Have you seen Luis Velez? by Catherine Ryan Hyde

I am often astounded at how synchronicity plays out when we are meant to hear or learn something or find solace. You know what I am talking about – those strange and serendipitous occurrences that we refer to as coincidences. The latest of these happy chances, as it were, betided me when I picked up Have you seen Luis Velez? - a book which best-selling author Catherine Ryan Hyde wrote in 2019, long before the dreaded Covid-19 appeared and turned everything on its head and before the current racial riots further rocked our world and made us take note.

Yet, it was exactly the insight and wisdom I needed to read during this time, the story about 17-year-old Raymond Jaffe and 92-year-old Mrs G’s unique friendship in a New York borough. The tale produces several moments that manage to cast a piercing spotlight at the heart of what’s wrong in the world and gives me the hope that we have an antidote. Well, maybe not for the virus or the multi-layered racial issues, but perhaps for the fear. That, by seeking love and kindness, we may find a powerful antidote to the fear that is tightening its grip on the world.

It is, of course, also about time that the world faces up to the staggering inequality, prejudice and bigotry that plague it, the blanket acceptance of the privileged and the fearful need to revert to the primitivity of tribalism.

Catherine Ryan Hyde should be applauded for telling a story of such simplistic beauty and at the same time bravely exposing and exploring all of these issues in a deeply provoking manner. A rich cast of characters, the story is woven around Raymond, a child born from a mixed marriage, Mrs G (Mildred Gutermann), a German Jew who escaped the holocaust when her family fled to the US just before the outbreak of WWII, and Luis Velez, a Latino who helps the blind Mrs G by taking her to the bank and the shops on a weekly basis until he suddenly disappears.

Before Raymond steps up to fill Luis’s role in Mrs G’s life and becomes her friend, he struggles with his own feelings of isolation, of not belonging anywhere. He is uncomfortable living as a black child with his white mother, stepfather and siblings, feels unwelcome at the weekend home of his own father and his new wife, and at school where he is treated as an outcast.

Once he commits to be there for Mrs G and meets various new friends when he sets out to find Luis Velez, he is amazed to find that the more he helps others, the more his own life is enriched. Mrs G, who grew up as a Jew in Nazi Germany, who experienced the harsh realities of prejudice and who now finds herself as one of the ‘privileged’ living in America, offers wonderful observations based on her knowledge of finding herself on both sides of the spectrum that continues to divide our world.

In explaining the world’s blind acceptance of privilege (based on colour, class or creed), she uses a metaphor of fish living in water. When someone remarks to the fish about the water, the fish turns around in surprise and asks: ‘What? What water?’ That is how it is with privilege in our society – taken for granted, viewed as a given, never questioned.

And isn’t that precisely what lies at the heart of all the acts of inhumanity between races, classes and cultures; the inequalities and the dominance of one over the other throughout our history and still prevalent to this day?

I implore you to read this book – for the great story and the good writing, but also for the insight and understanding of many of the issues that continue to make living in this world so complicated.