Beautifully written, strongly imagined, and deeply felt.
Another marvelous tale steeped in Jewish history and culture, from the author of The River Midnight (1999).
The Yiddish theater and the teeming streets of London’s Jewish ghetto in the last quarter of the 19th century form a vibrant backdrop for Nattel’s two strong-minded heroines. Nehama arrives from Poland in 1875 and falls into the clutches of the Squire, who turns the 17-year-old virgin into a prostitute and beats her savagely when she tries to run away. Even after she escapes and marries the goodhearted tailor Nathan, she’s convinced that her seamy past is to blame for her miscarriage. So when Emilia, daughter of an affluent but sadistic Minsk notary, turns up in London in 1886, just as unprotected as Nehama was—and very pregnant as well—the rough-edged East Ender rescues the new arrival from the pimps prowling the docks. Emilia flees, leaving behind her infant daughter to be raised by Nehama and Nathan. Their struggles are contrasted with Emilia’s comfortable life after her brief stint as a fashionable shopgirl attracts the admiration of successful hack writer Jacob Zalkind, whom she allows to believe she’s a gentile. The author paints powerful portraits of two very different women who both hide the truth about their past from their husbands, while also tracing the age-old immigrant conflict between allegiance to ethnic roots and yearnings for the tantalizing freedoms offered in a new society. The ghosts of Nehama’s grandmother and the first wife of Emilia’s hateful father watch over the action; the Toronto-based author deftly folds these magical elements into the essentially realistic storyline. Her prose is just as finely balanced, rich in humor that’s never simply for laughs (Emilia suffers “the ordinary fortune of every woman from the day that Eve was pushed out of her garden and realized that she must find a good address”), and filled with passages of heartbreaking beauty that acknowledge the permanent scars left by tragedy but affirm the healing powers of love and self-knowledge.
Beautifully written, strongly imagined, and deeply felt.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-4966-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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