The Gift of Our Wounds

February 15, 2018
Tragedy opens a dialogue between a former white supremacist and an Indian immigrant whose father was killed in a massacre at a Wisconsin Sikh temple.As the title suggests, bad can lead to at least some good, and violence to healing, when it gets different kinds of people to talk to each other, understand each other, and even learn to love each other. Early on, Serve 2 Unite co-founder Kaleka admits, "my anger was eating me alive" following the 2012 murder of his father amid a shooting rampage by a white supremacist. Though former skinhead Michaelis (My Life After Hate, 2010) hadn't known the killer, he recognized him as if he were looking in a mirror at his younger self. "My gut told me what no one was reporting yet," he writes. "This was a strike by the radicalized far-right movement. An attack to say, 'You're threatening our race and we're going to eliminate you before you destroy us.' It had all the markings of white supremacists--specifically, racist skinheads, the faction I helped to establish nearly twenty years before." The narrative alternates between the immigrant's story of coming to and adjusting to the Midwest and the one-time racist's story of years venting his rebellious anger and then eventually overcoming it. It climaxes with the murderous attack, which left emotions raw and both co-authors searching for answers. They found them in each other and successfully established a dialogue that bridged their very different backgrounds and led to the formation of Serve 2 Unite, an organization of "relentless optimism in the face of adversity" through which the two "continue their mission as brothers in a quest to bring about healing and wage peace."An instructive book that attempts to extend the message of brotherhood and compassion that has been forged from tragedy.

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Starred review from March 15, 2018
The cofounders of the anti-hate group Serve 2 Unite detail their journey toward a partnership in the wake of a horrific shooting at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin in 2012. At first blush, Arno Michaelis and Pardeep Singh Kaleka seem like unlikely allies. Kaleka grew up as the kindhearted son of devout Sikh parents and worked to better his community, first as a police officer and then as a teacher. Michaelis went from being a rabble-rousing teen to an influential member of a white-supremacist group, so violent and filled with hate that he found David Duke's rhetoric too mild. But after the birth of his daughter, Michaelis loses his taste for hate and violence and realizes how deeply misguided his beliefs are. He founds the group Life after Hate, which is what leads Kaleka to reach out after white-supremacist Wade Michael Page stormed the temple where his family worshipped and fatally shot six people, including Kaleka's father. With coauthor Fisher's assistance, both Kaleka's chronicling of the day of the shooting and Michaelis' frank recounting of his former attitudes and acts make for heartbreaking reading, but their work together is inspiring and gives readers hope that the next generation can do much to heal America's great divide.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)