Jerome Charyn: American Scrapbook (USA 1969)

From the Publisher:
The scandalous detention of thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II has been overlooked as a subject of fiction. In his fourth novel Jerome Charyn continues to show daring and imagination -- as well as the vigor and inventiveness, abandon, and alert feeling for the comic praised by critics of his earlier work -- by setting his story in two of these "relocation camps." Through the eyes of six members of the Tanaka family, he recreates fictionally the fears and tensions, the comedy and tragedy of those caught up in a cruel and unjust imprisonment.

In the camps the jailers are white Americans. The prisoners, too, are Americans, most of them. Their responses are as varied as one would expect them to be, ranging from the paranoiac fears of Mitsuo to the innocent confusion of young Napoleon. Conflicts among family members, among factions of prisoners, and, of course, between prisoners and jailers generate the tensions of this extraordinarily original book.

Although it is a novel pertinent to the current re-evaluation of our past, and as such a parable with obvious lessons for our time, American Scrapbook is first and foremost an achievement of sympathetic imagination, a triumph of a novel.

Jerome Charyn: American Scrapbook. A Novel about the Detention of Japanese-Americans by the American Government during the World War II. New York: Viking, 1969, SBN: 670-12015-4, 177 p., $4.95.