The World That We Knew

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6

Chapters 7-13

Chapters 14-19

Chapters 20-26

Chapters 27-34

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

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Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-6 Summary

It is early springtime, 1941, in Berlin. Nazis have begun an aggressive campaign to deport the prominent Jewish families still in the city. Nazi thugs killed Hanni Kohn’s husband, a respected doctor, just months ago outside the hospital. Through her grief, Hanni is determined to ensure the safety of her 12-year-old daughter, Lea, a shy, precocious, and beautiful child with luxurious blonde hair. In addition, Hanni cares for her bedridden mother, a Russian Jewish immigrant who tells Lea stories of the old country about bands of wolves that roamed the countryside determined to do what they needed to do to survive the fierce winters. The wolves ruled the forests, her grandmother tells her. “Be a wolf,” she advises (11). One night, a Nazi soldier, attracted by Lea’s blonde hair, nearly rapes her. When the soldier pushes Lea into an alley, the girl sees perched on a rooftop across the street the lone mysterious figure of Azriel, the Angel of Death. Hanni intervenes to save Lea by stabbing the soldier with scissors from the dressmaker’s shop where she works. Shaken by the encounter, Lea tearfully cuts off her blonde hair. Hanni resolves to get Lea out of Berlin and to the relative safety of occupied Paris where her cousins, the Lévis, live.

Hanni doesn’t want her daughter to travel alone. She has heard that the neighborhood rabbi deals in powerful magic. Hanni, with her family’s jewelry in hand, approaches the rabbi and asks him to fashion a golem, which in Jewish culture is a life-like figure made of mud and water, soulless and emotionless, created to perform a single vital function. Golems have extraordinary strength and abilities. They can communicate with animals, foresee the future, even commune with angels. Through his wife (the rabbi refuses to talk directly to a woman), the rabbi denies Hanni’s request. “You are asking for a creature that is little more than an animal, a beast one step above the world of demons and spirits” (27). The rabbi’s daughter, Ettie, overheads the conversation and offers to help Hanni. She knows the incantations (indeed, she wishes she’d been born a boy so that she could be a rabbi) but will help only in exchange for using the jewels to obtain identity papers to secure herself and her older sister, Marta, transportation out of Berlin.

Two nights later, Hanni, Ettie, and Marta meet in the basement below the rabbi’s house. Ettie uses mud and rainwater, the purest water, as well as a dab of menstrual blood provided by a reluctant Marta. As Ettie works the clay, the creature begins to assume a human shape. Before Ettie begins the incantations, Hanni gifts the creature with her tears. Hanni instructs Ettie that the golem needs to be a woman for appearances’ sake; Lea cannot travel alone with a man. Ettie warns Hanni that they’re dabbling in dark magic, explaining, “It doesn’t matter what she looks like. She is not human. If she lasts too long, and gathers too much strength, she will be uncontrollable.” (46). Hanni agrees to tell Lea that once she’s safe, she must destroy the golem by removing some of the letters that Ettie carves into its arms. Hanni slips a written reminder into a locket she gifts Lea. As Ettie begins, the mud creature begins to glow and then slowly, awkwardly begins to sit up. They decide to call her Ava, a Jewish word meaning life.

The following day, Hanni introduces Ava to Lea as her distant cousin who will escort Lea on the train to Paris. Ava struggles to understand the world around her, “not sure what sort of being she was” (49). Lea is reluctant to leave her mother and grandmother. In the mayhem of the train station, Lea and Ava meet up with Marta and Ettie, and the four board the train. When Ava sees Ettie, she falls to her knees before her creator. This puzzles Lea, and for the first time she hears the word “golem,” which she doesn’t understand. Marta is concerned about her and Ettie’s identity papers, which (unlike Lea’s) are forged—and are not particularly good forgeries. As the train pulls out of the station and into the countryside, Ava looks out the window and in the night sky sees the figure of Azriel. A few miles out of Berlin, Gestapo soldiers stop the train, checking papers to make sure no Jews are on the train. Ettie panics. Determined to survive, she and her sister boldly jump from the train. Ettie runs to the safety of the woods, but Marta is shot and killed, leaving only “the beautiful husk of who she had been, crumpled in the grass” (67). As the train moves on, Ava realizes that her creator is suddenly gone.

Ava and Lea arrive on the doorstep of their cousins, the Lévis. The family, particularly the mother, Claire, are suspicious of the refugees, “foreign Jews” (77), and hesitate to take them in. The father, Andre, is a respected, if eggheaded, university mathematician. Despite the occupation, the Nazis allowed his family to stay in Paris even as arrests and deportations increased. They have two sons, 14-year-old Julien and 17-year-old Victor. Julien dreams of being a painter. Victor is restless to join the French Resistance. The maid, Marianne, just gave notice and is returning to her family farm in the small farming village of La Chambon-sur-Lignon, some six hours south of the city. Julien is at once smitten with Lea: “He had no idea who she was or her companion might be, but at least something interesting was happening” (79). He pleads with his father to take them in. The father agrees. They put Ava to work in the kitchen. As they settle in, Ava is uneasy over the attention that Julien is paying to her charge, musing, “Such was the behavior of mortals. Illogical, Impractical, emotional” (85).

Chapters 1-6 Analysis

These opening chapters establish three critical dynamics that define the world within which these three Jewish girls must venture and, ultimately, triumph: the concept from Lea’s grandmother’s tales of a dark world of wolves and hunters; the grim reality of surrendering to death against the hunger to live; and—most grandly—the raw energy of love against the power of hate.

In the stories that Lea’s grandmother told a younger Lea about growing up in the forbidding wintry wastes of central Russia, the novel introduces an into-the-woods fairy-tale ambience. The wolves, with their hulking black shadows, are agents of malevolence and threat. The grandmother was not simply telling her enraptured granddaughter stories about creatures that lurk in the depths of winter-dead woods. She is doing more than sharing with her granddaughter the feel, culture, and environment of her heritage as part of a family later displaced as first-generation immigrants in Germany. The grandmother, whose memory goes back to horrific recollections of Czarist pogroms directed against Russian Jews when she was girl, is teaching the tender and naïve child the reality of the world that Jews must live in. The wolves are not the red-eyed demonic forces that dominate fairy tales; the wolves here are heroic, doing everything they can to survive. By its disposition, a wolf hurts nothing, kills only to survive, and attacks only when provoked: “Only when it is wounded or starving. Only when it must survive” (6). The villains are the hunters, who with little reason to kill wolves, whose numbers are so scarce, raid the forest with their rifles bent on killing to kill. The parable depicts Nazi Germany as hunters and the Jewish enclave in Berlin as wolves. The wolf is content to live in peace; the hunter raids without logic and thus compels the wolf to resist, to survive, because endurance means extinction. The stories “were tales to tell when children needed to know not all stories ended with happiness” (5). The hunters-versus-wolves dynamic comes to shape Lea’s (and Ettie’s) heroic efforts to survive a cold, dead world of hostility, violence, and death.

That world is easy to hate, easy to dismiss as some dark, surreal creation of Kafka (a writer Julien studies). The massive and intimidating golem, Ava, introduces the novel’s dynamic between life and death. The creation of Ava, whose name means life, has a single directed purpose. Within Jewish folklore, a golem, because it lacks a soul, tends toward anarchic behavior, so its host must destroy it once its mission is complete. That reality, which prompts Hanni’s directive that once her daughter is safe, she is to destroy Ava, sets in motion the difficult wisdom of the novel that understanding the reality of death gives life its most urgent and sweet rewards. The lingering presence of the Angel of Death in these opening chapters commands the emotional center. Azriel hangs about the streets of Berlin and then along the tracks of the train bound for Paris. Death is everywhere, waiting patiently. Ironically, the soulless machine Ava comes to symbolize life. Everything Ava sees amazes her. The novel argues that despite the grim reality of a world driven by demons and fools, despite a life guaranteed to end in death, the world can stun, delight, amaze, and enthrall. The device of the golem reveals the innocent, open sensibility of a child, which is taken from Lea and Ettie at a tender age as they’re tragically immersed in a toxic world of hate and violence. Ava comes to symbolize the hunger to live despite the evidence of humanity’s evil. She embodies the urgent energy of the moment, the reckless love of the now who sees the world as “a marvel and, if you didn’t remember what the day would bring, achingly beautiful” (36).

However, the novel introduces a far more powerful dynamic to show the urgent embrace of life against the chilling surrender to death. The world’s marvels—the sun, the birds, the trees, the stars—are not in the end sufficient. The richer reward begins in these chapters at the most unlikely moment: when young Julien, a bored, haughty, spoiled would-be artist, first glimpses the tired and hungry refugee Lea. He notices “something” (79) about her, something he cannot entirely explain. This moment represents an even more potent magic than the elements of transformative and miraculous magic that the novel introduces with giddy delight. Love, as the novel comes to assert, alone defies the world’s manifest evil. However, love here is no fairy tale; it rages against a world of relentless cruelty and brutality. Hanni grieves the entirely pointless beating death of her husband, a doctor who spent his life helping people. She dabbles in the darkest magic to protect her daughter from the real darkness of evil, knowing that the only way to save her is to send her away. Ettie looks up to her older sister with tender love. Julien’s father, although adrift in his airy world of mathematics, looks tenderly at his wife even as he realizes that their time together is growing short. Love emerges as the tonic to the enveloping, claustrophobic world of hate. The novel uses Ava again as a naive childlike presence uncertain over what she intuits as Julien’s interest in Lea. While Ava’s purpose is to protect Lea, Ava cannot decide whether Julien’s interest is a threat, as it seems to her “illogical, impractical, emotional” (85). Ava’s disdain for emotions here provides the basis for her growing awareness of love’s profound solace, which defines her moral and spiritual growth into humanity.