Join visiting author, David Schein for a reading and discussion of his new novel, The Adoption.
When a mixed-race couple in Chicago, discover that their adopted Ethiopian baby girl Kalkdane, is not really an orphan and that she has a family in Ethiopia, so begins this contemporary, international epic, tracking the lives of Kalkidane in Chicago and her siblings in Ethiopia as they grow up in separate cultures and come together on the brink of adulthood.
Gleaned from Schein’s many travels to Ethiopia, where he co-founded One Love AIDS/HIV Awareness Theater with the children of the Southern Dawn Circus, the novel fictionalizes and interweaves the lives of children growing up in Ethiopia and the USA over the span of the last twenty years, as Ethiopia became the fastest developing country in Africa and the internet gave African children the ability to have their voices heard around the world.
With many short chapters, a large list of characters, and an English Amharic dictionary, The Adoption dissects the phenomenon of “cultural misapprehension,” presenting a truly contemporary view of a world where well-meaning Westerners fuel a huge Adoption Industry, where street kids in Ethiopia beg pennies so that they can go to internet cafes to Facebook their cousins in Las Vegas, and where, despite huge differences of culture, tradition and history, the human predilection to love and fear, to nurture and exploit, and to fight for survival, is universal.