Review: The World That We Knew

The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Alice Hoffman has long been America's mistress of magical realism, or as she terms her unique brand, suburban magic. She has shown deft touches of it in her novels of historical fiction, most recently for instance, in The Marriage of Opposites. But typically in her historical novels, deft touches are the extent of her use of magical realism. Thus, it's something of a surprise that she employs broad elements of fantasy in a novel about one of the darkest moments in human history, the Shoah. Although I went into this novel skeptical of the fantasy aspect of the book, it is a resounding success.

What makes us real? What makes us human? What separates you or me from the monsters of the German SS? And what separates them from good Germans or French, or from neighbors who turn traitor trying to survive another day? Hoffman explores these questions in the powerful and often even lyrical story of four people, Ava, Ettie, Julien, and Lea. One of these people isn't a "real" person at the start. She is made real, over the course of a few years and many pages, just as are some of the secondary characters in the story are made real- by their loves found and lost, the strife endured, and the resistance to caving into Nazi ideology. Focusing not just on the plight of the Jewish who seek shelter and safety, Hoffman also tells stories of the Righteous of in France, who hid Jews at great peril, and the French Resistance network. She gives us the often overlooked minutiae, the daily cruelties, and privations, of the German occupation, and gives us lightly fictionalized accounts of real people who braved everything to do the moral thing.

At the start of this novel, in Berlin 1941, a German Jewish mother, Hanni, seeks to protect her daughter and to send her to France to escape the deportations. She enlists the help of Ettie, the well-educated daughter of a Rabbi, who breaches the Jewish edicts as a woman by exploiting an obscure branch of kabbala and language reserved for men in order to create a golem, whose job it will be to shield Hanni's child Lea from harm. That golem, Ava, will leave Berlin with Lea, Ettie, and Ettie's sister Marta. This fateful decision changes the course of all their lives. In the meantime, Julien and his brother Victor each deal in different ways with the Nazi occupation of Paris. Victor leaves the family to fight, and Julien remains with their parents in increasingly precarious occupation conditions. When the Nazis round up all the Jews in their neighborhood for deportation, his father buys Julien's freedom and he escapes to the south. Victor manages to find their family's beautiful former maid Marianne, and together they join, each in their way, the Resistance. Weaving together these brave souls, the reader is drawn into the story and the lives of these characters, especially that of Ava. What turns a being of water and clay, or anyone, into a real person? There is only one thing, Reader.

I listened to Judith Light's marvelous narration, with thanks to Libro.fm.

An extraordinarily moving novel.

I received a paper Advance Review Copy and a courtesy audiobook copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

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