Tag: World War II

Review 2242: The Oppermanns

~ whatmeread ~ 3 Comments

One of my brothers and I have gotten into the habit of buying each other books that we think are excellent. The Oppermanns was his Christmas present to me, and I just got around to reading it.

The novel is astounding because it was written concurrently with the events it describes, That is, it begins late in 1932 and ends in the summer of 1933 and was written during that time period. It tells the story of a wealthy German Jewish family. It’s considered the last masterpiece of the German-Jewish literary movement.

The Oppermanns are wealthy well-known residents of Berlin whose family owns a chain of furniture stores. Martin runs the stores. Gustav is an intellectual who spends most of his time enjoying art, literature, and music. Edgar is a world-famous scientist and surgeon. At the beginning of the novel, all three are happy with their lives, and although Martin has half-heartedly sought a merger with a competitor to mask the Jewish ownership of the family store, he has muffed it and doesn’t much care. The Nationalists, as the Nazis are referred to throughout the novel, seem to be on the wane.

However, within weeks the Leader (his name is never mentioned) has been made Chancellor because foolish landowners and big business, having drained the country dry, think they can use the Nationalists. Things begin to turn bad. One of Gustav’s friends emigrates to Palestine, but Gustav thinks he is being alarmist. After all, this kind of thing has happened before, and it always dies down.

This novel documents the slow horror of the Nationalist take-over (not so slow, really) and shows how easy it is to fool oneself and stay in one’s comfort zone even when it becomes uncomfortable.

The novel is all the more chilling because of how early it is written, because readers today know more about what will happen than Feuchtwanger did. It has a slightly optimistic ending, implying that the German people—whom he always differentiates from the Nazis—would not put up with brutality forever, but of course we know the German people didn’t stop anything.

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Review 2225: The Postcard

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Although sold as fiction, I believe that The Postcard is very much autobiographical and historical, the story of the fates of Berest’s relatives and her own search for an identity.

The search begins with a postcard, one that arrived years before but that Anne’s mother Lélia shows her much later. It is an old postcard containing only the names of Anne’s grandmother’s parents, sister, and brother. All of them died in Auschwitz. The postcard is addressed by another hand to Lélia’s mother Myriam, but at Lélia’s address, where Myriam did not live. It is a mystery. Is it a threat? A reminder?

Myriam has never spoken about their family’s past and now she is dead, so both Lélia and Anne have grown up knowing very little about their family, Ephraïm and Emma Rabinovitch and their children, Noémie and Jacques. Since receiving the postcard, though, Lélia has built up an archive of documents about the history of the family up to when they were deported by the French government. The first part of the novel covers this history.

The further sections of the novel are about Anne’s attempts to discover who sent the postcard and what happened to Myriam. Why was she the only one missed, and what did she do during the war? And finally, how has her family’s experience affected Anne’s own life?

This is a deeply engaging story and an important one, I think. Although the Holocaust is long past, its effects are still reverberating.

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Review 2214: Life and Fate

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Finished in 1960, Russian author Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate was confiscated by the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) and had to be smuggled out to be published in Europe. Taking War and Peace as its model, it is about the pressures of totalitarian governments during the siege of Stalingrad. It centers around one extended family, the Shaposhnikovs, but it also includes some of the German officers and others, visiting a variety of wartime settings: a besieged plant in Stalingrad, a German concentration camp, a scientific institute in Moscow, a Russian tank corps, and so on.

Because of its broad scope and length (more than 800 pages), it has a lot of characters, maybe a dozen of whom we visit and revisit, but others whom we see only once or twice. Some of the ones we revisit are Krymov, a commisar who is the ex-husband of Yevgenia Shaposhnikova; Viktor Shtrum, a famous physicist married to Lyudmila Shaposhnikova; Pyotr Novikov, a tank commander in love with Yevgenia; Yevgenia herself, who is worried about both Krymov and Novikov; Sofya Levinton, a doctor and friend of Yevgenia on her way to a German gas chamber. There is an appendix to the book listing hundreds of characters, but it doesn’t list most of the male characters’ first names or patronymics, so at times I wasn’t sure who the characters were talking about.

Although the Russian characters are uniformly patriotic, almost all of them live in fear, remembering the Terror of 1937 when many people were disappeared or deported to labor camps. Those times aren’t really over, as several characters run into trouble for minor infractions or no infraction at all, resulting in imprisonment and torture for some, demotions or exile for others. One character is labeled an enemy of the state for reporting that a soldier on his own side shot at him. In addition, bureaucracy gets in the way of people trying to do their war work.

This novel is powerful at times, but because of its structure, I didn’t really feel much connection to any of the characters except maybe Novikov, who spends hundreds of pages yearning for Yevgenia, not knowing she has returned to Krymov. It wasn’t until I was well into the book that I realized it was a sequel to Grossman’s Stalingrad, and it refers back to events that presumably occurred in that book, but it’s hard to know whether reading it first would have helped.

Also, Grossman occasionally takes a paragraph or two, sometimes a whole chapter, to philosophize on some subject. That’s a kind of polemic writing I don’t appreciate.

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Review 2175: White Shadow

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In this second book of Roy Jacobsen’s Barrøy trilogy, it is World War II and the Nazi’s have invaded Norway. The small island of Barrøy, the home of Ingrid’s family, has been evacuated. Ingrid has been living on the main island working in the canning factory, and her family is dispersed.

One day Ingrid defies the Germans and gets on a boat to row back to Barrøy. She goes into her family home without paying much attention to signs that someone has been in it, and it’s as if her brain refuses to see at first that there are dead bodies on the shore. A German ship carrying Russian prisoners has been bombed. She spends a day covering and burying bodies but eventually finds one man alive—a Russian, badly injured, up in the loft of the house.

Ingrid takes care of him but also must keep him safe from the Germans, who are observing her from the main island. She also is trying to bring the farm back into shape and fish to feed them.

The novel takes us to the end of the war, during which Ingrid has a difficult time.

Jacobsen tells this story with his usual pure, spare prose, a moving novel about human transcendence over great difficulty. I just love this series.

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Review 2136: The Secret Guests

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A while back, I tried reading a mystery by Benjamin Black, a pen name for the writer John Banville. It made me interested enough to try another book by him.

During the Blitz, the British government decides to send the two princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, away for safe-keeping. Ireland is selected, presumably because it is neutral. Garda Detective Strafford, who is assigned to security, thinks the choice of Ireland is crazy, because there are still many people in the newly independent Ireland who hate the British, but the British involved don’t seem to know that. Celia Nashe, the MI5 agent assigned, just wants to break through the old boys club and get a decent mission.

So, Celia and the princesses are sent, otherwise unaccompanied, to join the household of the Duke of Edenmore with only Strafford for company, surrounded by a hidden detachment of incompetent Irish army men. Clonmillis Hall proves to be a castle—ramshackle, comfortless, cold, and poorly run.

No, this isn’t Cold Comfort Farm but a pretty good thriller, as the local IRA agent finds out who the girls are and notifies his contacts in Belfast. But first we see the discomfort of Nashe and Strafford, the homesickness and boredom of the girls.

Nothing much about this semi-literary thriller is predictable. The girls are lightly characterized—Elizabeth as reserved and priggish, Margaret as sly and mischievous, but still with sympathy. Although the novel changes point of view, it sticks mostly with Strafford. An interesting, engrossing read.

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Review 2126: The Flight Portfolio

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As soon as I finished reading Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge, I looked to see what else she had written, and that’s how I found The Flight Portfolio. This novel is based on true events with real historical characters except for Elliott Grant and some main invented characters.

It’s 1940, and American journalist Varian Fry is working in Marseille as the head of a charitable organization. Its mission is to help as many European artists, writers, and other intellectuals as it can to leave Europe and escape the Nazis. This mission is supposed to be legal but of course Fry has to use illegal means to evacuate people sought by the Nazis or by the Vichy government. The book begins with him trying to persuade the Chagalls to leave, but they think they are unassailable.

Into the chaos of the office work, including the eviction of the charity, comes a request for a meeting. It is from Varian’s old schoolmate at Harvard, in fact his ex-lover, Elliott Grant, who disappeared when Varian decided to pursue marriage and a normal life. Grant has come to ask Varian’s help in finding the son of his own lover, Professor Gregor Katznelson, a brilliant nuclear physicist who is somewhere in Europe trying to evade the Nazis.

While Varian works hard trying to get exit papers and arrange routes of escape, his relationship with Grant rekindles. He is forced to face his old decision and determine whether he wants to continue hiding his real self. His office faces searches and arrests, closures of escape routes, arrangements made only for clients to refuse to leave, blockages by government officials, and other obstacles.

The novel is riveting. Orringer is not only an excellent writer but a great story teller. I love it when I discover someone who is this good.

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Review 2125: N or M?

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Agatha Christie said she liked Tommy and Tuppence best of her protagonists, so I decided to read them all in order. N or M? is the third. Unfortunately, they tend to be espionage novels, which are not her best even though Tommy and Tuppence are fun.

It’s 1940, and both Tommy and Tuppence are frustrated because no one wants them to help in the war effort. Tommy at 49 is considered too old for intelligence work. However, shortly after he makes another attempt, he’s called on by a Mr. Grant who has an independent operation for Tommy only.

England has become infiltrated by Nazi sympathizers in all levels of government, which is why Mr. Grant wants someone from the outside. He has information that either N or M—both German spies, one male and one female—is at the San Souci rooming house in Leamington. Tommy is to pretend to have got a boring job in Scotland then go to Leamington and check into the San Souci. He does so, only to find one of the guests is Tuppence, who has eavesdropped on his meeting with Mr. Grant. So, pretending they don’t know each other, the two begin investigating the household.

I thought that Tommy and Tuppence were a little dense about the identities of the spies. I knew who one was almost immediately. However, this was the usual romp with some adventure and risk to our hero.

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Review 2065: The Invisible Bridge

~ whatmeread ~ 8 Comments

One of the reasons I learned to love reading was that I got swept up into another time or place or even world. As I got older and more discriminating, this experience happened less often. It happened most recently within a few pages of starting The Invisible Bridge, which I read for my James Tait Black project.

Andras Lévi, a young Hungarian Jew, arrives in Paris in 1937 to study architecture. He has brought with him a letter that an acquaintance asked him to mail once he was in Paris. He mails the letter but notices the address.

Soon he is involved in the technicalities of art school, made more difficult because he almost immediately loses his scholarship, a first act of the anti-Semitisim that is perceptibly increasing, although not as bad in Paris as it was in Budapest. He seeks a job at a theater from Zoltán Novak, a man he met on the train from Hungary. When he begins a friendship there with an older actress, she sends him to lunch with friends at the address on the envelope he mailed, and that’s how he meets Klara, an older woman with whom he falls madly in love.

This novel, which starts out seeming very particular, about a love affair between two people, grows into a novel of great breadth, covering events of World War II, the Hungarian Holocaust, life in work camps, the siege of Budapest. All of it is centered in the importance of family.

I absolutely loved this novel. It is sweeping, wonderfully well written, touching, harrowing. And what a story, based on the lives of Orringer’s grandparents. I can’t recommend this book enough.

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Review 2050: Summer Pudding

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After Janet Brain’s employer’s office is bombed in the Blitz, she travels to the village of Worsingford where her mother and sister Sheila have made their new home. She has never been there before, but she makes a new friend on the train, Barbara Haines. Barbara’s reactions to some things she says should tell Janet that something is going on, but she doesn’t notice.

Janet arranged for her mother to move out of London into the country because her doctor urged her to make her mother get some rest without telling her she has a bad heart. Sheila was supposed to be doing the housework. But when she arrives at the cottage, she finds her mother more worn than ever and Sheila, beautiful and spoiled, doing absolutely nothing. Janet had planned to join the WAAFs but realizes she can’t leave her mother with Sheila.

Janet learns that Sheila agreed to teach Iris, the daughter of their neighbor and landlord, Donald Sheldon, months ago but has not kept her promise. So Janet goes over to Sheldon’s to offer her services. She is attracted to Donald, a widower, but finds him acting oddly when she tries to bargain for her pay. Donald also has a housekeeper, Gladys, who is jealous of him.

As Janet gets to know Donald, he alternates between seeming to care for her and seeming to disapprove of her even though she can’t figure out what she’s done. She doesn’t realize that Sheila has been telling lies.

Although the Furrowed Middlebrow books often involve some light, understated romance, they usually have other things going on as well. This is the first book I’ve read under this imprint that is a standard romance, with most of the action devoted to keeping the couple apart until the end. How good a romance is depends on how well you do this, and in this case, I think Scarlett (a pen name for Noel Streatfeild) doesn’t always handle it well. Characters over-react to other characters’ comments, for example. The situation isn’t too badly handled, though, and the book makes nice light reading. Straight romance novels are not usually my genre, though.

I received this book from the publisher in exchange for a free and fair review.

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Review 2030: Down Below

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Leonora Carrington was a Surrealist artist who for years had an affair with the much-older Max Ernst. During World War II, Ernst kept being imprisoned as an enemy alien in France, and the resultant tribulations broke Carrington’s mental health. As she and some friends traveled to Spain to escape the German invasion, she became disassociated from reality. Down Below is her recollection of her state of mind and thoughts during her break from reality.

Reading this very short work is an odd experience, as Carrington’s delusions seem as surrealistic as any artwork. It also feels elliptical, reticent about the events that brought on her insanity and really about anything personal except her state of mind. It would have been almost impossible to understand without the background provided in the Introduction to my NYRB edition.

It’s pretty crazy. Unfortunately, this breakdown made her a heroine of Surrealism, which must have been personally difficult for her.

Just as a coincidence, shortly after I read this book, I read Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, about Varian Fry, the man who helped many writers and artists, including Ernst, I think, escape the Nazis. Review coming in a few months.

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