Halter fleshes out the scriptural account with rich and credible portraits of contemporary life and history, even if his...
The prizewinning French author re-creates the story of Abraham and Sarah and the unlikely steps that led to their giving birth to both Judaism and the Jewish people.
We know that Abraham was the patriarch whose descendants were to be as numerous as the sands on the shore—despite the fact that his wife Sarah made it well into her 80s without bearing a child. Halter (Stories of Deliverance, 1997, etc.) follows the biblical line pretty closely, but he fills in a lot of detail that Moses never wrote down. We learn, for example, that Sarah is the daughter of a nobleman in Ur, in ancient Sumer, and that she is betrothed to a Sumerian prince. At the last minute, however, she rebels against her fate by refusing the marriage and running away. Hiding in the swamps outside the city, she stumbles upon a young man named Abram fishing for crayfish in the glades—and spends the night with him. Abram is a nomad, one of the mar.Tu people whose encampments encircle the city. Later on, Sarah returns to face the music at home but guarantees that she will never have to go through with the marriage by taking a potion that renders her infertile. Now unmarriageable, she becomes a priestess of the goddess Ishtar and presides over the sacred rites (especially the slaughter of bulls) in the temple. Years later, however, she meets Abram by chance and discovers that she is still in love with him. You know the rest: Abram and Sarah run off together and start a new race with the eventual and miraculous birth of their son Isaac, and the world is never the same again.
Halter fleshes out the scriptural account with rich and credible portraits of contemporary life and history, even if his narration (“There was a quivering in her belly that had nothing to do with fear or anger”) occasionally descends to the level of the bodice-buster.Pub Date: May 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5272-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...
An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.
Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowierer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas. She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.
The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as nonfiction. Still, this is a powerful, gut-wrenching tale that is hard to shake off.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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