Review: "Breaking the Code" by Karen Fisher-Alaniz

Breaking the Code by Karen Fisher-Alaniz
Published 2011 via Sourcebooks
★★★

Fisher-Alaniz grew up knowing about her father’s experience in the Navy during World War II—to a point. She knew he had served, she knew he hadn’t been in a combat position, and she knew he told the same sanitized stories over and over again. But on his 81st birthday, that changed: he handed her, without explanation, the notebooks full of letters that his mother had saved, letters that he had written while deployed in Hawaii. And as she dug deeper and deeper into these letters, Fisher-Alaniz started to see just how much more complex his experience had been than she had understood.

The story is told in something of a back-and-forth style: a few of Fisher-Alaniz’s father’s letters from the 1940s, then some of the more contemporary story, with Fisher-Alaniz and her father (whom I’ll refer to as Fisher) having lunch and digging, carefully, into more memories that her father would have preferred not to probe too deeply. It shouldn’t surprise anyone who has read the title that his work involved code-breaking, which was considered such secret and classified work that—to say nothing of the silence born of trauma—he simply locked those memories away for decade after decade.

The letters are fantastic. Letter-writing is rapidly becoming a lost art (someone less than ten years my junior recently told me that they’ve never sent a postcard and aren’t even sure how sending one works—do you need a stamp? etc.—which broke my brain a little), but when Fisher was away at war, he sent long, chatty letters that, well, sound straight out of the 1940s. It is strange to him, decades later, that his mother kept these letters and that his daughter would want to read them, but from my 2024 perspective of course his mother kept them (they’re vivid and full of personality, and when he was writing them she didn’t know if he’d come home alive), and of course his daughter wanted to keep reading once she’d started.

The contemporary sections are quite a lot flatter. They’re important to the story, because the story is not just about what Fisher did during the war but about how the two of them, driven by Fisher-Alaniz, started to uncover and unpack those experiences. The writing is serviceable, but—maybe partly because Fisher found so much of the war so hard to talk about—those sections feel more like scaffolding than like fully engaging story.

This has been on my TBR for years, and I’m very glad to have finally read it, even with reservations about the execution.