Rosenbaum’s first 50 pages, told in the voice of the ghost of Friedl, are full of beauty, energy and wisdom. But the later...
A Jewish woman’s ghost in Poland tries to influence three generations of a family of nonbelievers as debut novelist Rosenbaum tackles major themes of Jewish identity and belief in God.
In 1905, 83-year-old Friedl Alterman’s soul awakens in the village of Zokof’s Jewish cemetery when young Itzik Lieber hugs her gravestone while hiding from a Polish mob after an act of heroism. Although Itzik has what she considers the soul of a raw potato, Friedl’s spirit protects him and guides him to Warsaw and into the care of a young socialist who gets Itzik safely to America. Friedl then waits in a blue void until 1991, when Itzik’s son Nathan, a constitutional scholar who knows little of his father’s early life and disdains his father’s anti-intellectual socialism, attends a seminar in Poland. Shocked at the country’s widespread anti-Semitism, he visits Zokof and meets Rafael, Zokof’s last surviving Jew. Raphael, whom Friedl also protects, tells him Itzik’s story, but despite dreamlike visits from Friedl herself, Nathan returns to America with his soul only half-cooked because he cannot accept his belief in God. A year later, after Nathan’s sudden, fatal heart attack, his daughter Ellen, a choreographer, accepts a three-month dance project in Krakow. She too is jolted by the anti-Semitism she finds. She also meets and falls in love with Marek, a Polish Catholic drawn to Jewish music. When Friedl’s spirit visits, Ellen is far more receptive than Nathan. She and Marek help Rafael re-establish the Jewish cemetery, while through dance, Ellen finds a way to release Friedl’s spirit, and perhaps her own.
Rosenbaum’s first 50 pages, told in the voice of the ghost of Friedl, are full of beauty, energy and wisdom. But the later sections suffer from a more pedestrian narrative that borders on doctrinaire.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-316-01451-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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