Stark, unadorned fiction, well worth reading.
Deceptively simple in style, Schwarz’s narrative discloses depths of tragedy, of suffering, and occasionally of hope.
This debut novel covers the period from 1945 to 2000 and ranges geographically from the Polish-German border to New York City. In May of 1945 we meet several Holocaust survivors, including Pavel, who escaped from a camp three weeks before the liberation; Fela, a woman whose husband disappeared and who was presumably killed; and Chaim, a bright 14-year-old who serves as a teaching assistant at a postwar refugee camp. For the next 55 years we learn of the intertwined fates of these characters as well as of those who orbit them, including Fishl, who escaped along with Pavel; Hinda, Pavel’s strong-willed sister; and Sima, a teacher at the refugee camp who married Chaim. In the beginning Schwarz takes us from the physical difficulties of survival to the logistical difficulties of getting out of postwar Germany. Most of the survivors want to emigrate either to Britain or to the United States, but this desire involves complicated issues of negotiation and influence. Pavel and Fela first meet when they’re rooming in a widow’s house, and they fall into an affair, complicated by their lack of certainty about what happened to Fela’s husband. Pavel’s sister wants to marry a Jewish man in a Jewish ceremony, but an American rabbi insists on documentation that has literally gone up in smoke. Despite such impediments, Pavel and Fela marry and move to the United States, where Pavel has a tailoring business in New York. The characters raise families, face difficult business decisions and have an occasional affair, but despite renewing their lives they remain haunted by their past. As the title suggests, they remain displaced and, if not homeless, at least estranged. In one of the final scenes Pavel becomes enraged when a well-meaning American Jew suggests Pavel get the tattoo removed from his arm, implying that he should be ashamed of his past.
Stark, unadorned fiction, well worth reading.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-188190-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.
Clayton’s (Beautiful Exiles, 2018, etc.) novel about the Kindertransport program joins the recent spate of Holocaust books (from All the Light We Cannot See to The Tattooist of Auschwitz) that allow readers to identity with heroes and survivors instead of victims.
The real-life heroine here is Truus Wijsmuller, the Dutch Christian woman instrumental in smuggling approximately 10,000 children out of the Reich and into England through the Kindertransport. The villain is the infamous Adolph Eichmann. Early in his career Eichmann authored the influential paper “The Jewish Problem,” about how to rid the Reich of Jews. After Germany took over Austria he landed a powerful position in Vienna. In 1938, Truus met with Eichmann, who offered what he assumed was an impossible deal: If she could arrange papers for exactly 600 healthy children to travel in one week’s time—on the Sabbath, when Jewish law forbids travel—he would allow safe passage. With help from British activists, Truus successfully made the arrangements and found refuge for all 600 children in England. Clayton intersects these historical figures and events with fictional characters trapped in Vienna. Aspiring playwright Stephan, 15 years old when the novel begins in 1936, comes from a wealthy Jewish family, manufacturers of highly prized chocolate candies. The Nazis strip ownership of the chocolate factory from Stephan’s father and hand it to Stephan’s Aryan Uncle Michael. A guilty collaborator torn between greed and love, Michael is the novel’s most realistically portrayed character, neither good nor entirely evil. Sensitive, brilliant, and precocious, Stephan is naturally drawn to equally sensitive, brilliant, and precocious Žofie-Helene, a math genius whose anti-Nazi father died under questionable circumstances and whose journalist mother writes the outspokenly anti-Nazi articles about actual events, like Britain’s limiting Jewish immigration and the invasion of Czechoslovakia, that punctuate the plot. After Kristallnacht Stephan ends up hiding in Vienna’s sewers (a weird nod to Orson Welles in The Third Man), and Žofie-Helene’s mother is arrested. Will Stephan and Žofie-Helene end up among the children Truus saves?
Workmanlike and less riveting than the subject matter.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-294693-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Stunningly original and altogether arresting.
An exquisite critique of patriarchal culture from the author of All My Puny Sorrows (2014).
The Molotschna Colony is a fundamentalist Mennonite community in South America. For a period of years, almost all the women and girls have awakened to find themselves bloodied and bruised, with no memories of what might have happened in the night. At first, they assumed that, in their weakness, they were attracting demons to their beds. Then they learn that, in fact, they have been drugged and raped repeatedly by men of the colony. It’s only when one woman, Salome, attacks the accused that outside authorities are called—for the men’s protection. While the rest of the men are away in the city, arranging for bail, a group of women gather to decide how they will live after this monstrous betrayal. The title means what it says: This novel is an account of two days of discussion, and it is riveting and revelatory. The cast of characters is small, confined to two families, but it includes teenage girls and grandmothers and an assortment of women in between. The youngest form an almost indistinguishable dyad, but the others emerge from the formlessness their culture tries to enforce through behavior, dress, and hairstyle as real and vividly compelling characters. Shocked by the abuse they have endured at the hands of the men to whom they are supposed to entrust not only their bodies, but also their souls, these women embark on a conversation that encompasses all the big questions of Christian theology and Western philosophy—a ladies-only Council of Nicea, Plato’s Symposium with instant coffee instead of wine. This surely is not the first time that these women are thinking for themselves, but it might be the first time they are questioning the male-dominated system that endangered them and their children, and it is clearly the first time they are working through the practical ramifications of what they know and what they truly believe. It’s true that the narrator is a man, but that’s of necessity. These women are illiterate and therefore incapable of recording their thoughts without his sympathetic assistance.
Stunningly original and altogether arresting.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63557-258-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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