Those Who Save Us

As other reviewers have said, this book is a real page turner. I absolutely tore through it, drawn in by the powerful storytelling and gripping plot.

What I liked most about this novel, however, was the new perspective it granted on Germany and Germans during the war. This is the side of the Holocaust that has been largely unexplored in literature until now -- how ordinary German citizens confronted or ignored the crimes against Jews, while at the same time trying to ensure their own survival. There are no easy answers, of course, and the book does a good job of acknowledging that fact, while still hammering home the horrors of what happened.

Most importantly, it kept me thinking and questioning: if I were a non-Jewish German, what would I have done? A book that inspires that sort of reflection and thought -- while also providing a riveting, satisfying read -- is a rare treat indeed.

"Those Who Save Us," Jenna Blum's courageous and chastening debut novel, investigates two themes that are at once profoundly historical and deeply personal. With elegant, fast-paced prose, Blum narrates a story that reveals the enduring impact of the Holocaust while bravely exploring the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The two damaged women who are the focus of the novel, a mother permanently ruined by the course of actions she pursued during the Holocaust and her daughter, ravaged by a sense of incomplete identity and derivative pain, travel eerily parallel paths. Both struggle with identity, grapple with ethics and lead isolated, unfulfilled lives. One willingly needs to obliterate the past; the other desperately requires the past in order to form a coherent sense of her present self. This triumphant novel enables the reader to see the world through both protagonists' eyes, to suffer their pain and to ask existential questions the answers to which may only result in more suffering.

The daughter of an officious, sycophantic lower-level Nazi lawyer, Anna Schlemmer violates the Reich's prohibitions against carnal relationships with Jews. The resulting pregnancy and her father's subsequent repudiation, occurring at the onset of World War II, force Anna to find a means of survival. Anna's decisions, and the long-term reverberations those choices engendered, compose one of the two interwoven strands of the novel. From her decision to involve herself in the resistance to her wrenching degradation at the hands of an SS officer, Anna's focus narrows. Despite a near complete loss of self-respect, she keeps her cherished daughter alive. This loss of conscience -- this descent into self-eradication -- teaches us a great deal about what occurs to good people when placed in an environment of unprecedented fear and brutality.

Anna's daughter, Trudy, lives a half century removed from her mother's ordeal, but knows literally nothing about her past. A "conspiracy of silence, a wall that Trudy could neither penetrate or scale" forbids her from her mother's past. Only a photograph of Anna, Trudy and a German military officer exists, and Trudy can only construct a flimsy artifice of her own story. She knows that Anna's American husband is not her "real" father, but knowledge of who is not cannot supplant the agony of not knowing who is. Divorced, alienated and terribly lonely, Trudy knows only her mother's repeated injunction: "The past is dead...and better it remain so." Ironically, as a professor of German history, Trudy strives to teach indifferent students about the very past that is utterly unknown to her on the deepest personal level.

Blum is at her best in depicting the awful hurt those who suffer transmitted trauma experience. For every indignity Anna suffered in the 1940s, her daughter relives in the 1990s. Deprived of stories, the fundamental building blocks of attachment between a parents and children, Trudy cannot know herself. Her mother's stony silence and absolute unwillingness to reveal the past -- and herself -- to her daughter are doubly isolating, removing the mother from the daughter and the daughter from her self.

The maelstrom of the Holocaust tears apart the world Anna knew and skews her ability to mother her young daughter, Trudy plods through live in a loveless, sterile environment, each day a drab duplicate of insufficient hopes and dwindling expectations. In Jenna Blum's capable hands, these two women emerge as archetypes of conflicted hopes, mangled dreams and beleaguered interpreters of the past. If stories serve as the trellis around which we twine ourselves in order to grow, "Those Who Save Us" underscores the dangers of struggling through life without the requisite support of knowledge of the past. This brave, compassionate and deeply unsettling novel emboldens us to remember and recount.

I'm always on the lookout for historical literary thrillers, but there are so few good ones out there. Those Who Save Us, while certainly not marketed as one, really is a historical literary thriller in every way. And it's a terrific one indeed. Jenna Blum's writing style reminds me of David Liss more than any other writer.

Those Who Save Us is a real page-turner. At the end of each chapter, Jenna Blum left me hanging and wanting (no needing) to know what's next. Yes, I cared about the characters very much -- but like a great thriller, I was also drawn into the plot in a way that I couldn't let go.

OK, so the book is about choice and the backdrop of the horrors of the holocaust are terrible indeed, but I was expecting all that. What I wasn't expecting was that the narrative would be so fast-paced. It is quite an accomplishment for an author to deal with moral issues in history and entertain the reader at the same time.

So here's my two cents for Jenna Blum's literary agent: If you haven't already, I think you should consider marketing the mass-market paperback rights in the literary thriller category. This book should have a completely different cover, different marketing, different blurbs and different cover copy to appeal to people who buy books in airports and through Amazon's "thrillers" category. This is an entertaining book! Don't hide that fact!

If you havent bought this book yet, buy it NOW. It is one of those books that keeps you up at night because you cant put it down- and one of those books that you dont want to end. It's words will stay with you long after you read them. Jenna Blum's characters walk off the page. This book should hae been on the NY Times as one of the 10 Most Notable Books of the Year.

Review of THOSE WHO SAVE US, by Jenna Blum

It's been quite some time since I've read a novel that I had difficulty putting down, and I read a lot of contemporary fiction. Perhaps the toughest criticism Jenna Blum will face is that her readers will complain they couldn't get anything else done until the book was finished. Of course, the story is compelling all on its own--the German/German-American take on Nazi brutality and the whole experience of guilt and shame as survivors in their own right--BUT, there are many compelling stories and not all of them make a reader hunger for the next intelligent, unusual turn of phrase. The experience of reading such rich, vivid language--words that have the power to create a certain tangibility in place and character--is what distinguishes her novel from others I might also say are "page-turners." The prose is lush, here, palpable in a way that brought me inside each and every scene.

Given her topic, readers will do a significant amount of hand-wringing until the last page is turned (crying, gasping, cringing at the brutality). There's Horst's sexual shenanigans and then the violence aimed at children (Rainer's brother's murder and Trudy's German subject with the eye patch). Within my Jewish community I know many, many Holocaust survivors, their children and also their grandchildren; while all support the idea of keeping this kind of history alive through well-researched fiction and non-fiction, some shy away from actually reading about such things (too painful, especially for those who survived the conflagration themselves or who, like my husband, listened to parents crying out in their sleep with nightmares). I would say that all should--all MUST--read it because along with the pain and suffereing Blum portrays, she offers her readers the possibility of tremendous redemption from the intergenerational guilt that surviorship engenders.

An important message about guilt and redemption is at the heart of THOSE WHO SAVE US. While I don't think a parallel can ever be made between what the Jewish people and Germans such as Anna and Pfeffer suffered from the Nazis in WWII, Blum reminds us that suffering was pervasive, that there was a hefty pricetag attached to survival for all because it often involved some form of character degradation (whether one became an SS whore like Anna or a Frau Kluge type extorting valuables from the Jews and then turning her victims in anyway); from this a lifetime of torment followed. Blum captures the ugly reality of human desperation, what is oddly within the realm of the norm when the topic is war. That she has portrayed this from the German perspective elevates it to a universal quality of suffering that offers the possibility of universal expiation. Even someone as sinister as her Obersturmfuhrer in the novel can be tossed into the pot of war troubles and deprivations fomenting during this period in history that made it roil with atrocities.

Of all Blum's characters, I was most drawn to Anna and her steadfast adherence to keeping her past a secret. I loved when her daughter Trudy finally understood that her mother had a right to her silence, that it was an individual "choice." While I sympathized with Trudy's quest for the truth, it was really Anna's view that grabbed me by the softest underbelly of my recent experience with losing my mother and said: Hey! I have a right to secrecy, you know! It's MY life not yours! (Do we children ever cease to be greedy beasts, however old or grown up we become?) I wish to thank Blum for Anna's reminder to let such things as a mother's private matters (her pain?) pass into the dust with her if that was her wish.

History, itself, should never pass into the dust, however. This novel could easily be one of those rare historical works which will be vital reading for the generations coming up. For it is the descendents of WWII's survivor population (I include Jews AND Gentiles here) as well as everyone everywhere who will need a glaring reminder in the future of this war's particular brand of brutality. Kudos to Blum for not sanitizing the heinousness of war, and for so thoughtfully and graphically rendering fact into the most engaging fictional form.

Pauline Briere