The Girl with the Leica

August 15, 2019
A charismatic martyr of the Spanish Civil War lives on in the memories of three erstwhile pals who have an axe to grind. In 2018, Janeczek won Italy's prestigious annual Strega prize, the first woman to have done so in 15 years. Gerda Pohorylle, working pseudonymously as Gerda Taro, was also a first in the 1930s, a female photojournalist on the front lines as leftist troops waged their ultimately unsuccessful battle against the Franco coup. A German Jew who fled Leipzig for Paris, Gerda and her 20-something friends enjoy a brief idyll of cafe society. A typist, she becomes obsessed with photography and heads for Spain with her mentor and lover, André Friedmann, a Hungarian refugee, who takes on the name Robert Capa. (Together they concocted both aliases.) The two separate to cover the rebellion, intending to reunite, but shortly before her 27th birthday, Gerda is killed in a collision with a tank. Janeczek, as an epilogue confirms, hews closely to the known facts about her characters, all real people. The pre-World War II upheaval is very much in the background. Instead we have mostly retrospective musings, half-realized scenes of young love and its attendant angst as recounted by Gerda's surviving contemporaries, all, like her, German exiles. Dr. Willy Chardack lives in Buffalo, New York, where his routine of the New York Times and pastries is disrupted by a phone call from an old friend that prompts him to ruefully recall his mostly unrequited crush on Gerda. Ruth Cerf, Gerda's best girlfriend, seems to view Gerda mainly as a rival for male attention. Georg Kuritzkes, a neurologist in Italy, still rankles over being displaced by Capa as Gerda's love interest. For long stretches, little happens. Gerda is seen only through a glass darkened by resentment. But the chief hurdle for readers of English is the prose. Surprisingly, Goldstein's translation fails to unknot frequent syntactic snarls, in contrast to her limpid renderings of Elena Ferrante's work. The text is replete with head-scratcher sentences like this: "The ladies of high society were already competing to see who could gorge Hitler, in the face of the workers reduced to poverty by their consorts." Flirts dangerously with unreadability.

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September 6, 2019

Janeczek's fictionalized biography of Gerda Taro (1910-37), one half of the photographer team known as "Robert Capa," is set in Paris in the summer of 1937, amid the rise of fascism, Nazism, economic depression, antipathy toward foreigners, and the Spanish Civil War. Gerda, a 26-year-old German-Jewish expat and antifascist, is determined to document the conflict in Spain but becomes the first female photojournalist killed on the battlefield. Left to mourn Gerda are partner Endre Friedmann, who went on to claim the name Robert Capa; an old female friend; and two ex-lovers, including Dr. William Chardack, later known as the pioneer of the implantable pacemaker. Their remembrances of Gerda told here in alternating chapters. VERDICT This novel presents a chance to highlight Gerda's story, her daring and accomplishments, and might have finally removed her from under Capa's shadow. Instead, Strega Prize winner Janeczek (Bloody Cow), and translator Goldstein, deliver a work filled with impenetrable prose, scant action, and an unsatisfying portrait of a woman with with a brief, if eventful and interesting life.--Susan Santa, Shelter Rock P. L., Albertson, NY

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 21, 2019
Janeczek creatively and seamlessly spotlights war photographer Gerda Pohorylle, known professionally as Gerda Taro, in this fictionalized account of her life. Gerda’s short life (1910–1937) is chronicled from the viewpoint of the friends who knew her best; she was half of the alias Robert Capa, the photographer team of Gerda and her lover André Friedmann. While living in Buffalo, doctor Willy Chardack reminisces about Gerda when he receives a call in 1960 from another former lover, Georg Kuritzkes. Willy, known as “the Dachshund,” spent time with Gerda in pre-WWII Paris, where he continued his university studies while Gerda learned how to use a camera and supported the antifascist cause. Ruth Cerf highlights her friendship with the effervescent Gerda, who was thrilled as her photography career began to take off in 1930s Paris. Yet tragically, Gerda’s quest to rush into danger to photograph military action led to her death during the Spanish Civil War. Kuritzkes also remembers Gerda, the woman he once loved and who challenged him intellectually. Janeczek details the political unrest in pre-WWII Europe while instilling her novel with the indelible mark of Gerda’s presence and photographic genius. Fans of historical fiction featuring strong, forward-thinking female characters will be enthralled.

Starred review from October 1, 2019
Helen Janeczek joins an illustrious group of novelists who have found a deep wellspring for fiction in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), beginning with Ernest Hemingway's eye-witness-inspired For Whom the Bell Tolls, which was published just a year after those who were fighting to save an elected government were defeated by fascist forces under General Francisco Franco, who was allied with Hitler and Mussolini. Hemingway covered the war, along with his third-wife-to-be Martha Gellhorn, and both appear in Beautiful Exiles (2018) by Meg Waite Clayton and Love and Ruin (2018) by Paula McLain. Distinguished Spanish writer Manuel Rivas' pid ID=433995The Carpenter's Pencil (2001) is a deeply inquisitive and moving novel about the war, as are Alan Furst's Midnight in Europe (2014), The Time in Between (2011) by Maria Duenas (translated by Daniel Hahn), and Mary Gordon's There Your Heart Lies (2017). Now Janeczek and Isabel Allende in A Long Petal of the Sea (2019), explore the seismic impact on individual lives of Spain's devastating civil war in novels strikingly divergent in style and focus.Two photojournalists are working in Barcelona in 1936. Both are Jewish exiles. Hungarian Andr� Friedmann and Polish German Gerta Pohorylle adopt noms de guerre. He will make history as Robert Capa; Gerda Taro should be better known. At 27, she became the first woman war photographer to be killed in battle. Rather than tell Gerda's riveting story in a straight-ahead work of biographical fiction, Janeczek has created the exceptionally intricate The Girl with the Leica, translated by Ann Goldstein and winner of the prestigious Strega Prize, in which she portrays Gerda through the eyes of three people who loved her, true-life individuals with extraordinary stories of their own. Willy Chardack, a distinguished doctor living in Buffalo, New York, in 1960, thinks about beautiful, brilliant, willful Gerda as he grapples with his isolation as an immigrant in America during the red scare. His musings set Gerda within a densely detailed rendering of 1930s Germany beset by escalating anti-Semitic terror. In Paris in 1938, a year after Gerda's death, Ruth Cerf remembers her close friend as independence incarnate. And finally Georg Kuritzkes, Gerda's first lover, weighs in from Rome in 1960, illuminating yet more facets of Gerda's brio and daring exploits. Janeczek's demanding, allusion-saturated, multiperspective novel portrays a circle of valiant dissidents and ventures into many spheres, but the focus always swings back to resplendently determined, courageous, and creative Gerda.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)