NAMES IN A JAR

Sisterhood and survival in Poland during the Holocaust.

Polish Jews Anna and Lina find themselves swept into the Warsaw ghetto in 1940 when the Germans invade. In alternating first-person narration, readers get a glimpse into less-familiar Holocaust experiences as 12-year-old Anna first smuggles food into the ghetto and then is herself smuggled to safety with kindly Christian farmers, while Lina, her older sister, becomes a forger and later endures Treblinka. Lina’s story horrifies in expected ways, with starvation, death, and a sadistic Nazi supervisor, but Anna also encounters depravity and bodily harm as well as romance and develops a love for medicine and science. Despite hardships, neither sister gives up; indeed, staying alive for Anna keeps Lina going. The opening, narrated by Anna’s adult self, lessens the suspense; readers know going into the novel that her survival is a given. Secondary characters show heroism in ways large and small; moments when Anna and Lina express sympathy for individual Nazis, thus humanizing those characters, may not be credible to readers. Both Anna and Lina become romantically involved with Christian men. Minor but pervasive inaccuracies will likely be ignored by many readers eager for a novel in this genre, and there are powerful moments here despite those issues. All characters are light-skinned. Hebrew and Yiddish terms are defined in the text.

The Holocaust always makes for a moving read; this will succeed on that alone.