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Der Anfang Der Welt (2012)

by Ramona Ausubel(Favorite Author)

3.28 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

3492055192 (ISBN13: 9783492055192)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Piper

review 1: I find it remarkably indicative of the depth of the scars left by the experience of the Holocaust that we are here, 70 years--and in Ausubel's case, several generations--removed from the events of the late 30s and early 40s, and we are still struggling to find fresh ways to describe the hell unleashed upon Europe during the second World War. Still trying to find the words to put order to the fathomless and incomprehensible horror of some of mankind's most egregious inhumanity. In this iteration, Ausubel has elected to take a magical realist, fairytale-esque route, populating the isolated, Jewish hamlet of her narrator, Lena, with a cast of mild eccentrics: Lena herself, who will age in an erratic fashion, her bald mother, over-sized sister, cabbage-picker father, distressi... morengly needy and childish aunt, and the strange, nameless woman who washes down from the mountain when her own village is ransacked and bombed, and whose arrival sets the story in motion.Ausubel's language is quite lovely, by and large; though, to my taste, she does tiptoe perilously close to preciousness on occasion. Additionally, I found the final third of the novel--wherein the conflict at large finally intrudes on the hermetic world she has created, and nearly all of the book's action occurs--to be rather overstuffed. A fact which is somewhat surprising in retrospect, as she drops the threads of some of her more endearing characters entirely. I suppose this and the tuns the story take are in keeping with the capricious terror of World War II, but it doesn't quite fit with the fairytale tone she's already established. On the whole, a beautiful meditation on the crystalline nature of faith and sorrow.
review 2: In the 1930s, an isolated Russian hamlet finds a Stranger that floated downriver with terrible tales of war. They decide to hide and create a new world. Not a utopian existence by any means - mostly absurdities: a couple pretends their 11 year old niece is their own baby and she plays along with the elaborate charade, but ages a year per week. This leads her to marry at a tremendously young age and then they have children, and then the soldiers come. She flees into the mountains with her children. Heartbreaking. You wait for the atrocities to come pouring down and instead begin to wonder along with her if she "plucked her children out of the fertile earth for nothing". When the violence *does* come raining down it is almost a relief that at least her sacrifice was justified. Though she just has more to lose. less

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