Ellen Prentiss Campbell

The Bedford Hotel located in Bedford Springs, Pa. is the setting for this re-imagination of actual events during WWII when a down on it's luck historic hotel was used first as a training facility for inductees into the navy, then later as an internment camp for the Japanese Embassy delegation captured during the fall of Berlin.

The story is told by Hazel Shaw, an imagined woman from Bedford Springs as the country entered WWII. As a recent high school graduate, her clerical skills gain her the position as secretary to the man placed in charge of the hotel's internment activities by the State Department. During that time Hazel's father dies, and she is widowed when her high school sweetheart husband is killed in the war. In her emotional turmoil she befriends one of the Japanese families interred at the hotel and mentors their adolescent daughter.

Much later when faced with a moral dilemma as a head of Quaker academy, she attends a conference and meets the woman she had supported as an adolescent.

The bowl with gold seams which gives title to the book refers to a piece of kintsugi pottery, which is porcelain bowl intentionally broken them mended with a golden glue. The resultant piece is revered as more beautiful and more valuable than the original....what is broken becomes more beautiful.

Hazel has a such a bowl on her mantel in her adult home, it's provenance provides the story of Hazel's involvement with the Japanese family. It also serves as a metaphor for one of the many themes in the story.

The language is beautiful, the complex characters are well drawn with keen psychological insight. And the story reveals to us a forgotten chapter of WWII history.
The Bedford Hotel is a real place, closed for about 30 years, it is now reopened as a luxury hotel.
I'm surprised that this book has not received more attention.… (mais)