Chaotically plotted, but brings this turbulent age to vibrant life with sympathetic characters, both minor and major.
A down-to-earth Virgin Mary fields offers from Joseph and Pontius Pilate.
Romanian-born novelist/memoirist Popescu (Footprints in Time, 2008, etc.) grafts the story of adolescent Mary onto the dilemma of Eve, who was, he intimates, set up by the Creator to be both the repository of humanity’s hopes and the mother of all scapegoats. When Mary’s not puzzling out sexual politics, she’s the de facto leader of her clan, which has been exiled from Nazareth by King Herod the Great. We first see her through the eyes of handsome young Roman Apella (aka Pontius Pilatus). The last scion of a family executed by Augustus Caesar, he has been appointed through a convoluted chain of happenstance to be Augustus’ spy in Israel. Although he’s pledged to marry Caesar’s niece, Apella is immediately smitten with 17-year-old Mary, who saved her tribe from certain death in the desert by discovering a well, and offers her the status of a favored bondwoman in his household. Mary, though attracted to Apella, loves Joseph, a woodcarver apprenticed to her father, who disappeared during the Jewish gang wars (fomented by Herod) that drove her clan out of Nazareth. As the Nazarenes, assured by Apella of Herod’s forgiveness, prepare to return home, Mary learns that Joseph, who has made a fortune sculpting statues, is now betrothed to the daughters of the competing gang leaders and is requesting Mary’s hand as third wife. Stung, but not considering bondwoman-ship an acceptable alternative, Mary climbs Mount Barak to consult the Creator himself. He tells her, in effect, that all she has to do is wait for the men to make their usual hash of things. Sure enough, the gang leaders perish or flee, removing their daughters as competition. Popescu ingeniously skirts the thorny question of the virgin birth: Mary seems to have gotten pregnant the old-fashioned way. Or has she?
Chaotically plotted, but brings this turbulent age to vibrant life with sympathetic characters, both minor and major.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3263-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.
Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.
Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.
Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
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 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
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