Article 2 - REVIEW OF "WALL TO WALL" July 2008 edition of First Church of The Streets

     The reasons for travel are many: adventure, escapism, fun, pilgrimage, or education. There are times, however, when a person travels not so much to get away, but to find oneself and one's roots. This is true of American traveler Mary Morris in the narrative "Wall to Wall", as she makes her way from Beijing to Berlin by rail in the years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Morris' journey takes her far from her native Chicago and present home in New York City to the mystique of the Communist strongholds as she searches for the roots her Jewish ancestors left behind.

     The journey begins for Morris in 1986, a year when the Berlin Wall is still intact. Through happenstance, circumstance, and childhood dreams, Morris finds herself at the precipice of traveling to her ancestors' native Kiev via the Trans-Siberian Express. A childhood dream nearly fulfilled is threatened by the explosion at the nuclear plant of Chernobyl just days before she departs from the United States, an incident that remains as shrouded as the Communist life she witnesses in China. This shrouding of such an extreme disaster acts as a backdrop for the tone of what Morris experiences as she delves through the beaurocracy of the Soviet Union and China, where nothing is what it seems and everything is viewed with suspicion and paranoia.

     Through this atmosphere while on the train, Morris encounters Western Europeans, Soviets, Eastern Europeans, and Chinese people of various ethnic descents. She deals with the people behind the beaurocrats, and forges a special bond with the dining crew en route through Russia because of her Russian roots. Able to converse in several different languages, and being, to paraphrase her, the kind of solo woman traveler whom people confide their lives to, Morris is able to relate to many different people of many different stripes. She is able, because of these interactions, to see how the cultures that various people have been raised with seem to shape them now, and brings this perspective of observation to her depiction of her conversations and interactions. These conversations feel real, like she herself is a person on a train telling you the reader her story.

     Not all of Morris' encounters deal with strangers confiding in her, and not all of her experiences are on the train itself. She walks through Red Sqaure and visits the Kremlin, interweaving the history into what she sees and experiences. Morris also relays a great deal of her own personality and concerns in the story, but whether it is her concerns over her companion back home or her rootlessness as a wandering displaced Jew, her personal concerns, though deeply felt, do not become a tiresome filler of psychobabble that sometimes afflicts personal revelations in a travel narrative. She seems to be able to weave her own dislocation with what she sees in others, and in the dark settings surrounding her.

     If a person is looking for a travel narrative where the writer is all enthused by everything that she sees, (s)he may be disappointed by this book, as Morris refuses to be a detached observer and explains what she really feels she encountered. But her willingness to try to relate to all those around her makes her a participant in the drama that unfolds, rather than a scowling Westerner who knows free enterprise is best and can find evidence of her superiority in everything she observes. She does come off as a person who has traveled her whole life and is wearied of the venture, but as she is on this journey to seek her roots and her "home" as a Jew, this longing makes perfect sense. The dark mystery that enshrouds the ecological apocalypse Chernobyl also touches her in a personal way at a critical time in her life. The secrecy wrapped around the disaster helps her define herself and what she values. Chernobyl's larger impact becomes her story, and international politics becomes very individually personal for the traveler.

     "Wall to Wall" is a book about finding oneself where everything has been blotted out and obscsured, and how things have more than one meaning, such as coming to West Berlin a person who is relieved to be back in the West where one is free to express oneself in present day, to East Berlin near the point where Hitler killed himself and the oppression still continues. in a place where one such as her was killed for being oneself. Confronting the Berlin where Morris' family was uprooted to begin with, from the ashes of Kristallnacht, Morris makes the journey back to where she came from, and in confronting this darkness, Morris is better able to make her way home. Which is better? She asks, crass capitalism or the dour reality of equalization given from high above? It is a question that she can't answer, but the graves of those who came before her are mixed in with the life she lives now as she walks away to what she knows as freedom. In this respect, home is an intangible reality that shifts itself, a journey not found in a place or a building. Whether in the quaint suburbs of Chicago, deep in the destruction of Kiev, or in the ashes of a rebuilt but divided Berlin, a home with roots is something that can always be redefined.