Recent Reviews
Badenheim 1939 by Aharon Applefeld
Some books entertain us. Some books teach us. Some warn us. In 2018, as our democratic norms are under attack, Badenheim 1939 feels like a warning siren. Author Aharon Applefeld should know. He lived through the Holocaust and then moved to Israel.
In the spring of 1939, the fictitious town of Badenheim near Vienna is preparing for its annual summer concert season. Europe’s best classical musicians, many of them Jewish, will perform. Because we know what awaits the musicians, their Jewish patrons and the whole of European Jewry, the book has a dark, absurdist and ominous mood. After all, it is 1939!
Appelfeld characters are neither heroes nor villains. What they have in common is their myopic focus on the minute details and larger plans of their own live, oblivious to the horrors to come. The dialogue focuses on the dimensions of the upcoming summer arts program: the artists, the pieces, and the instrumentation. Hitler, who is never mentioned, will invade Poland by fall.
As the season changes to fall, those who are Jewish are not allowed to leave Badenheim. Then there is a shortage of food. Then, mail and newspapers are no longer delivered. The insularity allows the citizens and guests of Badenheim to comfort themselves with stories emanating from their hopes but not from facts. They are told to register with the Badenheim authorities and the word Jew creeps into the language. Who is Jewish? Who isn’t it? The capricious authorities begin to decide who must stay and who can leave Badenheim.
Denial dominates the story. Eventually the Jews are told they are going to be sent to Poland. Those trapped in Badenheim imagine that they will board trains and arrive in Poland where they will begin their lives anew. The musicians will find receptive new audiences and many others will reconnect with their homeland. Some of those confined to Badenheim view their forced departure as a positive development.
Appelfeld does not mock his characters, but rather highlights the universal human trait of denial, both as necessity and tragic flaw. As the musicians and tourists soon experience the daily encroachments of their personal freedoms, they seem incurious (or maybe petrified) of what their entrapment might signal and they simply adapt to each new diminishment of their rights. You can’t blame them. No one could have imagined the depravity and horrors of the Nazis and their enablers. Even if the residents and visitors of Badenheim knew what was coming, could have stopped the horror of Hitler and the Holocaust?
Like a Kafka or Orwellian novel, there is an ominous and absurd tone that permeates the novel. Because Appelfeld’s readers know the barbarity waiting in Poland, the book is terrifying. From the opening chapter, I wanted to climb into the novel and tell the characters to stop talking about the summer musical performances and leave Europe immediately. But they cannot. It is too late
Anything is Possible by Elizabeth Strout
I enthusiastically recommend Elizabeth Strout’s stunning book Anything is Possible. In the nine interconnected stories about people from the fictitious town of Amgash, Illinois, Strout identifies the defining experience that shaped each character. She avoids linguistic ornamentation or exaggeration and simply writes raw, clear and honest prose. Just as I was feeling judgmental or frustrated about a character’s choice, Strout zeros in on the dramatic moment or life experience that shaped that character and my feeling changed to empathy and compassion. Strout isn’t heavy-handed, maudlin or didactic. These stories feel authentic and astute.
Lucy Barton, the protagonist from Strout’s previous book My Name is Lucy Barton, is mentioned in most the stories. Lucy manages to escape Amgash and becomes a famous novelist. In one story Lucy returns to Amgash to visit with brother Pete and sister Vicky. Sitting in the living room of the home where they were raised and where Pete still lives, the three siblings descend into their childhood dynamic. With both petty and wise recollections, the siblings discuss the pain, shame, and embarrassment of their youth. Being poor and abused by their parents and ostracized by their classmates made their early lives almost unbearable. Still stuck in their small lives in Amgash, Pete and Vicky resent Lucy’s abandonment and feel pride in her success. As they talk, Lucy feels catapulted back in time and has a panic attack. Her two siblings jump into action and drive Lucy back to Chicago. Through all their suffering and bitterness toward life and each other, it is clear that these siblings love one another, if only as survivors of the same upbringing.
Strout explores how the aftermath of specific events continues to reside within people and results in emotional paralysis. The poignant shame of poverty seeps into these stories even for those who are now well off. Part of Strout’s insight derives from viewing her characters lives over decades. Like a detective, she shows how the trajectory of a person’s life can be traced to a few key factors. There is a lot of unmet need and unfair judgments in these stories. Strout understands the complexity of motivation, fear, and desire and eloquently captures the ways people can demean with cruelty or soar with grace. Anything Is Possible inspires us to be empathetic and understanding because with empathy and understanding anything is possible.
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
This engaging and sweeping novel by Jhumpa Lahiri spans decades and oceans as the story moves from India to Rhode Island and back to India again. On one level, the novel explores how the political turmoil of India in the 1960's changed the life of a 22-year-old man and the lives of those he loved. Yet the larger story illustrates the ways family obligations can shape our lives with or without our consent.
Subhash and Udayan Mishra are brothers born a year apart in Calcutta. Inseparable in their youth, they take different paths in their late teens. Subhash studies chemistry and is accepted into a Ph.D. program at the University of Rhode Island, while Udayan is swept into the Naxalite movement, a rebellion by young students to eradicate inequity and poverty. When the police murder Udayan for his revolutionary activities, his young wife, Gauri, is left living with her bereft and angry in-laws. To complicate matters, Gauri is pregnant
The novel explores the painful implications of these events in the life of each character and how after Udayan’s death his family members are left to pick up the pieces of his life. Family members blame each other for Udayan’s choices and they all experience loneliness, disconnection and confusion. Each surviving family member is left to suffer in his or her angst and seems incapable of moving on. Instead, they live on separate islands of guilt and shame. Subash, Gauri and Udayan’s mother and father shrivel to lesser versions of themselves and when the baby is born she absorbs the family’s sorrows.
Lahiri creates beautiful portraits of each character’s isolation and inner turmoil. As a reader, I wanted to tell each one of them to forgive themselves and talk with one other so that they might get on with their lives. But since each family member holds a shameful truth that derives from their relationship with Udayan, they hold their secrets close. Lahiri’s writing is lyrical. I just wish she had offered more dialogue between the characters so that I could have reached my own conclusions about their choices.
The Lowland gives insight into the power dynamics and traditions of an Indian family. The story also serves as a powerful reminder of how a series of small decisions can alter the course of a person’s life and the lives of his family. By the end of the novel, we feel empathy for all of the characters, as it seems they have little power to change how they feel or leave the tragedy they are living.
