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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
Categories: HISTORICAL FICTION
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The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Categories: RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
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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 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION
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