Karolina's Twins-- The Secret of a Holocaust Survivor

Novels dealing with WWII have been extremely popular.  I think they have replaced Tudor themed books as the most published type of historical fiction.  When they focus on Holocaust themes, they are very emotionally intense.  Unfortunately, because of their intensity readers tend to burn out on them eventually.  So I predict that there will be another shift in the historical fiction market in the near future.

As someone whose family was severely impacted by the  WWII Holocaust, I actually avoided Holocaust themed novels for a long time.   I felt that they would be too painful for me to read.   I'm not sure what changed for me, but I started to read Holocaust fiction a few years ago.   At this point, I have begun to burn out.  I don't think that it's a good thing for anyone to read too much about genocide because it blunts the feelings of horror and outrage that should be the normal response to these events.  Yet I am still open to reading Holocaust novels that are unusual in their focus, or which educate me about an aspect of the WWII Holocaust that was previously unknown to me.

Karolina's Twins by Ronald Balson is a different sort of Holocaust novel. It is a contemporary/historical legal thriller.  It is also the third in a series dealing with the cases of private investigator Liam Taggart and lawyer Catherine Lockhart.  It centers on locating a pair of twins who have been missing since WWII.  I received a request to review this book through the publisher and downloaded it from Net Galley in return for this honest review.

                                 

I knew that the Jewish community in pre-WWII Poland located in the cities and larger towns was very different from that of my own shtetl ancestors.  A shtetl is a small insular village composed entirely of Jews.  They were isolated from the outside world, and had very little knowledge of Polish society.  Their way of life was eradicated by the Nazis.  The contemporary Haredi, who are more commonly known as Hasidim, have done their best to preserve it. Yet it's difficult to duplicate the culture of a rural village in an urban environment.

Lena Woodward, the fictional client in Karolina's Twins, came from a Polish town that still exists.  Her father was a tailor who was also a WWI hero. Due to his military background, he was highly regarded by local Poles.  The family was Polish speaking rather than Yiddish speaking, and was very much integrated into Polish society.  I had actually never read about Polish Jews who were so identified with Poland.  They reminded me of what I've read about German Jews.  So it didn't surprise me to learn that Lena's father had business and family ties in Berlin.  Through research I discovered a Jewish memorial website which stated that Jewish tailors who emigrated to Germany from Lena's town of  Chrzanow were an important factor in the establishment of the German clothing industry in the early 20th century.

Lena's story was told to Catherine Lockhart as part of the investigation in the present.  Normally, I would be very critical of a novel whose structure was so expository because it usually lacks immediacy.   Yet Lena's narrative contained dialogue and other characteristics of flashbacks that made it more engaging, and lent it dramatic power.  It allowed me to visualize events.  This is a key difference that made expository storytelling more successful in Karolina's Twins.
Ronald Balson also handled suspense very well.   The plot was organized so that both the investigation and Lena's account reached a climax at the same time.

Lena was a courageous woman who was willing to take risks that most people would consider unthinkable, but her circumstances called for bold action.   In the present, this Holocaust survivor retained her mental acuity and vitality.  Yet she had regrets which caused her to conceal a crucial aspect of her past.  It's  this secret that brings her into a painfully distressing legal conflict with her son.  It lies at the heart of the narrative. Catherine's empathy and consistent supportive attitude toward Lena eventually allows the truth to surface.

Catherine impressed me with her willingness to place her career in jeopardy out of loyalty to her client.  Although the danger to Catherine in the contemporary storyline wasn't equivalent to Lena's traumatic experiences, there were suspenseful elements.  Catherine had the mental toughness to rise to the occasion.   So this book had two strong female protagonists.  This makes Karolina's Twins a novel that I can recommend to the audience for this blog.





                                  

Tsura by Heather Anastasiu

I accepted a free copy of Tsura by Heather Anastasiu for review from the author because the central character is a  Romani woman.  Romani are what the gypsies call themselves.  I've read a number of books about  Romani  history and a couple of anthropology studies about Romani in the United States.  I've also read some Romani memoirs, and a great many novels dealing with Romani.  So you might say I'm interested in the subject.

                                    
                                   

                                
I admit to being somewhat disappointed about the extent of Romani cultural content in Tsura.  There was a slight Romani flavor sprinkled throughout Tsura, but ideally I would have liked to see a great deal more.   The plot line justification for there being so little Romani content is that Tsura was exiled from the Romani community for reasons that are huge spoilers.  Based on my reading and what I heard from a part-Romani acquaintance, Tsura probably wouldn't have ever been part of the Romani community because her grandmother was non-Romani.  Romani have a very strong sense of purity and the non-Romani grandmother would have brought about the exile of her grandparents. Her family would have been part of the non-Romani world for three generations.  They would have needed to make a strong effort to preserve their Romani culture in isolation from their community.  They might have forgotten some traditions and this would have impacted Tsura's ability to live like a Romani woman.

When the novel opens Tsura is in hiding with her Jewish lover who was calling himself Andrei.   She believed that she had a future with him and was prepared to convert to Judaism.  If so, she really needed to change her own name.  Tsura is very similar to the Yiddish word for trouble.  The plural form is much more familiar.  It's tsuris.   I can just see Andrei introducing her as Tsura around the Jewish community.  The response would be "Oy vey!  We don't have enough tsuris already?"  Yeah, that would go over really well.

So why were Andrei and Tsura hiding? Tsura  takes place in Romania in World War II.  Some years ago I had read a Holocaust memoir about a Jewish woman from Poland who took refuge with relatives in Romania in World War II, and was therefore safe from the Nazis. Yet I knew that there were Romanian Jews who were sent to concentration camps.  I was confused.  Why were some Romanian Jews safe from the Nazis while others weren't? 

 Tsura finally answered this question.  Northern Transylvania was annexed by Hungary as a result of The Second Vienna Award in 1941.  The Axis Powers essentially gave this land to Hungary.  As a result, its Jews were no longer under the protection of Romanian Marshall Antonescu  who refused to cooperate with the Nazi Final Solution when it came to the Old Kingdom's Jews.  These were the Jews who lived in the original territory of Romania.  He regarded them as Romanians.  Marshall Ion Antonescu was no angel.  He should not be nominated for a humanitarian award.  He was responsible for the deaths of Jews who had joined the Red Army.  This was known as the Odessa Massacre. Antonescu was a Romanian nationalist and extremely anti-communist.  He was executed in 1946 for the Odessa Massacre and other war crimes.  I'd like to thank Heather Anastasiu for helping me to understand Romania's role in World War II a little better.

On the other hand, I had a problem with the way the Jewish Holocaust was portrayed in this book.  Something occurred that could never have happened.  I can't discuss it specifically because that would be a significant spoiler, but it undermined the believability of this book for me.  There is another aspect to this problem that I can't even mention in order to avoid spoilers, but my knowledge of this other area combined with my knowledge of concentration camps caused me to realize that this plot event was an impossibility. I will probably discuss it in the Goodreads version of this review because spoilers can be hidden on Goodreads.

So far I haven't discussed what I thought of the romance factor in Tsura which would be the most important component for those readers who chose to read this book because it's a romance.  Well, it's a delayed HEA situation.  There's a sequel and the relationship issues are presumably resolved over the course of that narrative.  I wouldn't read the sequel for that reason myself, though I did like the romance hero very much.  Tsura's difficulties with understanding him in this first book irritated me, and caused me to be impatient with her throughout the novel.  


                                

 

Saying Goodbye To Warsaw by Michael Cargill

This is the second book that I've read by Michael Cargill.   My first was the anthology Shades of Grey which I reviewed on Goodreads here.  Saying Goodbye To Warsaw was selected as the Book of the Month for June on the GR group Books, Blogs, Authors and More. I belong to this group and participate in it. It's a WWII novel that takes place in the Warsaw Ghetto, and I received it for free from the author in return for this honest review.

What I liked most about this book was Alenka, a character who appeared late in the novel.  She was spirited, resourceful and optimistic in a situation that left little room for optimism.  She played an important role in Cargill's version of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.  I also found her believable unlike the nine year old protagonist, Abigail.

Another review said that Abigail became unbelievable only toward the end of the book during the uprising.  I disagree. I think she was always too good to be true.  She had no flaws other than being young and innocent which was too temporary in her horrifying environment to be a real flaw.  All the children in the Warsaw Ghetto had to grow up in a hurry.   Abigail became much more seriously unbelievable toward the end of the book.  She not only acquired skills too quickly, she was better at them than anyone else.  Credibility went out the window.

I should state at this point  that I took a course on the Holocaust from the Jewish Theological Seminary.  One of the books I read in that course was The Theory and Practice of Hell by Eugen Kogen who was a political prisoner in Buchenwald.  I am mentioning this so that readers are aware that I have also read books from the perspective of non-Jewish Holocaust victims.

Kogen's book shows that the Nazis were quite rigorous about separating non-Jewish prisoners from Jewish prisoners.  The Nuremberg Laws actually required them to make sure that Jews had no contact with other types of prisoners.  They were afraid of "race pollution".  Separation of Jews from non-Jews was also the main reason for their establishment of  Jewish ghettos like the one in Warsaw.  So they wouldn't have deliberately sent someone who was legally non-Jewish to a Jewish ghetto.  From the Jewish perspective, they did send quite a number of non-Jews to Jewish ghettos.  This is because the definition of who is a Jew according to Jewish law was more restrictive than the Nuremberg Laws.

I am bringing up this issue because there is a character in this book who was sent to the Warsaw Ghetto even though he was non-Jewish.  This may seem like a minor point to other readers.  He was portrayed very movingly and I liked the role he played in the novel, but it bothered me that the author didn't understand something very basic about the Nazi mindset.  

Cargill also mentions Israel a few times.  Israel didn't exist until 1948 which was after WWII.  There is a statement made by a character in this novel that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was partly funded by "our friends in Israel".  This is highly improbable.  At the time, Jews in America were sending funds to Palestine to help with the struggle of Jewish settlers against the British Mandate.   For more information see the article on the Jewish Insurgency in Palestine on Wikipedia.

I'm picky about the historical details discussed above because they matter to me.  They probably wouldn't even be noticed by many readers.  

From a storytelling perspective, I thought that Saying Goodbye To Warsaw was well-plotted and well-paced.  I also liked the final scene.   It affirms the centrality and sacredness of family.  In the end, family is what matters most.