GRATITUDE

Rambling Holocaust novel from Hungarian-Canadian Kertes (Boardwalk, 1998, etc.) refracts the fate of Hungary’s Jews through a variety of lives.

The German invasion in the spring of 1944 brings with it roundups and mass deportations. Lili Bandel, home alone in the Jewish enclave of Tolgy, hears the marauding soldiers. She ventures out to find the town emptied, family and neighbors gone. The resourceful blonde 16-year-old makes her way to Budapest. Further south in Szeged, dentist Istvan Beck learns that the Germans have hung his father, the town’s Jewish mayor. Istvan finds refuge in the cellar of his assistant Marta, a compassionate Catholic. In Budapest, fate brings Lili into the Beck family circle; she and Istvan’s cousin Simon eventually fall in love. The deportations are building in momentum. Istvan’s brother Paul, a lawyer, is fighting them, but he needs an authority figure. Enter Raoul Wallenberg, the heroic young Swedish diplomat whose strategy of issuing Jews protective Swedish papers and setting up safe houses will save hundreds of lives and bring him fame. Kertes’ treatment of Wallenberg is deeply disappointing; the Swede is a pallid figure constantly upstaged by the flamboyant Paul, who single-handedly stops a transport and saves four family members. The focus moves among the Becks in Budapest, Istvan in his cellar and his protector Marta, who is deported to Auschwitz for merely “a whiff of transgression.” For every horror, there is a miracle. Marta is saved from the gas chambers by a guard who sets her free after raping her; a Polish nobleman and a hot-air balloonist ease her journey home. So it goes, too, with Lili and Simon: He is deported to a Transylvanian labor camp, but Lili is allowed a conjugal visit, and the lovebirds return to Budapest like “tourists.” These sudden reversals of fortune undercut the more credible depictions of loss and suffering.

Well-researched but floundering melodrama.