The Good and the Evil – The World That We Knew by Alice Hoffman

"Where there is life, there is hope." This quote, attributed to the playwright Publius Terentius Afer, known as Terence, was an African slave who was brought to Rome in the second century BCE by the Senator Terentius Lucanus. It is so fitting a summary of this remarkable novel.

The lyrical Alice Hoffman evokes the darkest days of the Holocaust, in her novel about Ava, a golem (in Jewish folklore, a clay creature brought to life through sacred magic) created in secret by Ettie, a rabbi's teenaged daughter, for the responsibility of protecting a young girl in her escape from Berlin to Paris. With payment from the mother Hanni to watch over her daughter Lea, Ettie and her sister Marta join the two on a dangerous train ride out of Germany.

Hoffman is a master of both magical realism and the historical novel, and they have never come together more convincingly or beautifully than they do here. Hoffman does not spare the reader from the horrors of the roundups, murders, rapes and tortures that are committed by the Nazis and their French collaborators, but she also evokes the humanity of love, compassion, kindness and generosity that were the hallmarks of the Resistance fighters, both French and Jewish, and those that assisted them.

Ava is the most extraordinary character, a quasi woman of clay, who has superhuman strength, understands the speech of birds and forest animals, and learns complex tasks almost instantaneously. Her evolution is the center of the novel, but there are other very interesting characters.

Lea grows from a petulant, sullen and frightened girl of twelve, who exposed to the enormous trials of the war, then becomes a sensitive young woman who is adult before her time. Julien, the spoiled, immature teenaged son of the distant cousins who take her and Ava in when they reach Paris, evolves into a resourceful young man who follows his older brother into a Jewish Resistance group. And then there is Marianne, a young woman from the distant countryside, the maid in Julien's parents' household, who returns home and becomes a leader in spiriting Jews and others in hiding over the border into Switzerland. Marianne is, of course, the name for the symbol of the common people of France, evoking the principles of liberty, egality and fraternity. Hoffman picked a most appropriate name for her.

There is an amazing amount to absorb in The World That We Knew, and being openminded to the idea that good can conquer evil, and that there are things in this world that may be beyond what we normally comprehend, are vital for a full appreciation. On the other hand, reading, or listening to this work, will hopefully allow some minds to suspend their cynicism and disbelief.

I was delighted to see that the reader of the audio book version is the acclaimed actress Judith Light, who has given a remarkable reading, voicing not just the characters, but delivering the French and German place and personal names with care, and occasional snippets of Hebrew prayers with gravity.