Looking back to the Holocaust from the perspective of current day and how it has affected the lives of those who lived through it. Here again is a novel with a different viewpoint of this horrific time in our history. Roberta Silman has approached two interesting subjects, The Holocaust and Taking Down the Berlin Wall. Through the lense of a marriage that is also faltering she builds up the individuals who are affected deeply by these historic events.
Paul Bertram has lived the past 50 years of his life hiding his childhood experience in war torn Germany and escaping Europe and coming to America. Not even his parents and sister know all the secrets he is keeping. He has worked hard to become a model citizen, successful lawyer, husband and father. Playing the role of the man he thinks he should be has been difficult and taken a toll on his family.
Now it is 1989 and the Berlin Wall is being dismantled. He feels that this may be his last chance to rectify the wrongs he has committed and the important people in his life he has alienated. His children are angry at him and his wife has divorced him. He has been through a succession of affairs that are not satisfying him. So he asks his ex-wife to accompany him to Germany to help him work through the past and maybe save the future.
Eve is shocked by the phone call from her husband asking her to join him on a trip to the new Germany, but after realizing she still has feelings for her ex husband she accompanies him to revisit the city of his childhood.
Paul did not realize how difficult the return would be, “I didn’t know what to expect, I was so anxious to get here I hardly thought about what I would find...”. They are on the street where his childhood home still is. He is very shook up as he looks down the tree lined street. Eve suggests he take some deep breaths. He has trouble speaking as he says, “It looks so harmless. Like an ordinary well-heeled neighborhood. Exactly as it looked when I was eight or nine. Unbelievable, not a single blemish.”
Paul and Eve tour through Berlin exploring the city and confronting the past. As Paul looks for a chance for redemption, Eve faces the fact that part of their marital problems were her fear of pushing Paul to answer the questions of his past.
They work together finding out the love means accepting your partner including all their flaws. Helping each other through discovering who they were when they were young and now who they are after maturing.
Silman has written a novel that brings to life the fear and suspense of trying to live in Berlin if you were Jewish during the Great War. Hiding in Berlin, Paul describes was different than hiding in other places, “I guess that was the difference between Berlin and other places. Berlin was not a city that could become a cage, it was too big, too spread out, its citizens far too independent. That’s why it was possible for so many people to hide there.”
She also clearly delves into the complexities of marriage. Eve remembers someone once telling her that, “Marriage is like a minefield.” But she wonders, “What if a marriage is layered, like a palimpsest, on top of a war, which has minefield after minefield? And what if it is your marriage?”
This is a wonderful novel about both individually working through your demons and finding out if the marriage you thought was finished can be renewed on a different level of understanding.
Keeps the reader thinking through out the story.
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