53 pages • 1 hour read
Nicole KraussThe History of Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Elephants
Elephants appear several times in the text as symbols of truth that characters try to ignore or reframe. With this symbol, Nicole Krauss plays with the phrase “the elephant in the room,” which generally refers to some fact everyone willfully ignores. It’s also commonly said that elephants never forget, alluding to the power of memory. Finally, elephants live in strongly bonded, multigenerational herds, evoking the idea of community and paralleling the intergenerational narratives in The History of Love. Working this popular, multifaceted symbol into the novel supports themes of language and communication and comments on the role of language as a connective thread.
When Leo is a boy, he sees an elephant in the town square of Slonim. He knows the elephant’s presence is impossible, but he believes in it so strongly that he makes it real. The elephant becomes a symbol of Leo’s intentional reframing of reality to make it possible to live with all he’s lost. Zvi Litvinoff employs a similar strategy to cope with the loss of his family. He describes how living with the truth was like “living with an elephant” (156), something he is forced to ignore and fit himself around at every moment. Another reference appears when Leo experiences his heart attack, which feels “as if an elephant had stepped on [his] heart” (5). He is crushed by the heart attack itself but also by the sudden reality of his own mortality, thinking, “I didn’t live forever” (5). No matter how these characters try to avoid it, the truth is like an elephant, unavoidable and always pushing its way back in.
Naming and Translation
Naming is a key motif related to the themes of love, communication, and silence and the connective power of literature. Many characters are invested in the process of naming things to make the world more knowable so they can better understand themselves and their place in the world. Because the characters often have trouble communicating and expressing themselves, they show interest in breaking language down into its individual parts to make it more manageable. Leo hopes to find the perfect words in his writing, Bird refuses to answer to his given name and instead “went through fifteen or twenty names” (35) before settling on Bird, and Alma’s mother is trailed by “pages of crossed-out words” that are inadequate for her translations (44). The more the characters struggle with communication and connection, the harder they try to break down language into its individual parts. However, more often than not, words are left with “meanings worn off like the faces of old coins” (37).
Names in the text are constantly shifting. The History of Love is written by Leo, attributed to Litvinoff, and translated by Charlotte. Alma writes love letters to Jacob Marcus in her mother’s name, and Jacob Marcus is itself an alias, a name borrowed from Isaac Moritz’s book. Leo’s final book is attributed to his son, and his identity shifts to a fictional character in that work. The story’s shifting names allude to the different realities the characters create and their individual quests for truth and connection.
Heart, Compass, Book, and Ark
Each narrator, Leo, Alma, Litvinoff, and Bird, has a symbol in the printed text that represents them and their story. Each symbol is a small drawing that appears before each character’s respective chapters. Leo’s symbol is a heart, representing his own weak heart, his age, his awareness of the physical mortality of his body, and his enduring love for Alma. Alma Singer is represented by a compass, a symbol of her search for Alma Mereminski, her interest in wilderness survival, and her forward-looking youth. Litvinoff is represented by an open book, presumably The History of Love, symbolizing the credit he received for the book’s publication. Finally, Bird is represented by an ark, a symbol of his religious belief and the responsibility he feels toward his mother and sister. Krauss’s use of these drawings in a book about the power of language and literature can be taken as a reminder that there is more to life than words.
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By Nicole Krauss
