The Teacher

November 4, 2019
Ben-Naftali’s captivating English-language debut is based on events of a Holocaust survivor’s life and subsequent suicide, as imagined by one of her former students. Elsa Weiss, an English teacher in Tel Aviv, is the favorite instructor of the nameless narrator. The narrator and her fellow students are fascinated by and afraid of their teacher, who they sense is hiding a mystery, though they are incapable of comprehending her hidden trauma. At 60, Weiss doesn’t even bother learning student’s names and seems different from their other teachers. The narrator grows up and becomes a teacher and remains mystified by Weiss. As an adult, she fictionalizes the path Weiss travels from her native Hungary after being separated from her parents in 1944 as she and her husband depart on a Kastner train to Palestine. The narrator imagines the atrocities that befall Weiss in the Bergen-Belsen camp and dreams that Weiss taught the imprisoned children. After her release from a sanatorium, Weiss learns the war is over, reunites with her brother’s family in Tel Aviv, and obtains a divorce. In researching Weiss, the narrator does some footwork and meets other survivors who tell her of the atrocities they witnessed. This heartbreaking novel is highlighted by Ben-Naftali’s spare prose and insightful observations. The author seamlessly blends history and fiction to forge a riveting novel.

November 1, 2019
One woman survives the Holocaust; decades later, another imagines what her life might have been like. Elsa Weiss survived the Holocaust by obtaining a seat on the "Kastner train"--a train that smuggled more than 1,600 Jews to safety after Rudolf Kastner, a Hungarian Jewish journalist and lawyer, negotiated with Adolf Eichmann. Kastner's train was real; in this novel by Israeli writer Ben-Naftali--her first to be translated into English--the reality of Elsa Weiss is up for debate. Once she arrives in Israel, Elsa works for decades as an English teacher before stepping off the roof of her apartment building. The novel is narrated by one of her students, who goes unnamed and who makes a project out of understanding Elsa's life. That's not easy to do. No one, it seems, knows anything about Elsa. What follows, then, is a work of the narrator's imagining--a kind of novel within a novel. Why Ben-Naftali chose this framing device isn't entirely clear, since she doesn't make full use of it. The vast majority of the book is taken up with descriptions of Elsa's experiences; only occasionally are we reminded that the real Elsa was a cipher, that these descriptions are the narrator's imaginings. But Ben-Naftali doesn't fully explore what it might mean to imagine another person's life or what these fictions illuminate about the narrator herself. Then, too, the narration hovers at a distance, favoring third-person description over dialogue or scenes in the present. The constant exposition makes Elsa into an abstraction and the other characters into less, even, than that. Ben-Naftali doesn't make full use of her material, and the result feels more tired than fresh.

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November 1, 2019
Elsa Weiss left no testimony behind when she jumped to her death some 30 years ago. She remains a recorded name, one of the 1,684 Jews on the infamous Kastner train that left Budapest, Hungary, in June 1944. And Elsa was among the 1,670 passengers to arrive eventually in Switzerland after surviving a stopover in Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The eponymous Kastner was both revered and reviled and was assassinated in Tel Aviv in 1957 for negotiating with Adolf Eichmann to divert the train from the Auschwitz gas chambers. In her biographical first novel, Ben-Naftali has a former student of Elsa's reimagine her life so that she will be remembered. Here is Elsa as a girl in Hungary, studying in Paris, getting married, becoming a Tel Aviv high-school teacher?and then, the horrific cleaving from home, family, country, and her very identity as well as her escape to safety when so many deserving others perished. Winner of the Sapir Prize, one of Israel's highest literary honors, Ben-Naftali's haunting tale portrays a vanished woman finally found. Translator Zamir provides a vivid translation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)