Helen Watson White 

Driving to Treblinka: A long search for a lost father by Diana Wichtel (Awa Press, 2017), 288 pp., $45

‘I was always looking for my father, even when he was still there,’ writes Diana Wichtel of her Polish-born father, Benjamin Wichtel (on his first gravestone, ‘Witchell’). This father’s absence from his daughter’s life is, however, only the tip of the iceberg that is his once-numerous Warsaw family’s accumulated grief and loss after the ravages of the Holocaust. Driving to Treblinka maps Wichtel’s life-long ‘search for a lost father’, and makes the process of searching both a framework for and a part of her subject.  [Read more…]

Alison Wong

You Do Not Travel in China at the Full Moon: Agnes Moncrieff’s letters from China 1930–1945 edited by Barbara Francis (Victoria University Press, 2017), 295 pp., $50; Old Asian, New Asian by K. Emma Ng (Bridget Williams Books, 2017), 104 pp., $14.99

When we consider New Zealanders who have lived in China and had a significant impact on that country and/or on our literary or cultural imagination, we easily call to mind Rewi Alley, Robin Hyde and James Bertram. But many others went to China as missionaries, medical or humanitarian workers, including Kathleen Hall, Mary Moore, Alexander Don, George McNeur, Annie James, Dr Kathleen Pih and Agnes Moncrieff.  [Read more…]