Hmmmm... A jewish woman at the start of the 20th century.... a man named Adolf.... let me guess, a comedy?
Well, the book certainly wants you to believe that Blanca's dead husband was the man himself. Everything points to it, he's christian, he's Austrian, he was born around the same time, his name is Adolf, and (and this is the big one) he wants to "eliminate" the Jews. It would have been exciting if the book had gone all 'Inglorious Basterds' and actually had Blanca kill Hitler. It's only after his death that you finally get his last name casually revealed via a wanted poster.
It makes you wonder why a woman who spent the majority of the film depicted as frail and passive suddenly becomes an axe murderer/church arsonist.
I noticed that this book won the National Jewish Book Award. It places judaism in positive light in that once Blanca leads the bosom of her religion she becomes lost, disenfranchised, and clearly weakened. This kind of assimilation could be applied to the debate concerning the native population of Canada.
It's a very sad book (of course), and I'd likened it to Schindler's List in that the dire subject matter means I don't want to read it again any time soon. There are no happy points (besides the central mother-son relationship) to cling on to, and there are many premonitions of the Holocaust. Appelfeld's shows that it's these kinds of relationships and attitudes that planted the seeds for the Holocaust, and if this is how bad it was for just one woman, it's near-impossible to comprehend the bigger picture.
Tom.
This is a great overview of many of the things going on in this text. I hadn't thought exactly that when she leaves the bosom of her religion she becomes lost, but I suppose that happens when she converts and gets married. Still, her family wasn't that religious to begin with, right? I don't have the book with me at the moment, but her father wanted to convert and her mother's religious practices were not overt. Of course, there was Grandma Carole, but Blanca didn't seem all that connected to her before her marriage. Or maybe she was and just got very disconnected after her marriage? At any rate, I'll have to think about this one some more. Blanca certainly is trying to salvage the situation and herself by the end by heading towards a stronger attachment to her religion, and she is able to leave Otto in a place from which he will likely grow up with a stronger sense of religion than she could have given him while staying married.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. When i picked up this book i thought Hitler!
ReplyDeleteI think the point of this novel was to show the reader how bad things were prior to the Holocaust. Most assume everything was fine until Hitler, but that isn't the case. I really enjoy reading your blog posts!
You mentioned that one of the only clearly positive relationships of the book is Blanca's with Otto, who is, strangely, also associated with Christianity. I am still grappling with this, but to me it kind of emphasizes Blanca's sense of confusion or ambivalence towards Christianity
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