THE DISTANCE OF MERCY

A young Austrian woman leaves home to study the violin against the objections of her father and finds comfort in an unlikely friendship in this debut historical novella.

Nicolette Stolicz is born in Vienna at the conclusion of World War II, just before Austria is liberated from the Nazi occupation. Both of her grandfathers were members of the Nazi Party, their political allegiances a hard reality for her father, Josef, to accept since he loathed Hitler and “scorned his countrymen who accepted a serpent as savior.” A talented musician, he refused to play in Hitler’s orchestra and was shot in the hand for his insolence. The war created a deep schism within Nicolette’s family, one she exacerbates when she asks her grandmother for money so she can study the violin in Chicago, a decision her father interprets as a profound betrayal. While in the United States, Nicolette finds work as a cleaning woman and befriends Tillie, an African American woman whose husband, Jimmy, was killed in Normandy. Drancik poignantly chronicles the burgeoning friendship between the two, one that becomes an important source of solace for both, especially for Nicolette when she finds herself in trouble with no one to turn to. The author depicts with an uncommon amalgam of power and restraint the two women’s relationship; in the late 1960s, the echoes of the bigotry Jews experienced in Austria movingly evoke the prejudice Tillie confronts in Chicago. In addition, Drancik’s prose is quietly elegant and, like Nicolette’s character, quickly vacillates between sleepily laconic and unabashedly angry. But the short work as a whole strains for a didactic lesson, and that laboriousness feels like literary condescension, especially at the story’s end, which seems a bit trite and sententious.

A thoughtful tale of friendship, emotionally affecting and intelligently composed.