THE PLUM TREES

A woman retraces her great-uncle’s steps through Auschwitz.

Grieving and disoriented at her uncle’s funeral, Consie is handed a letter that seems to indicate something surprising: Another uncle—the uncle’s uncle, in fact—might have escaped Auschwitz. Though his three daughters survived the camp, they’d long presumed both their parents dead. Consie is shocked to hear that Hermann might have staged an escape. In what seems to be the present day, she begins tracking down information—mainly oral testimonies from other Auschwitz survivors—that might indicate what happened to Hermann. One of these, a recording made by Hermann’s oldest daughter, Magda, makes up the crux of Shorr’s very fine novel. It’s a story within a story, and it’s so vividly and urgently written that, reading it, it’s easy to forget about Consie and her search entirely. But when Magda’s story ends, Consie’s continues. Shorr’s prose is powerful but never overblown, and while the details she includes about the suffering endured at Auschwitz might not be entirely new to most readers, the novel as a whole is still deeply moving. There’s also a subtle and very smart commentary running through the book about not only how history is recorded, but how it is then experienced and sometimes resisted. Consie notes how different her reaction to the oral testimonies was compared to her experience reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.When the book became “so disturbing as to be unbearable, she could still slam it shut and put it back on the shelf.” She could do no such thing with the stories she hears. As for Shorr’s book, you’ll have trouble putting it down at all, much less slamming it shut.

Written with urgency, elegance, and grace, Shorr’s novel is a deeply moving account of a family’s suffering.