A somber and important novel highlighting the experiences of German Jewish women during the Holocaust.
A missing piece of family history is memorialized in Suchman’s historical novel, a tribute to the lives lost during the Holocaust.
The book opens with a nonfiction prologue: In 2018, the author and her husband, Bruce, missed their connecting flight through Frankfurt to Washington, D.C. With 12 hours to kill, they explored the city. Bruce’s father, Curtis, fled the region at 17 to escape the Nazis; the couple found a plaque (a stolpersteine, known in English as a stumbling stone) dedicated to Emma and Selma Heppenheimer, Bruce’s great-grandmother and great-aunt. But missing from the stone was the name of another great aunt: Alice. It is here that Suchman moves into the novel proper, using her extensive research into Alice’s life to fictionalize her story. Beginning in 1920 and ending during World War II, Suchman’s narrative covers more than two decades as she imagines how this Jewish woman endured her experiences as Nazi ideology and politics took hold of Germany and controlled and suppressed so many aspects of her life. Readers first meet Alice in Nuremberg on the eve of her wedding to Ludwig Adler. A graduate of the Nuremberg Arts and Crafts School with dreams of opening her own fashion studio, Alice begins an apprenticeship in a handbag factory, and it is here that her first true experiences with antisemitism begin. Suchman writes of Alice’s experiences in a powerful way; readers see a young woman come of age and find her place in the world, unable to find firm footing because of the events taking place around her. Short, emphatic statements, such as Alice’s reaction to discovering the identity of a co-worker leaving derogatory notes for her (“surely, he couldn’t hate her if he actually knew her”), emphasize the horrific dehumanization of ordinary people just for being Jewish. Extremely readable with close attention paid to both wider historical and intimate family details, Suchman’s tale serves as a monument in words.
A somber and important novel highlighting the experiences of German Jewish women during the Holocaust.Pub Date: May 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781685134105
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: yesterday
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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