1) The best way to describe the book: a Jewish version of DR. ZHIVAGO (a reference my students will probably not understand). Translation: a very romantic love story set amid the upheavals of history. A huge cast of characters, a strong sense of place (Paris in the 1930's, horrific labor camps in Eastern Europe in the 1940's)) and a historical perspective I've never previously read about.
2) Before reading the novel, I wasn't familiar with what happened in Hungary and to its Jewish people during WWII. Hungary was a member of the Axis powers, but Hungarian Jews were not deported to concentration camps until late in the war. Many were sent to labor camps within the country and its neighbors in order to support the national army as it fought against Russian and the rest of the Allied forces. The country wasn't occupied by the Germans (it seems the Nazis in their power surge even took over their allies' countries) until 1944, when the Jewish citizens found themselves being rounded up. In fact, nearly half of the Jewish population survived the war (a terrible loss of life but not even close to the number of Jews lost in other European countries).
3) Inside this 600-page novel, the author gets a chance to say some wonderful things about fate and free will (you all know I love this theme -- we've talked about it quite a bit when we discussed THE BOOK THIEF - remember?):
A quote from the novel:
"He believed in God, yes, the God of his fathers, the one to whom he prayed in Konyar and Debrecen and Paris and in the work service, but that God, the One, was not One who intervened in the way they needed someone to intervene just then. He had designed the cosmos and thrown its doors open to man, and man had moved in and begun a life there. But God could no more step inside and rearrange that life than an architect could rearrange the lives of a building's inhabitants. The world was their place now. They would use it in their fashion, live or die by their own actions."
Onto my next book...
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