Tag Archives: 1941

No Heroes Need Apply: A Boy in Winter

16 Monday Oct 2017

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Review: A Boy in Winter, by Rachel Seiffert
Pantheon, 2017. 242 pp. $26

Ukraine, autumn 1941, and the German invasion of Russia is now several months old. At first light, two young boys flee across their small town, trying to reach the schoolmaster’s house, in hopes he can tell them where to hide, whom to trust, assuming the rumors are true. But before they can get there, the Germans’ trucks roll in, and the boys must escape the unexpected trap.

The trucks’ arrival wakes Otto Pohl, a Wehrmacht engineer building a road through this forested, often marshy countryside, so that the invading forces may be efficiently supplied and reinforced. Otto’s a good sort, a conscientious man who believes the war to be criminal, which is why he volunteered to build a road in the Eastern wilderness, thinking that as army service went, he’d never be forced to see or do anything he’d hate himself for. He’s about to be proven wrong.

The Germans round up every Jew in town and drive them into a brick works, where they’re forced to stand, awaiting what they believe is transport further East. No one in town much cares; the victims are only Jews. What they do care about is the strict curfew the Germans have imposed and the constant threat of search and seizure. Nevertheless, Yasia, the teenage daughter of a prosperous farmer, decides to risk trying to reach her boyfriend, a deserter from the Red Army, now working for the invaders. She too sees more than she wanted.

Murder of Jews by SS paramilitaries, Invanhorod, Ukraine, 1942. This photo was taken by a German soldier serving in the East; a member of the Polish Resistance working in the Warsaw post office intercepted it for future documentation. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons via Historical Archives, Warsaw; public domain)

Three things distinguish A Boy in Winter from the average Holocaust novel. The first is a refreshing lack of earnestness. Nobody makes any speeches about right or wrong to condemn or embrace anti-Semitism or the German regime. In fact, the characters say very little, though their thoughts, gestures, and actions speak loudly.

The characterizations, the second key asset, are so strong and nuanced — even the SS commandant — that you understand why things happen the way they do. There are no heroes here, only powerless people trying to balance fear and suspicion against their will to get by and see another day. A great many evils can happen through that calculus, but Seiffert is much more interested in showing them than in criticizing. And by focusing on the very small picture rather than the large one, she has much to say about both. For instance, why are the two boys the only ones who try to run away? Why is Yasia the only onlooker not to keep her head down? The answers lie in character, not plot manipulation, but more than that, you can’t read this novel without plugging yourself in place of these characters and wondering what you would do.

The third way A Boy in Winter succeeds is in its moral compass, which points not to redemption but the possibility of some small mercy. An overdetermined authorial urge for redemption has marred many an otherwise fine book, and, since it’s a Christian concept, I like it even less in a Holocaust novel. By reaching for less heavenly attributes — for what’s only a glimmer in this world of mortals — Seiffert achieves more.

To do so, she writes in spare, elegant prose, precisely fitting her spare, elegant narrative. Consider this flashback passage about Yankel, the elder boy who runs away (and the title character), through the eyes of his father, Ephraim. Yankel loves to look at photographs of his uncle Jaakov, Ephraim’s brother, who emigrated to Palestine:

He asked more about Jaakov as he got older, wanting more often to hear the stories of his travels and his olive trees, or even just to see his photo… And though Yankel sat with it quietly, content with his own thoughts, never saying very much, Ephraim saw — not without pain — the admiration in his son’s gaze. He began to feel, too, how his eldest’s eyes measured him, silently: the narrow walls of his workshop, the fastidious labour in the lenses he ground there, the tiny screws he tightened to hold them in their wire frames. The scope of his life was meagre, seen against his brother-in-law’s.

Not only is this a beautiful, evocative passage, revealing in a physical sense the rift between father and son, you understand why Ephraim is anxious to follow the Germans’ orders, whereas Yankel has no hesitation disobeying them. How Yankel got to be that way is of course very important, but Seiffert brings you there, just as she brings you everywhere else you need to go.

A Boy in Winter is a sublime, powerful, brilliant novel, among the finest about its subject that I’ve ever read.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

We’ll Always Have Paris: A Hero of France

26 Monday Jun 2017

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Review: A Hero of France, by Alan Furst
Random House, 2016. 234 pp. $27

If you’ve read any of Furst’s fourteen books, the time and place will be familiar: Paris, 1941, the City of Light under a blackout imposed by the German Occupation. It’s early spring, so America has yet to declare war, and Britain fights alone against German power at its high-water mark. Trying to strike back at the German hinterland, British bombers overfly French territory, and many don’t make it home. Consequently, increasing numbers of British airmen are parachuting into Occupied territory, and the nascent Resistance does its best to keep them out of German hands and send them to safety in neutral Spain.

German troops parade down the Champs Elysée, Paris, 1940 (courtesy Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia Commons)

One such Resistance cell operates in Paris, under a man code-named Mathieu. Like the setting, he too is typical Furst–worldly, mature, resourceful, committed, without swagger, doing what he does because he thinks someone has to, refusing to judge those of his countrymen who want no part of it. Oh, and did I say that beautiful women find him irresistible? Many things are rationed in Furst’s Europe, but sex isn’t.

Naturally, the occupiers and their French toadies do their best to crack the Resistance. But luckily for Mathieu and his operatives, the Occupation is new enough so that the German Army and the French police undertake the counterespionage; the Gestapo remains largely in the wings. As a result, the bad guys aren’t as vicious and uncompromising as they might be, especially since many of the French contingent would rather not arrest their countrymen. The real danger lies in ordinary civilians looking to make money by informing, and they can be persistent.

Mathieu . . . saw what was indeed a strange-looking man, or, rather, a strange-looking boy, barely in his twenties. Standing at the bar and drinking a glass of wine, he had dark skin and dark eyes, wore a buttoned-up overcoat that was both much too tight and much too long, a hat with a wide, flat brim and a low crown, also flat, to which he’d added a bow tie that might once have belonged to a café waiter. With a pencil line of a mustache that traced his upper lip, he struck Mathieu as a boy dressed up to play his father.

But this guy, though dangerous, isn’t the real threat. The real threat is a German police inspector imported from Hamburg to crack the Resistance cells operating out of Paris, and he’s got people working for him who are much smarter than anyone Mathieu has come up against.

Furst moves his story rapidly, and, as always, his narrative represents the definition of “no; and furthermore.” Plans backfire thanks to inattention or nerves or plain bad luck. What I like about A Hero of France is that whatever heroism you see is of the quiet variety and seemingly more genuine for it. The narrative also gives the bad guys their due; of the several minor characters who come through clearly, the German police inspector and his chief mole stand out for me.

Furst’s trademark atmospheric descriptions are in full force too. You feel the blackout, the tension in the streets, a divided nation about to discover that when it comes to privation, they ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Furst suggests the political struggle between the Resistance and its British contacts–we won’t call them allies–and the pressures under which the French administration tries to remain intact. With equal, admirable economy, he makes a key historical point, that the British were so desperate for air crews that they sent escaped fliers back into the air. (This contrasted with subsequent American policy, which grounded escapees on the logic that they might be recognized if recaptured, compromising them and anyone who had helped them.)

All this is fine. But I still pine for Furst’s earliest works, which felt fresher, more fleshed out, and more gripping. They were also much longer. Maybe that kind of book is passé or unprofitable or un-something. But A Hero of France has tons of narrators, few of whom come alive, and, despite the “no; and furthermore,” inconvenient circumstances sometimes resolve themselves in ways they wouldn’t have in earlier books. If Furst is trying to suggest that he can do this because it’s only spring 1941, and the very, very bad guys aren’t in charge yet, I’m not buying.

Paris is Paris, and we can always have that, as Humphrey Bogart told Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. But certain things can be too familiar and leave us wanting more.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.