Carry Me
CBC Books | CBC | Posted: March 8, 2017 2:50 PM | Last Updated: July 11, 2017
Peter Behrens
Billy Lange is born in 1909 on the Isle of Wight, England, where his father is the skipper of a racing yacht belonging to a wealthy German-Jewish baron. As a child, Billy is entranced by the baron's daughter, the elusive and willful Karin von Weinbrenner. After the First World War, Karin and Billy are reunited on the baron's Frankfurt estate.
Over the years, Billy and Karin's childhood friendship deepens and transforms into a complex love affair with extraordinarily high stakes. Coming of age in Frankfurt and Berlin, Billy and Karin share a passion for speed, jazz and nightclubs. As society loses its moral bearings and Germany marches toward the Second World War, they also share a dream of escape — from Germany, from history. Brilliantly conceived, deeply researched, and profoundly moving, Carry Me is an unusual love story, an historical epic and a lucid meditation on Europe's violent twentieth century. (From House of Anansi)
From the book
Going up to Ally Pally on visiting days, we rode buses with other internee families. If they forgot themselves and started speaking German or Yiddish, Eilin would shush them. If they kept it up, we'd move as far away as possible. Sometimes we'd get off at the next stop.
But I began muttering secret, gobbledygook German to myself while walking to school along Muswell Hill Broadway. I couldn't speak a word of real German, but had no trouble generating guttural grunts and vowels that sounded, to me, defiant and subversive. Whispering ersatz German was like uttering a charm, allowing me to feel, in a small, secret way, untouchable.
From Carry Me by Peter Behrens ©2016. Published by House of Anansi.