The Ballad of Sara Zane – Mike Davis

TEXT EXCERPT FOR THE BALLAD OF SARA ZANE

Somewhere on Hiway 1, between Sacramento and Monterey, California a beat-up old flatbed Ford pick-up with a homemade shanty on the back trundles South with a young teenage Sara Niezabitowska resting her head on the passenger- side window frame lamenting she and her Polish refugee parent’s never-ending flight and plight to survive:

I was only four years old when I screamed “DUSHA!” tore myself from my mother’s arms and bolted back inside for my teddy bear and but for the grace of God we would have ended up like the rest of our family who disappeared into Hitler’s death camps.

As it was, we stole into the night, like smoke and escaped. But that was two lifetimes ago now and today it is a hot and muggy mid-afternoon, August 2, 1951 – It’s also my sixteenth birthday. But it won’t be like most other sixteen-year old American girl’s birthday, there’ll be no party, gifts or even a cake with candles. It’ll be like all the rest since that early morning in Warsaw – Spent on, yet another, unfamiliar road on the way to another low-paying fruit picking job. But I shouldn’t complain. We’re lucky to be here at all. Momma and Poppa never speak of it and all I remember is hearing the crashing and banging and the relief on Momma’s face when I reappeared with teddy-bear Dusha.

After months of hiding and travelling at night, we eventually ended up in London and then on to New York. We spent a little over a year in Hell’s Kitchen living like animals, scrabbling for whatever we could to survive. We’re Jewish, you see – And we’ve been running ever since. When my father finally realised that they’d never recognise his Polish credentials; Momma, who’d taught school before meeting Poppa, applied for a teaching jobs, but the answer was always the same, Your English is not up to our standard, so she stayed home and taught me to speak proper English as well as every other subject.

Poppa, a prestigious accountant in Warsaw, had been reduced to cooking the books for a local gangster in order to survive. It nearly destroyed him. But to his credit he only worked there long enough to purchase this old ’40 Ford flat pick-up truck, our 10 x10 fold-up shanty, two beds, a potbelly stove and a small chest of drawers that just fitted into the bed of the pick-up for sixty dollars from a farming family who’d come east looking for work. It was our ticket out of Hell’s Kitchen. It would be the first time we seemed to be going to somewhere instead of running from somewhere.

We followed the picking seasons for several years and the winters were always ‘lean times.’ It seemed to me that we would never find a place to call home. We worked our way all across the United States until we finally discovered California – And another ocean that marked the point where we’d be heading towards what we’d escaped only a few years earlier. But instead of feeling cornered or trapped; this magical, warmth – Warm enough to actually be comfortable all year round. A place where they say it never snows and Poppa can find consistent picking work so maybe we can stay in one place long enough for me to make some friends and have a life like everyone else seems to have.

But my short life had already taught me that nothing is certain or forever and I should live every moment. Right now, with the wind blowing my hair everywhere and cooling my face, Highway 1 below Castroville, California is the best place I’ve ever been. It feels good to close my eyes and let the thump, thump, thumping rhythm of the road slowly lull me to sleep.

WAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!! The ear shattering blare of a semi-trailer’s air horn blasts me back into a lurching and swaying present that won’t stop until the sounds of flying gravel and branches raking the old truck cease and we rock to a stop, many yards off the road in the middle of an artichoke field. I only know they were artichokes because the irate farmer whose field we were in, let us know in no uncertain terms. I think Poppa had, gotten drowsy, lulled by the heat and monotonous sounds of the road and fallen asleep at the wheel. All in all, it was lucky that we hadn’t hit the row of trees or rolled it over as we’d careened through. Poppa paid the farmer two dollars for the damaged artichokes and after making sure everything was all right; we pulled back onto the road again. Momma chided him for the next half-hour for not at least getting one artichoke for the pot.

Wide awake now and with all of our eyes glued to the shimmering road ahead, we rattled towards Monterey on a concrete ribbon of concrete sections interrupted by tar seams that beat a bebop rhythm as we meandered through a desert landscape. Were it not for this road, the berm strewn with beer cans, coke bottles, cigarette packs, the detritus of the new American industrial age it would be unchanged by man. It isn’t long

AUTHOR’S WORD: The Ballad of Sara Zane

My first wife whom I tragically lost to cancer in 1994 was an adopted child who never got to meet her birth mother. It was a shadow that she lived under. I learned about the possibility of miracles when my daughter eventually tracked her down and we all met her. There was some closure but not for all, obviously. I have been a magnet for adopted kids my whole life. Several of my girlfriends and more of my buddies than I care to admit have all been adopted and had the same anxieties and fears and always seemed to be under my wing because I posed no threat to them or their existence and always had time for them. Fortunately, Christine found her forever love in me. Most of my adopted acquaintances somehow never made that connection. In the case of Sara Zane, it all begins with a key. Some stories just have to be told because it would be such a tragedy if we forgot about hope and the power of love. It’s important to remember that miracles and happy endings still happen.

Précis

The Ballad of Sara Zane, the first novel in Mike Davis’s Shawn McQueen Trilogy, is an evocative journey through post-war America seen through the eyes of a young Polish-Jewish refugee. Sixteen-year-old Sara Niezabitowska, who survived the Holocaust as a child, travels the length of the United States with her parents in a battered flatbed Ford, following the picking seasons in search of stability and belonging.

As the Niezabitowska family heads down California’s Highway 1 in 1951, Sara’s voice reveals a haunting mix of innocence, loss, and longing. Her parents—once educated professionals in Warsaw—are reduced to migrant workers, hardened by survival yet bound by hope. In vivid, cinematic prose, Davis paints their journey as both physical and spiritual: a family in exile, caught between the ghosts of Europe and the uncertain promise of racist America.

When the family reaches California, fate delivers a miracle. Tomasz, Sara’s father, is offered work as an accountant by the benevolent Señor Villareal, lifting them from itinerant poverty into a semblance of normal life. For Sara, the change marks the awakening of youth: freedom, friendship, and first love. Through her friendship with the spirited Margie and her encounters at the beaches of Malibu—where she meets the larger-than-life surfer Dale Velzy and Hollywood stuntman Tommy Zane—Sara’s world opens to new possibilities and heartbreaks. She falls in love, pregnant and they say died of a broken heart leaving an orphan daughter named Gina suffering the orphan’s unique angst of not knowing who or why she is. It’ll take a miracle to complete her circle and couple of surfers and a busted up little bull rider do it by accident. It is here that fate intervenes and drops recently widowed surfboard shaper Shawn McQueen into the mix to bridge the worlds.

Davis weaves a rich tapestry of cultures—Polish, Mexican, Californian—against the backdrop of 1950s America’s surf, sun, and social change. Sara’s coming-of-age mirrors a universal search for identity and belonging, touching on displacement, prejudice, resilience, and love’s redemptive power. With lyrical realism and historical sensitivity, The Ballad of Sara Zane captures the fragility and courage of youth rising from the ashes of war into the mythic light of the American dream.

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Keywords

Sara Zane, Mike Davis author, Shawn McQueen trilogy, post-war America fiction, Holocaust survivor story, coming-of-age novel, 1950s California, migrant family story, Malibu surf culture, historical fiction, female protagonist, love and loss novel, refugee narrative, Dale Velzy fiction, Polish-Jewish immigrant novel, American dream story, surf history novel, emotional literary fiction, postwar migration novel, Californian coast novel.

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Metadata

• Title: The Ballad of Sara Zane
• Author: Mike Davis
• Series: The Shawn McQueen Trilogy (Book One)
• Genre: Historical Fiction / Coming-of-Age / Post-War Drama
• Setting: California, USA – 1950s
• Length: Approx. 300 pages
• Themes: Survival, exile, identity, adolescence, love, resilience, cultural displacement
• Tone: Reflective, cinematic, emotional, redemptive
• Audience: Readers of literary and historical fiction, fans of epic human dramas like The Grapes of Wrath or The Book Thief

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