionally given emotional burdens from their experiences. Gratz shows countries with inhumane policies regarding refugees and how plenty are willing to take what little is possessed by people who have almost nothing, while hanging over all three children is the fear of return to their homelands. Fini doesn’t explicitly show atrocities, but Gratz describes them, and there are no illusions that death awaits should they return.
It’s unlikely children reading Refugee will know much about the events detailed, but they’ll recognise the horrors and the lack of compassion, and identify with Josef, Isabel and Mahmoud. These are ordinary people facing life-threatening terror that’s reduced their options down to one. That’s what a refugee is.
