Books by Margret Berendes
The Arabic Anka Pendant and Where Time is Round

Where Time is Round and Ravens Ride the Wind

A suicide epidemic in the Alaskan village Emomeguk frightens the Yup'ik Eskimos.The consequences of this disaster create a story of its own that intertwines the lives of two people with entirely different backgrounds, an Eskimo Elder of Russian descent and a German woman psychiatrist who have at first sight nothing in common and relate to each other in an antagonistic, prejudiced fashion.

Although the story takes place on American soil most readers are neither familiar with the life of modern Eskimos, who are forced to live between two cultures nor the archaic landscape near the Bering Sea. The Alaskan Eskimos are not restricted in their living space to reservations like the American Indians but live on the tundra in about some sixty villages, tucked away and separated by thousands of thaw lakes and hundreds of rivers without any connecting roads.

The outsider who tends to simplistically blame alcoholism for the chain of suicides will learn about the true complexity of circumstances, responsible for this disaster. Among other factors the reader will be introduced to the importance of a psychologically interesting phenomenon, a "contagion", manifested here in the so called curse, the prediction of a shaman from fifteen years ago.

Practicing psychiatry in the bush of western Alaska calls for more than conventional medical principles and medication. Without intuition, inventiveness and last not least compassion, the power of the heart, the work cannot be done.

And these are the qualities the Yup'ik Elder and the woman psychiatrist have to apply in their challenge do deal with the aftermath of the suicides. At random meetings their initial antagonism and prejudices cannot but slowly wane and they accept their encounter as predestined. Their witness of these tragedies leads them to exploring together the meaning of life and the enigma of death, thus finding through each other a fuller understanding of their own life.