The World That We Knew

April 1, 2019

In 1941 Berlin, Hanni Kohn saves daughter Lea from the Nazis by taking her to a celebrated rabbi whose daughter, Ettie, creates a golem named Ava meant to protect Lea. As Ettie prepares to become a resistance fighter, Lea and Ava travel to Paris and thence to a convent blessed with silver roses and a village that ends up saving 3,000 Jews. With a 200,000-copy first printing and an eight-city tour.

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Starred review from July 15, 2019
In this tale of a young German Jewish girl under the protection of a golem--a magical creature of Jewish myth created from mud and water--Hoffman (The Rules of Magic, 2017, etc.) employs her signature lyricism to express the agony of the Holocaust with a depth seldom equaled in more seemingly realistic accounts. The golem, named Ava, comes into being in 1941 Berlin. Recently made a widow by the Gestapo and desperate to get her 12-year-old daughter, Lea, out of Germany, Hanni Kohn hires Ettie, a rabbi's adolescent daughter who has witnessed her father creating a golem, to make a female creature who must obey Hanni by protecting Lea at all costs. Ettie uses Hanni's payment to escape on the same train toward France as Lea and Ava, but the two human girls' lives take different paths. Ettie, who has always chafed at the limits placed on her gender, becomes a Resistance fighter set on avenging her younger sister's killing by Nazis. Lea, under Ava's supernatural care, escapes the worst ravages of the war, staying first with distant cousins in Paris (already under Gestapo rule), where she falls in love with her hosts' 14-year-old son, Julien; then in a convent school hiding Jewish girls in the Rhone Valley; then in a forest village not far from where Ettie has partnered in her Resistance activities with Julien's older brother. While Lea's experiences toughen and mature her, Ettie never stops mourning her sister but finds something like love with a gentle gentile doctor who has his own heartbreaking backstory. In fact, everyone in the large cast of supporting human characters--as well as the talking heron that is Ava's love interest and Azriel, the Angel of Death--becomes vividly real, but Ava the golem is the heart of the book. Representing both fierce maternal love and the will to survive, she forces Lea and Ettie to examine their capacities to make ethical choices and to love despite impossible circumstances. A spellbinding portrait of what it means to be human in an inhuman world.

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July 29, 2019
Set in Nazi-occupied France between 1941 and 1944, Hoffman’s latest (after The Rules of Magic) is a bittersweet parable about the costs of survival and the behaviors that define humanity. The narrative follows several groups of characters: teenage Julien Lévi and his older brother, Victor, whose family is murdered by the Nazis; Ettie, a rabbi’s daughter, who with Victor and Marianne, the Lévis’ former (Protestant) housekeeper, become members of the Resistance; and Lea Kohn, a schoolgirl fleeing Berlin with her “cousin” Ava. Unbeknownst to most of the characters, Ava is actually a golem—a soulless supernatural protector out of Jewish folklore—and her interactions with them and the ways in which she touches their lives serve as touchstones for Hoffman’s reflections on the power of love to redeem and the challenges of achieving humanity, or retaining it, under such challenging circumstances. Though coincidence governs much of the meeting and team-ups of her characters, Hoffman mitigates any implausibility through the fairy tale quality of Ava’s involvement and her supernatural powers of salvation. The attention to the harsh historical facts makes the reader care all the more strongly about the fates of all of the characters. Hoffman offers a sober appraisal of the Holocaust and the tragedies and triumphs of those who endured its atrocities.

Starred review from June 1, 2019
For Jewish mother and daughter Hanni and Lea, 1940s Berlin is an increasingly terrifying place. Hanni's love for her daughter is boundless; Lea must be kept safe at any cost. Knowing she lacks the power to accomplish this, Hanni finds a partner in Ettie, a strong-willed rabbi's daughter. Together, using clay and kabbalistic magic, they create and animate a golem. This soulless, superhuman creature is given the mission of protecting Lea, loving her as her mother would, and seeing to her safety. In the novel's foreword, the perennially best-selling and imaginative Hoffman notes, When you lose your child, the future vanishes. When you lose your parent, the world ends. During the Holocaust, a time of indescribable evil, so very many children vanished, so many parents were lost. WWII fiction has glutted the market, but Hoffman's unique brand of magical realism and the beautiful, tender yet devastating way she explores her subject make this a standout. Her settings, from Berlin to an isolated mountain village and a French convent, as well as every character are fully and vibrantly realized. Hoffman's use of a folkloric aspect adds a distinctive and captivating perspective to an exceptionally voiced tale of deepest love and loss.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With more than 30 works of fiction, Hoffman has a large, devoted following, and this, one of her finest, will be much requested.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)