A quirky but exceptional story of infinite love and life-sustaining commitment.
Polish writer Krall transmutes the real experience of a Holocaust survivor into an emotionally bleached yet devastating account of where love can take us.
In a shockingly matter-of-fact tone, Krall (The Woman from Hamburg and Other True Stories, 2005, etc.) recounts the horrors of Jewish suffering during World War II in brief chapters and a terse narrative voice: “Shayek leaves to fetch his sisters but comes back without them. They committed suicide, after poisoning little Szymus. Shayek tried to find out where they were buried, but the man who dug their grave is no longer alive either.” Without preamble, her short novel plunges the reader into the midst of life in the Warsaw ghetto, where bombs, lice, typhus, and death are everyday events. The book’s running refrain when someone disappears is: “That’s too bad….We’re still here.” The narrative belongs to Izolda Regensberg, who meets her husband, Shayek, on Page 1 and spends most of the remaining pages trying to save him, first from Auschwitz and later Mauthausen concentration camps. Initially she escapes from the ghetto and works to save her own family and Shayek’s, dyeing her hair blonde, taking on an Aryan identity, and accepting rape by policemen as a form of currency. Her nightmare picaresque journey of arrests, escapes, and desperate negotiations continues after Shayek’s arrest. She is sent into forced labor, beaten and tortured by the Gestapo, later dispatched to Auschwitz herself, and yet her indomitable resilience pushes her ever forward—and the occasional chapters set 25 years in the future, in Israel, with Izolda surrounded by grandchildren, confirm she will survive. But it’s Krall’s unique voice that dominates this detached, surreal, curiously playful tale of a woman of indefatigable resourcefulness trapped between history and her heart.
A quirky but exceptional story of infinite love and life-sustaining commitment.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55861-944-9
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
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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