Anyway - this latest novel flips, back and forth between Trudy, a German history professor at a a Minneapolis university and her German mother Anna, who survived WWII through unbelievable ways. Through Trudy, we see a woman who is struggling to know who and where she comes. She has tried, in the past to get these answers from her mother but Anna refuses to talk about any part of her past in Germany. Trudy thus decides to take on a project of interviewing German immigrants who lived through the war and in surviving, possibly ignored the actions that Nazis were taking against the Jews. Through Anna, the reader flashes back to her hometown of Weimar where she managed to survive starvation and certain death by entering into an abusive and torrid affair with a high-ranking Nazi officer at Buchenwald.
I liked this book, probably more after I finished it and reflected on it rather than while I was reading it. (While reading, I would have given it 3.5 stars.)The concept was an interesting one: Intertwining the stories of anti-Semitic German immigrants with those of the German survivors who only did what they had to do to live through the war. How fine a line is there between the two? It makes you ask yourself the question: How far would you go to save those you love. The novel was a slow read and it wasn't until the end that I really felt a need and a want to see what the outcome was. The end was certainly worth it, however, and the answers to questions I thought would not be given, in the end were.
No comments:
Post a Comment