The World That We Knew

In the novel, a monster becomes human, and humans become monsters. What does it mean, then, to be human? In a story set in the darkest years of Nazi Germany, the question is hardly rhetorical or philosophical, and the answer is anything but simple. The Nazi genocide killed millions of Jewish people, entire families who were innocent of any wrongdoing. Those in charge of the camps, who directed the arrests, were human, capable of deciding right and wrong, presumably having hearts and capable of empathy. They acted, however, as monsters without souls. It is not enough for the novel to demonize the Nazis. To do so would be to suggest that somehow the Nazis were sui generis. Instead, the novel offers the complex figure of the golem Ava, a monstrous creation fashioned from river mud. An automation, surely she has no soul. Nevertheless, Ava comes to feel genuine emotions. Thus, the novel investigates the existential question of what it means to be human and in turn uses the Nazis as exemplum of a threat that persists beyond the rise and fall of Hitler’s Third Reich.

In the closing pages, when Ava discovers love and the grace of sacrifice, she evolves into a human. She receives the gift of being alive. The definition of humanity may lie in the elements of her creation: The river mud, the clay, that forms the bulk of Ava’s massive body suggests that humans must have the natural world around them to ground them, that nature itself must speak to them, must be part of their essence. The rainwater that Ettie mixes with the mud to make it pliable, purer, and cleaner than the city’s water, suggests that humanity must touch purity, must aspire to something grander and greater than the sad and sorry cycle of lust and dust, the tawdry pursuit of base gains, the empty pursuit of power and control. Humanity needs the element of the ideal, the pure. Marta’s menstrual blood, which she so reluctantly provides, suggests that humanity in its highest expression understands the miracle of procreation, the gift of fertility, and the power of sexuality not for shoddy carnal ends but rather to express the radiant energy of a species that defies extinction—in short, the blessing of life itself. The final element of Ava’s creation, however, is the most telling in the novel’s definition of humanity, as it’s not actually part of the ancient incantation ritual that Ettie performs. Hanni, who commissions the golem to protect her daughter, endows the creature with a few of her tears. A mother’s tears suggest that the ability to love others, care for others, to heroically and absolutely deny the self to protect others, is ultimately what defines humanity. Nature, purity, fertility, and love, these are what make us human. It is Ava in the end who embodies this complete vision of humanity. With these elements, monsters become human; without them, as the novel shows through the Nazis that swarm the French countryside, humans become monsters. 

Although the novel freely draws on paranormal phenomena—angels and demons, dancing birds, and acts of crazy clairvoyance—the most authentic magic it depicts doesn’t comes from ethereal beings hanging above the trees or sudden moments of insight when the future reveals itself. Rather, the most authentic magic is inherent in the everyday (extra)ordinary experience of the inexplicable and entirely illogical dynamic of love.

To offer the experience of love as the sole human energy capable of redeeming a world otherwise defined by inhumanity, hate, and violence is to risk a cloying, saccharine sentimentality. However, in this story, the characters earn love. Nothing about it is simple. Certainly, Lea and Julien find love, Dr. Girard reanimates his heart through the tender agency of Ettie, and Victor triumphs over his family’s entrenched class bias to find his way to the comfort and emotional support of the family’s maid. However, those experiences are set against the grim backdrop of millions of Jewish men, women and children being methodically imprisoned, tortured, and slaughtered for no reason other than their faith.

When Julien accepts a teaching position in the school for Jewish refugee children, he asks Lea to read Franz Kafka’s skewed surreal parables: “The world made no sense, fates were cast for no reason, men were beasts or insects or they were simply lost, wandering through corridors that led nowhere, beset by those who followed orders no matter how foolish those orders might be” (258). This, he tells the woman he loves, is not a world in which “a person could trust anyone” (258). Without blurring the novel’s hard-edged realism as an expression of Holocaust fiction, the story refuses to concede to that Kafkaesque world, refuses to let despair and confusion have the last word. The match-flick moment in which the heart recognizes the sympathy, consolation, and comfort possible in the authentic connection with another vulnerable, generous heart—even if that moment alone cannot redeem the world, un-Kafka it—makes the horror show endurable. Love is not much, just everything, in a world where despair is easy. Periodic breaks in the narrative’s frame acknowledge the grim reality of Nazi horrors, the sheer numbers of Jews lost to the insidious campaign for their eradication. Love softens that reality without ignoring it. As Julien discovers when he experiences the brutalities of the Nazi machine, even as he feels waves of despair, he understands that Lea alone is “the way to survive” (258).