Alice Hoffman's Latest, One of Her Best

"The World We Knew" is the novel I would recommend for those of you who may have enjoyed Kristin Hannah's "The Nightingale" but prefer more lyrical prose. Alice Hoffman has always been a favorite of mine. In fact, she received a lifetime achievement award at the Southwest Florida Reading Festival several years ago when I was still a working librarian and her speech brought me to tears.

Ms. Hoffman is no stranger to magical realism and mysticism but feminism also plays a large role in many of her books. I love the way she married these themes by explaining the Jewish idea of a golem, a being created out of clay and breathed into life through prayers that only an experienced rabbi can intone. A golem, because "it" is so powerful, has a limited existence and must eventually be destroyed. Hoffman uses this fact to beautifully explore the nature of the soul, of love, feelings, fear, and self-sacrifice that might render a being fully human.

 In 1941 Berlin, as the Nazis become a daily presence and an existential threat to Jews, a mother, Hanni, realizes that she must make the ultimate sacrifice and send her teenage daughter away to safety. Understanding that Lea could not escape on her own, Hanni goes to the rabbi to beg him to create a golem to accompany Lea on her flight to freedom. The rabbi's fearful wife turns Hanni away, but his feisty daughter, Ettie, who has been secretly studying the Torah against the strictures of Judaism, offers to make the golem under one condition, that she and her younger sister can accompany Lea and the golem, named Ava, to Paris.

Agonizing suspense and pathos play out in equal measure as we follow the women on to the train and through the check points. In Paris, Ava and Lea are taken in by the Levi family, relatives Lea had never met. Here Ava, always with a watchful eye on Lea, makes herself useful as a cook, replacing Maryanne who recently abandoned the family to return to her father's farm in the French countryside where she will become a valued member of the Resistance.

 The Levi's two boys, Julien and Victor are each wonderful characters who play an outsized role in bringing the stories of Lea, Ava, and Maryanne together. While love is the overarching thread throughout this amazing book, Hoffman does not romanticize this era when good and evil were in such stark contrast. Good people die, some for no reason whatsoever, others for a cause greater than themselves.

Like Julie Orringer's "The Flight Portfolio," this is an emotionally ensnaring novel that forces one to confront the nature of evil and ask how we would resist if the need arises. Especially interesting is Hoffman's note to readers about how she came to write this story after meeting a woman at a library book talk, a woman who worried that her history might never be known. I hope she's still alive to read this compellingly told tale.