Read in October 2013
Tunnel of Love, by Hilma Wolitzer
Three stars
The best part of this novel is Linda Reismann, a pregnant late 20s widow who’s left with a teenage step-daughter who doesn’t like her very much. The book opens with Linda and Robin arriving in Los Angeles, after a cross-country trip from New Jersey, following the burial of Linda’s husband and Robin’s father. On the way they stopped to see Robin’s long-lost mother, a visit so disastrous that Linda immediately dropped her plan to reunite mother and child. Clearly, Linda’s got a lot on her plate, but it’s her determination to make a home and a family that charmed me. The novel is set in 1991, and from the vantage of 2013, Linda may seem a little too good to be true. Perhaps we’ve all become too ambitious and self-centered to believe there are actually people out there whose hearts’ desires are to find a decent job that can provide a comfortable home for their families. Linda is no whiner — every time she’s knocked down, she gets up and gets on with life. Over the course of the novel, the plot takes a bunch of twists and turns but, just like the cars in a Tunnel of Love, finally finally finds its way back to a bright and happy day.
Those Who Save Us, by Jenna Blum
Two stars
Those Who Save Us is a mother and daughter book focusing on Anna, who lived through the Nazi’s regime in Germany as a young woman, and her daughter Trudy, who left Germany as a toddler when her mother married a GI and has grown up to be an historian whose specialty is the roles of women during the Nazi regime. The structure is a classic interweaving of now and then stories, with Anna’s experiences in Europe intercut with a now story of their life in Minnesota told from Trudy’s point of view. Anna’s story is a welcome depiction of the civilian German victims of the Nazis, but for the most part the more affecting stories are those Trudy hears as part of an oral history of the Holocaust. The relationship between Anna and Trudy is cold and distant, in part because Anna has never talked to Trudy about their lives in Germany or answered her questions about the identity of the SS officer who appears with mother and daughter in a photograph from those days. Over the course of the novel that question is answered for the reader and for Trudy, and the mother and daughter reach a resolution. I had a couple of problems with this novel, including the fact that it is simply too long. Blum’s characters aren’t involving enough to justify the length, the war stories become repetitious, and the plot drags. I also had problems with the two main characters. Anna should have been changed, even just a little, by living for fifty years in the U. S., and it is hard to believe that someone as well-educated as Trudy should be so lacking in self-awareness. Finally, there were a couple of errors of history. At one point there is a reference to the hope that Jews threatened by Nazis might be rescued by Israel, but Israel didn’t exist until May 1, 1949. In another place, a character observes that with the war over and the occupation of Germany underway, the U. S. Army gave first priority for shipment home to German-speaking translators, which certainly violates logic and appears to be untrue. As a result of those problems, this novel rang false and left me unsatisfied.