The Things We Cannot Say

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 7

Chapters 8-14

Chapters 15-25

Chapters 26-33

Chapter 34-Epilogue

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Book Club Questions

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Alina’s Wedding Ring

The gold wedding ring, a family heirloom from Alina’s mother, begins as a conventional symbol of love and commitment but evolves into a symbol of Alina’s growth into an empowered and independent woman able to rise to the challenge of unthinkable suffering and the humiliation of powerlessness and emerge triumphant and in control.

Although the boy she loves comes from a prominent and successful family (Tomasz’s father is a respected doctor), Alina comes from a working-class background, her family maintaining a farm for generations. She has no fortune to bring to the wedding. When Tomasz prepares to leave for his medical studies in Warsaw, Alina fears the distance may be more than their tender love can withstand. Her mother, seeking to soothe her unhappy daughter, gives her the ring and assures her that “when the time is right” (27), Tomasz will slip the ring on her finger. The ring at that point represents Alina’s resolve to find fulfillment as the life partner of the boy she loves.

Then the war happens. Alina initially clings to the ring as a symbol of her love for the missing Tomasz, but it takes on new meaning when Alina arrives at the Soviet-held camp in Buzuluk, where the camp guard turns her away, saying the camp is already too full. The impossibility of the order to leave shatters into irony. In a novel of tragic and sorrowful moments, this denial of freedom when Alina is literally within steps of it is the darkest moment. After all she has endured, Alina appears to be defeated, her campaign to secret out the film canister and achieve freedom in the balance. Alina without hesitation pulls her mother’s ring from its safe place in a hidden coat pocket and calmly negotiates for her admittance. The ring secures her entrance and in turn makes possible her flight to genuine freedom and new beginnings in America. The ring thus testifies to Alina’s emerging sense of courage, her heroic resilience, her independent strength, and her scrappy sense of survival.

Communication

As the title indicates, the novel examines the difficult struggle to say the things we cannot say, the logic of secrets and the pain of not sharing. In the end, the novel argues that sharing secrets and working through to communication elevates relationships, salvages damaged hearts, encourages forgiveness, and ensures moral and spiritual integrity. Even so, it is manifestly not easy to communicate such things.

In the narrative present, Alina Tomasz, Babcia to Alice, now in her 90s, suffers a minor stroke that leaves her unable to communicate save through the laptop app used by Alice’s son Eddie who, as a manifestation of his disability, is nonverbal. Sensing the approach of death, Babcia needs to share the secret she has kept for decades: the true identity of the man who was her husband for 70 years and her urgent need to make sure she is buried with the man she has loved in her heart for that same time. Even as Alice struggles to communicate with her moody and emotionally volatile son through the app, Alina uses the same imperfect communication system to try to relay the dimensions of the secret she has kept. More to the point, even as the Nazis appear ominously close to the Polish border, Alina’s parents do not want her to worry and dismiss the danger they know is very real. When Alina wonders about the odd chimney that goes up in the nearby work camp, her mother assures her the chimney provides warmth for the camp detainees. Tomasz, when he returns after his catastrophic experience in the Warsaw ghetto, struggles to tell Alina about his collaboration with the Nazis. The entire identity switch involves a level of secrecy that stretches for decades.

In the present, Alice struggles to explain to Wade her feelings of emotional abandonment and her sense that her devotion to family rather than a career has disappointed her mother, a prominent circuit judge. Indeed, when Alice seeks the comfort of a warm bath and a bottle of Merlot, she recognizes that the only thing she has is Eddie’s dependence on her and that she needs Wade to fail as father. Additionally, when Alice arrives in Poland, she is all too aware that she does not speak the language. The novel uses communication as a symbol of the rewards of trust, honesty, and love. Ultimately, communication succeeds. Alina conveys to her granddaughter the urgency of going to Poland and arranging her burial, and Alice learns that family is a joint enterprise, a cooperation that relies on saying even the things we cannot say.

Claustrophobia

Both Alina Dziak and Alice Michaels are afflicted with claustrophobia, one literally, the other symbolically. Claustrophobia is an intense and irrational fear of enclosed spaces, an anxious feeling of having lost control, of being helpless, pinned in, unable to move within a confining environment that threatens without evident relief.

Alina first reveals her claustrophobia when her family heads to the shelter of a cellar under the barn. Initially, despite the imminent threat, Alina refuses to head into the darkness. She struggles to calm her breathing when the cellar is closed up, and for days that stretch into what seems an eternity, Alina struggles to maintain her composure while overhead she hears the artillery of the invading Nazis. Later, she shares with Tomasz her family’s secret other cellar, which is stocked with provisions her mother has squirrelled away. She experiences identical stress attacks and struggles to find comfort in her lover’s generous arms. The nightmare of her escape to Buzuluk begins with a long day and night sealed in a tiny produce crate with Saul Weiss. She draws on her strength she did not know she had to measure her breathing, think about Tomasz, envision the wide-open expanses of her family farm. She overcomes her feeling of helplessness, her feeling of being trapped as much by the cellars or the crate as by Nazi-occupied Poland itself.

Alice Michaels suffers from an emotional claustrophobia caused by her sense of helplessness and by her daily struggle to find room to be herself in a dysfunctional family. She struggles every day to calm herself, to remember that she is not alone, that her family is there, somewhere. She is subject to wild mood swings, moments of inexplicable anger that reflects her anxiety over the soft prison that her family has become. Her home has become like Alina’s cellar, like that produce crate, a terrifying enclosed space with no place to move and no way to escape. Her flight to Poland neatly reverses Alina’s own flight to freedom to America. The results, however, parallel each other. In Trzebinia, Alice finds a way to free herself from the perception of the trap that her family has become. The moment that marks her freedom comes when her Polish guide takes her to the mountains near Trzebinia. There, “standing on a mountaintop for no reason other than the sake of the experience” (363), she stands above the world and feels for the first time in years the freedom to be a mother, a wife, and herself. She realizes, “I am simply Alice” (363). This moment marks the beginnings of Alice’s determination to make her family lift her rather than bury her.