HOME SO FAR AWAY

A fictional diary chronicles the experience of a young German woman—a Communist and a Jew—fighting fascism in Spain.

When Klara Philipsborn, a German living with her bourgeois family in Berlin, visits Spain in 1925, she experiences a “chemical shift” within herself, falling deeply in love with the place. A budding scientist with an interest in bacteriology, she’s able to secure a position as a lab assistant at the University of Madrid with the help of a referral from Albert Einstein, making her only one of four females out of over 2,000 students. A self-professed Communist with a “Marxist heart,” she becomes deeply involved in the leftist politics of Spain, and when Gen. Franco rises to power, she joins the Fifth Regiment, an “elite army of the people,” to serve as a nurse and translator in the fight against fascism. Meanwhile, Hitler ascends back home in Germany during a time when “logic has been replaced by wishful thinking,” a predicament that threatens her Jewish family, though her father stubbornly refuses to take the danger seriously. Berlowitz structures the entire tale as a series of journal entries composed by Klara replete with personal photographs—this generates an intimacy between the reader and Klara that results in a gripping immersion into the tale. The quotidian details of the entries and the granular accounts of the political scenes in both Spain and Germany, however, often slow the narrative to a crawl. Klara’s experience of alienation is deep and profoundly moving. Unable to return home and live openly as a Jew, she feels compelled to hide her religious identity even from her compatriots in the Fifth Regiment. Her sense of utter outrage seems to sustain her except when it is overcome by episodes of despair and hopelessness, a poignant inner turmoil that, more than political drama, is the core of the novel.

An affecting, historically astute novel.