The Things We Cannot Say

The novel is at once neither and both a historical novel about life in Nazi-occupied Poland, the story of the triumph of the will and the power of love in the darkest times, and an example of psychological realism, the study of a 30-something mother struggling to find empowerment and identity in a culture that sees stay-at-home mothers as somehow suspect. Either story could sustain a novel. This novel, however, juxtaposes the two storylines. It moves chapter to chapter from the first-person immediacy of Alina’s story in Poland to the first-person immediacy of Alice’s story in Florida. The novel then offers two separate first-person narrators. Rather than minimizing either storyline or trivializing either Alina’s desperate mission to freedom or Alice’s desperate mission to help her dying grandmother and resuscitate her family dynamic, the split narrative suggests that these two stories share more than a family tie. The first-person strategy creates sympathy. The novel uses first person for Alina’s story because that immediacy brings the dark realities of Nazism and the profound courage of those who suffered under such brutalities to a contemporary audience. The novel uses first person to relate the story of Alice’s sense of failure and to bring to life a domestic situation pounded into cliché by radio call-in shows, trashy reality shows, and earnest solve-it-now talk shows. The shuttling structure suggests that critical emotions and pivotal moments of understanding and insight are not confined to particular eras. History is a neat and tidy way to compartmentalize the human experience; fiction renders such tidy constructs irrelevant and, through the use of sympathetic characters with psychological depth, opens up stories to the broadest expressions of what are, in the end, human realities, not historical ones.

Thus, a farmgirl in Nazi-occupied Poland and a harried stay-at-home mom in contemporary Florida trace the same evolution toward insights that have wide and meaningful implications: the importance of love, the reward of family, the hunger for freedom instilled in the human spirit, the reality of evil, the need to resist evil or become complicit in its spread, the blessing of communication with those closest to us, the resilience of the heart, the hope that even the darkest moments will pass, and the profound and unshakeable optimism that despair can never be the last word. Those are ideas not bound by history or defined by an era or a culture. As the novel’s split narrative suggests, these concepts are part of humanity’s story.