Landau’s talents suggest she might do well with a more directly historical novel, but she has produced some strong...
This first novel follows one family through two wars, four romances and one death with enough thought and craft to remain several shelves above the potboiler section.
Lev Pearlmutter, a Jew with Eastern European roots who lives a financially comfortable life in Berlin with a German gentile wife, wants to escape “the shadowy presence of another past, another history”—i.e., his Jewishness. Yet after he joins up at the war’s outbreak in 1914 and leaves for the Eastern front, he soon falls in love with Leah, a poor, beautiful Jewish Russian peasant. She haunts him when he's back in Berlin after a relatively easy war, but it’s only when her nephew arrives in the city and falls in love with Lev’s daughter, Vicki, that the possibility of a reunion arises. Meanwhile, Lev’s son, Franz, has grown interested in the clothing-optional men’s nature camps that foster the Brown Shirts and make it difficult for the young man to conceal his homosexuality. Lev’s wife, Josephine, risks tilting the book into bodice-ripping territory in the hot and heavy moments she spends with her therapist. The rising Nazism has a fair number of targets in this one family, and Landau derives much of the novel’s meager tension from the reader’s certainty about what the characters only suspect: That it’s not a good time or place to be Jewish, gay or ambivalent. The author’s sense of history is strong in scenes of well-chosen detail, whether in village or city. At the same time, her World War I is largely bloodless, and WWII passes by in a few mentions and pages—a shadowy presence indeed.
Landau’s talents suggest she might do well with a more directly historical novel, but she has produced some strong characters in this highly readable, oddly sanitized look at assimilation and its discontents.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-87007-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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