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Best Review Contest (Fall 2014)
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Those Who Save Us ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆by Jenna Blum
We come to love those who save us.
What a simple line Anna says to Jack and yet how profoundly it wraps up all the complicated and intertwined relationships in this entire book. It's a powerful story - masterfully crafted with the title running as a thread through every story line, even those between minor characters. It's not a story to just read and put away. It's a story to read and live with for a while.
Anna, the daughter of a German man with military connections, falls in love with a Jewish doctor. Unknown to her father, she hides him in a hidden wall of their home. Eventually, inevitably, she ends up pregnant. Eventually, inevitably, her Jewish lover is discovered by her father, turned over to the Gestapo, and sent to Buchenwold. Anna, four months pregnant, flees her father's house and goes to live with the baker. She subsequently delivers her child, a daughter, and she and the baker concoct a cover story - a rape by a transient German highwayman - to protect and save the child. Trudy grows up believing she is a "pure" German.
To stay connected to Max, just to hear of a word from or about him, Anna joins the resistance and becomes part of the baker's efforts to feed the Buchenwold POW's with bread hidden in a tree next to the camp perimeter. She witnesses firsthand the atrocities of the camp - a murder for sport - and her terror of the Germans increases when the baker is discovered and shot. She knows that she and Trudy will be next unless she can devise a way to save them. She concocts a lie and tells it convincingly to the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald, who comes to investigate the baker's place of business.
The Obersturmfuhrer is attracted to her because she is German and she is pretty. Eventually, Anna develops a relationship with him. He's twisted and sadistic, and there is no doubt that Anna is a victim. But she finds it hard to separate the gratitude she feels to the Obersturmfuhrer for saving her and Trudy - from freezing, from starvation, from death - from her terror and disgust of his Nazi politics and behaviors. She despises and blames herself for her part in the affair - if she were stronger, able to save herself - she could - she WOULD - stand up to him.
As the days turn to years, Anna becomes the Obersturmfuhrer's "port in the storm." He shares his confidences, his worries, his hopes, dreams, ambitions, and desires. She is the person who saves him from his daily stresses as the commandant of Buchenwald, and he comes to love her for it. In return, she experiences a gradual increase of affection and comes to see him and understand him as a man and not just a Nazi monster. It's a literary unfolding of Stockholm Syndrome in all its subtle and complex psychology. When is is obvious that the allies are coming and the town will be liberated, the Obersturmfuhrer invites Anna to escape with him to freedom, thinking that she loves him as he does her. He's astounded when she refuses to go with him.
Jack, the Ami, saves Anna from a rape by a drunken American soldier. He saves Anna a second time - this time from the hostility of the mob of Germans that the allies line up and march to Buchenwald to witness the atrocities and bury the bodies. He also saves her toddler, Trudy, from the horror of witnessing the scene and being, quite possibly, scarred for life. Anna is deeply and truly grateful, and eventually she and Jack are married. She does not love him, but the marriage saves her from a life of living with what she's done in her homeland of Germany, and in return, she saves Jack from a lifetime of loneliness.
Sadly, the ugliness of the war follows her to America, where she faces the prejudices and hatred of the American people for the Germans - the soldiers who killed their sons and the citizens who stood by while the Nazis murdered all those Jews. Jack continues to save Anna, protecting her from the worst of the vitriol that the neighbors spew in her direction. Ironically, Anna never stands up in her own defense to tell anyone - not even her husband or her daughter - that she was a member of the German resistance. She pays penance for her affair with the Obersturmfuhrer, believing she is beyond redemption.
Did Anna love the Obersturmfuhrer? It's hard to say. When Jack asks her point blank if she was his mistress, she says yes without hesitating. When he asks her if she loved him, she has a harder time with the answer. Love is a complicated emotion, with thousands of subtexts. Maybe she can't give him a straight answer because she herself simply does not know. Or maybe she is ashamed of her feelings and does not want to give them life by speaking them. Or maybe she is still having difficulty separating love and gratitude and doesn't even know how to begin to start that conversation with the man she married out of a similar emotion.
As an adult, Trudy is racked with guilt, believing that she is the daughter of a Nazi SS officer. She knows no better because Anna maintains a rigid silence with regard to her activities in Germany. Trudy makes endless, futile attempts to get her mother to talk about the officer whom she believes is her father. She wants to know who he was, what he was like, why they aren't together as a family. She simply cannot understand why her mother won't tell her the truth of her birth.
Because of her mother's refusal to explain, Trudy is left with only the vague memories of her childhood - a tall German whom she calls Saint Nickolas and various people who shuffle in and out of her mother's bakery. As a toddler, she was saved from the horrors of the real world, but since she has no real memories of those horrors, she does not recognize that she has been saved, so she does not have any understanding of exactly how to love her mother.
It is not until Pfeffer reappears in the last chapters that the winding stories and associated traumas begin to resolve themselves. Through Pfeffer, Trudy learns the truth about her father, her mother, and the lengths her mother went to in order to save them both. For the first time in her life, she sees her mother as a hero, and she develops the capacity to not only love her, but also to forgive her. She is, finally and at last, saved.
*****
There are some odd literary structures in this book. The most noticeable is the lack of quotation marks, but the story is woven so beautifully that their absence wasn't something I missed, beyond just noticing that they weren't there. I found the word choices perfect, the descriptions rich and deep, and the characters complex and interesting.
As historical fiction, I have to say it's one of the best I've ever read. I checked this copy out from my local library, but I'm heading to Barnes and Noble to buy my own hard copy version, simply because I want to give this story a place on my permanent book shelf. It's definitely a story worth sharing with other readers.
Paula - Isabel Allende
5*****
When Isabel Allende’s daughter became gravely ill and fell into a coma, the author spent days at Paula’s bedside. At her own mother’s urging, Allende began to write the story of her family for Paula in an attempt to connect her child with her ancestors, “…so that when you wake up you will not feel so lost.”
Evocative, heart-rending, luminous, suspenseful, triumphant – I cannot think of enough adjectives to describe this beautifully written memoir. Allende lays her soul bare on the page. She brings her own grandparents, uncles, cousins, parents, brothers, friends to life as she attempts to reach the comatose Paula. Her family connections are full of world-famous people – not the least of which was her uncle Salvador Allende – and she had a rather privileged upbringing. She traveled extensively with her mother and stepfather, who was a diplomat and attended private schools. But all her advantages could not protect Allende from life’s setbacks and tragedies.
With unfailing honesty she relates everything – from being sexually molested as a child to being a television star, from a sheltered young woman to a feminist and political exile, from a traditional wife and mother to a reckless love affair with an Argentinian trumpeter. She also includes many examples of her deep connections to the mystical and spiritual; it’s easy to see why she writes magical realism so well.
The work moves back and forth from Allende’s history to the events in Paula’s hospital room. Those scenes at her daughter’s bedside were some of the most emotional. The fierceness with which Allende fought to bring her precious child back from the abyss, the refusal to take “No” for an answer, the determination to bring her daughter back to California and her home overlooking San Francisco Bay – these passages in the book reveal the woman today, while the scenes relating her history show how she came to be this strong woman.
It took me a while to get into the book. The writing is very dense; a paragraph can last three pages. But once I got used to the rhythm of her writing I was totally immersed and engaged. Allende’s gift for storytelling is evident. There were passages that evoked laughter, sections where I recognized my own relationships with my brothers or grandparents, and scenes that had me in tears or gasping aloud. Towards the end of the book she writes this:
I try to remember who I was once but I find only disguises, masks, projections, the confused images of a woman I can’t recognize. Am I the feminist I thought I was, or the frivolous girl who appeared on television wearing nothing but ostrich feathers? The obsessive mother, the unfaithful wife, the fearless adventurer, or the cowardly woman? Am I the person who helped political fugitives find asylum or the one who ran away because she couldn’t handle fear?
The answer, of course, is that she is all these women. Her experiences may be unique, but her reactions are universal.
The Seasonal Reading Challenge
Books mentioned in this topic
Paula (other topics)Those Who Save Us (other topics)
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