No One Is Here Except All of Us
From the award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and the new story collection, Awayland.


In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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No One Is Here Except All of Us
From the award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and the new story collection, Awayland.


In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.
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No One Is Here Except All of Us

No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel
No One Is Here Except All of Us

No One Is Here Except All of Us

by Ramona Ausubel

Paperback(Reprint)

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Overview

From the award-winning author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and the new story collection, Awayland.


In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781594486494
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date: 02/05/2013
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 416
Sales rank: 470,336
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

About The Author
Ramona Ausubel is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of AwaylandSons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, and No One Is Here Except All of Us. Her work has been published in The New YorkerOne StoryThe Paris Review DailyBest American Fantasy, and elsewhere, and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. She has been longlisted for The Frank O'Connor Short Story Prize, and a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions award and the Pushcart Prize.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"No One Is Here Except All of Us contains so many achingly beautiful passages, it's as if language itself is continually striving to be a refuge. . . . If a book can be said to have a consciousness, the consciousness here is infinitely tender and soulful, magical and true. It's the kind of God we wish for.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Ramona Ausubel's first novel, "No One Is Here Except All of Us," is a poetic fable about a part of history after which some people say poetry is an obscenity… Ausubel's fable-like tone is effective in creating a sensation of tale and dream. For conveying the full horror of the events surrounding the Holocaust, it is less so, but this isn't what she's trying to do. Instead, she is comfortable reshaping, in a safe time and place, stories that were handed to her, using her rhetorical and narrative skill to create something that can be carried without cutting the one who carries it.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
 

Reading Group Guide

INTRODUCTION
In 1939, the families in a remote Jewish village in Romania feel the war close in on them. Their tribe has moved and escaped for thousands of years- across oceans, deserts, and mountains-but now, it seems, there is nowhere else to go. Danger is imminent in every direction, yet the territory of imagination and belief is limitless. At the suggestion of an eleven-year-old girl and a mysterious stranger who has washed up on the riverbank, the villagers decide to reinvent the world: deny any relationship with the known and start over from scratch. Destiny is unwritten. Time and history are forgotten. Jobs, husbands, a child, are reassigned. And for years, there is boundless hope. But the real world continues to unfold alongside the imagined one, eventually overtaking it, and soon our narrator-the girl, grown into a young mother-must flee her village, move from one world to the next, to find her husband and save her children, and propel them toward a real and hopeful future. A beguiling, imaginative, inspiring story about the bigness of being alive as an individual, as a member of a tribe, and as a participant in history, No One Is Here Except All Of Us explores how we use storytelling to survive and shape our own truths. It marks the arrival of a major new literary talent.

 


ABOUT RAMONA AUSUBEL

Ramona Ausubel has been published in The New Yorker, One Story, The Paris Review Daily, The Best American Fantasty and elsewhere and has received special mentions in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and was a finalist for the Puschcart Prize. She is a recipient of the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction and a graduate of the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine.



DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
  • In the opening of the novel , Lena tells Chaya in her letter , &ldquoMaybe , when the world began , everything had been clean and pure.&rdquo When the villagers start their world over , does the world begin &ldquoclean and pure ,&rdquo or are the seeds of its destruction built into its founding?
  • When the villagers start their world over , they begin with storytelling. What importance does storytelling have for the novel? What is its power? How does each of the characters employ storytelling? What do these uses tell you about each character
  • One of the bonds that is the most transient in the novel is that between parent and child. How does the author depict this bond? Consider the situations in which children are transferred in the novel: were the parents right to let their children be adopted by others? What do you think about the motivations of the adoptive parents?
  • What is the stranger’s role in the re-creation of the world? Could the villagers have done it without her? Why does she decide to help protect the village from the outside world? What eventually makes her allow it back in?
  • Igor is the only character who is captured , yet his imprisonment ends up ensuring his safety , while the characters who remain &ldquofree&rdquo must fight for their own survival. What does this say about the concept of freedom? In this novel , is personal choice a gift or a burden , or both?
  • With the reinvention of the world , time is upended. Lena is made to grow up at an unusual rate. Does she really age faster? Do you think she and the other villagers realize the truth but allow Hersh and Kayla to believe their own story? What about when Lena gets married and bears a child—has the story about her aging process had a real and actual effect?
  • How does Lena know what happens to the other characters? Given the role that imagination and storytelling play in the novel , does it matter whether Lena has outside information? Would that make her version any more or less true?
  • Many unfair things happen to Lena during the course of the book-her parents’ giving her away , her losing her sons , and so on. How does she cope? Does she forgive the other characters? What role does forgiveness play in the novel?
  • What do you think the title No One is Here Except All of Us means?
  • At the end of the book , Lena writes to Chaya , &ldquoSomeday , your children will ask what happened , and you will tell a new version , and in this way , the story will keep living. Truth is not in facts. The truth is in the telling.&rdquo What does Lena mean by this? Is there a difference between truth and accuracy?
  • Interviews

    Téa Obreht is the author of The Tiger's Wife, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Award finalist. Here she talks with novelist Ramona Ausubel about her experiences writing No One is Here Except All of Us

    Téa Obreht: I'm always interested in how projects of this magnitude begin. It seems like a novel "about" one's family, or projecting one's family into a fictional sphere, almost always ends up being an endeavor of self-discovery. Tell me a little bit about how you came to it, about what inspired you to take this journey and why.

    Ramona Ausubel: The project started out as a desire to record the family stories while my grandmother was still alive and well (happily, she remains so at ninety-one). I didn't know it would become a novel until later, when, having collected dozens of individual stories, I was frustrated that the complete picture was still foggy. It felt like having a lot of scraps of fabric, but if I wanted to see the quilt, I was going to have to sew it myself.

    Téa Obreht: So much of this incredible book relies on fable, on the creation and acceptance of a particular reality in order to survive. At the end of the book, in a note to the reader, you even say "facts aren't important" and that "the truth is in the telling." What draws you to this idea of fable? What is its place in the modern world?

    Ramona Ausubel: When I first started writing, I was trying to stick as closely to the "facts" as possible. Soon, I realized that facts were not what I really cared about. The reason it mattered to my grandmother to tell the story and the reason it mattered to me to hear it and tell it again was not that we were trying to reconstruct history, it was that we were trying to fold the characters, places and lives from the past into our world. As long as a story is being told, it stays alive, even as it changes. Each fable is a version of what could have happened, and between all those versions, maybe we come close to the truth. I think that, no matter how modern our world gets, we will always have a need to tell stories about the past.

    Téa Obreht: I was fascinated by the point of view shifts in No One Is Here Except All Of Us; it seems that the novel begins rooted in collective consciousness and then, as the experiment of isolation fails, and tragedy upon tragedy is unleashed onto the characters, this shared perspective splits up until, in an ironic twist, outside communication becomes the only way the characters receive fragmented information about each others' lives. Why did you choose this particular narrative style? How did you settle on Lena as the primary voice?

    Ramona Ausubel: It took many drafts to find the right point-of-view for this story. Lena is based on my great-grandmother and I knew she would be the protagonist, but I wanted it to be about everyone together as well, for there to be a kind of Greek chorus. Finally, I decided to give the story to Lena to tell, and to allow her to speak both for the village and for herself, to speak to the ideas of collective struggle and imagination in addition to one person's loneliness and isolation.

    Téa Obreht: This novel was obviously inspired by family legends, but tell me more about your own life as a writer. When did you know you wanted to write? Who are some of your literary influences?

    Ramona Ausubel: I have wanted to write for as long as I can remember. My mom recently came across the poems I wrote in fifth grade, and I was a little embarrassed to admit that not only did I recall writing them, but I had been so proud of them that I still had them memorized twenty years later. I still feel the same sense of excitement and satisfaction when a piece of writing starts to come alive. Some authors and books that matter to me are Pastoralia, by George Saunders, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Gilead by Marilyn Robinson and Florida by Christine Schutt.

    Téa Obreht: You already have numerous illustrious publications under your belt, but No One Is Here Except All Of Us is your first novel. What were some of the challenges you had to overcome, and what surprised you most about the process?

    Ramona Ausubel: I have written short stories that mattered a lot to me, but writing this book was different because I spent so many hours in the world of the novel—some days I spent more time there than I did in the real world. Though the characters are different from the relatives on whom they are based, I still feel that I got to know my ancestors in a way I never could have otherwise. Those old family stories became my own, and they became part of my everyday life. In November, I became a mother. As I gaze down at my new baby, a tiny, beautiful little boy, I think, "I'm glad you're here. I have so many stories to tell you," and I realize that in many ways I have been writing this novel for him.

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