The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman
On page one of her terrific new novel, The World That We Knew (Simon and Schuster), Alice Hoffman sets a chilling scene: It is Berlin in the spring of 1941, where the clear-eyed Hanni Kohn is focused solely on saving her twelve-year old daughter Lea from the Nazis.
While the Nazis’ persecution of Jews is familiar territory in fiction and nonfiction, Hoffman uniquely explores how people become extraordinary in search of love, purpose, and revenge.
Hanni’s husband, a doctor, was murdered during an anti-Jewish brawl the previous winter and her elderly mother is confined to bed. Scrambling to ensure the family’s survival as food supplies dwindle and the noose tightens, Hanni realizes she will have to send Lea away from Germany. In order to accomplish this feat, Hanni ventures into forbidden territory.
She finds her way to Ettie, the daughter of an eminent rabbi, who also realizes it is time to escape even as her parents keep faith with Germany. Working quickly, Ettie uses Jewish scripture, clay, blood, and magic to create a golem, a living ghost endowed with superpowers who will guard Lea’s life. In exchange, Hanni relinquishes the family treasure, a jeweled ring and earrings, to Ettie.
It is a dangerous undertaking to create the golem, but Ettie succeeds. As the ghost is activated, she is named Ava and receives her instructions: absolute devotion to Lea. The two will travel to Paris and then throughout France, hiding and fleeing in such a way that the world becomes, Hoffman shows, a map rather than a place to inhabit.
Ava is there at every turn to guide Lea, to see her through, channeling Hanni’s wisdom to get the child to safety. Meanwhile Ettie, who managed to get out of Berlin on the same train as Ava and Lea, is stricken by tragedy and asks herself if she will ever have a reason to live. Within months she joins the French Resistance and finds her place in the brutal new world.
As always, Hoffman’s characters are indelible: a boy, Julien, with whom Lea falls madly in love, and his brother, Victor, Ettie’s partner in Resistance plots whose lover is a passeur – a rescuer of Jewish children whose parents were dead or in concentration camps. She led the orphans, sometimes in the dark over treacherous terrain, to a kind of freedom.
Everyone’s paths cross eventually, making some sort of sense in a time when “the rational order . . . in mathematics and in the natural world was nowhere to be seen,” Hoffman writes.
The World That We Knew is thrilling because the story is full of risk and terror. It also thrills because the writing is so deeply beautiful that it takes your breath away.
The World That We Knew is now available.
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