It is
a powerful and memorable work that pays due respect to its subject matter.
(Review by Margaret von Klemperer)
Some years ago, the First World War was the
hot topic for serious novelists. These things move in cycles - now it seems to
be the Holocaust that is in vogue. It’s a tricky subject for fiction, and, to
my mind, some of the novels that have been lauded and admired are distastefully
manipulative and simply unbelievable. So I was interested to see what such a
skilled and perceptive writer as Alice Hoffman would make of it. When I read
the blurb and saw references to the fantastical and magical, I was dubious. How
could this be made to work with such a brutal, real and tragic subject?
Set in the years 1941 to 1945, the novel
opens in Berlin, with a Jewish mother desperate to save the life of her young
daughter. She visits an Orthodox rabbi, steeped in the arcane world of Jewish
mysticism, in the hope that he can create a golem, a mysterious creature made
from clay, without a soul, but dedicated to the protection of one human. It is
the rabbi’s daughter, Ettie, who creates Ava, the golem who is tasked with
taking care of Lea and leading her to Paris. The golem has a limited life:
ultimately it must be destroyed by the person it protects, or it will become
human and begin to think for itself with potentially disastrous consequences.
In the skilled hands of Hoffman, this
scenario is weirdly believable, and, by the end, deeply moving as Lea, Ava,
Ettie and her little sister flee to France. Paris is no safe haven as Jews are
being rounded up and sent east to the gas chambers, so they, along with various
other characters including two young Jewish men, Victor and Julien, flee south
to Vichy France – Victor and Ettie, who is fixated on revenge, to join the
Resistance and Lea, Ava and Julien in the hope of an escape to Switzerland.
Meanwhile, around them, the war rages in all its brutality, treachery and
hatred.
All the peripheral characters are fleshed
out in a way that makes them very real and gives weight to a story that is both
a thrilling tale of adventure and escape and a poignant meditation on the power
of love – love of a mother for a child; love between siblings and love between
men and women. It is a powerful and memorable work that pays due respect to its
subject matter. Margaret von Klemperer
The
World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman is published by
Scribners.
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