The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
After a recent very long string of 2 and 3 star novels, I was so overwhelmingly happy to have read this delightful book. Historical fiction is probably my favourite genre and I'm always ecstatic to find another beautiful written novel that group.
The Lost Wife introduces us to Josef and Lenka, two young Jewish people who live in Prague during the onset of WWII. The reader quickly becomes familiar with young Lenka, the child who watched her mother become pregnant, welcomed a sister into the family, started drawing and making art pieces while still an adolescent, growing into womanhood and eventually falling in love with Josef, all the while with the backdrop of political turmoil.
Lenka is a very easy character to love. She is well written and explained by Richman, who fleshes her out into a woman who is deeply in love, Josef being the first man she is with. As the political situation grows worse, Josef and Lenka marry under the cloud of imminent German invasion as Josef plans on bringing Lenka with him to America.
Unfortunately, although Josef leaves for England to procure a passage to America for Lenka and her entire family, she remains behind in Prague, unable to leave her blood relatives behind.
The novel is written in a manner that is a bit difficult to explain in a review. Within the first chapter, Josef is an old man who is attending his grandson's wedding rehearsal. He glances across the room and an elderly woman catches his wife. He cannot believe it! Grasping her arm he says, "Lenka! Do you remember me? It's Josef...your husband..."
After that chapter, the story evolves, how two young people in love remain parted for sixty years, the circumstances that led up to such a moment, including Lenka's stay in prison camps Terezin and Auschwitz and Josef's near brush with death while on an ocean liner. Both of them marry other people (probably illegal, come to think of it) and both try to move on with their lives the best way they can.
Josef marries a quiet woman who has lost her entire family to the Holocaust. She forever deals with her shadows and they are never able to have an entirely open and honest relationship because of their haunting pasts. Lenka marries an American soldier who loves her more than she feels capable of returning.
I found myself very caught up in the plot, especially during the part about Lenka's stay in the camps. Later I was surprised to discover that several "characters" Lenka meets in the novel were actual prisoners who stayed in those camps and were involved in a small prison resistance of sorts. I don't want to go into detail about what happens in the camps, because I desperately want you to read this book!!!
For me, the most stirring part of the novel was the eventual death of Lenka's American husband. She comes to a realization that she has loved him all along and she finally opens her heart to him. The prose used is so breathtakingly moving. I must admit...I finished the novel voraciously in a Canadian Tire's auto shop waiting room and I was quietly sniffling away and avoiding the eye contact of the men around me. Yes, this book LITERALLY made me cry.
...It was there, in our bedroom with the old faded curtains and the furniture we had bought so many years before, that I told him how much I loved him, too. I told him how for fifty-two years I had been blessed to spend my life with a man who held, protected me, and gave me a daughter who was strong and wise. I told him how his love had turned a woman who only wanted to die after the war into someone who had a full and beautiful life...
Waterworks.
There is so much more to this novel than I can articulate. It is full of beautiful vignettes and phrases that weren't overly cliched or soppy. I couldn't tear myself away from it and finished it very quickly. I highly recommend this novel, especially to someone who enjoy historical fiction. Also, make sure you read the author's note that follows the story: it is full of interesting information.
If Goodreads had a half star rating, I would give this book 4.5/5 stars. The only reason I rated it a bit lower was because I wanted to know more about what happened with Josef and Lenka once they reunited AND sometimes I found the writing a bit out of place with the time era.
But do read it. And enjoy.
View all my reviews
Romance and reality colliding. How often do the two of them meet and how rarely are they discussed. What always seems to matter is the mutual meeting of two minds, the beginning of relationships when everything is new and apparently perfect, each person eager to look out for the other and be sacrificial. But what happens after those first few months, after the "honeymoon" stage? I suppose that many people are aware that the initial infatuation ends and then mundane reality of life sets in, the humdrum of existence.
In a way, I've been feeling lately that daily life has been beating the romance out of my relationships. Now, even more than ever, I have an almost daily realization that relationships are work and maintaining the romance is even more work. It requires effort and a lot of it!
M. is a wonderful person. He gives so much in our relationship, but yet I cannot help compare our now to then. The way he treats me now is slightly yet unavoidably different than the way he treated me when we first started dating.
First off, we no longer have the mysteriousness exuding from each other that we sought so desperately to penetrate. We have tried to understand each other to highest extent, thus removing any intrigue from what lies between us. In a way it is comforting; in a way it is boring. I can predict what he will do and what he will say when I am upset. I no longer wonder what his reaction will be. I know him almost as well as I know myself. As I said, it is comforting to be so intimate with someone and to feel so open, but it also leads me to feel somewhat bored at times.
Where he would once upon a time check my blog at least weekly to see what I had written and then compliment my entries, he no longer does so unless I alert him to new posts. He seems to have lost the interest in my writing and I can't really blame him. My entries are pretty boring.
The second thing is that we no longer have the same eagerness to please each other that we once did. When we first started dating, I never said anything even remotely hurtful or rude to him because I was afraid of destroying what appeared to be a fragile and delicate thing. Sometimes I catch myself being intentionally hurtful or rude to him now, as though testing him and stretching our relationship and his love to it's furthest
extent. I know with my head that this is normal when it comes to settling down into relationships, but I feel so unsettled about it. I don't want to be the person who maliciously hurts the person I love.
I also remember times when I would be crying and upset and he would cancel appointments or stay home from work to comfort me and help me feel better. Now he walks out the door and continues on with his life, with his work shift, knowing I will still be waiting for him in the bed when he gets home. It doesn't matter if I feel under the weather. I won't die so life goes on. Reality pounding the hell out of romance.
Even more saddening is my recollection of how I would say something wistfully or desire something vaguely and he would go out of his way to obtain said things for me. Today I left for work early to get Nyquil for my lingering chest cold and it so turns out that they no longer sell it in the hospital pharmacy...psych patients were apparently abusing it. Anyway, I texted him and said that they had no Nyquil and his reply was basically, "well that sucks!" and nothing else. I thought for sure he would drop by a store and grab me some, but he didn't volunteer to do that and I had to outright ask him to pick it up for me.
A similar occurrence last week when I was making breakfast and said I wanted a coffee. He took the dog out for a walk and I thought for sure he was going to the nearby cafe to grab one for us. He came home empty handed and inwardly I felt a sadness settle in, as though the realization that this is the reality of my relationship from here on forward has finally made itself completely apparent to me.
I know that he does so much for me and I do appreciate all the wonderful things he does, but at the same time I see how our relationship is evolving and changing and I am powerless to stop it or to take control of what is happening and bring back some romance and mystique. I accept that this is the way we now are and that this is the future we have together, but a little part of me wistfully misses the excitement and wonderful little things that M once did for me.
We will always find things that leave us a little unsettled and uneasy, especially when we see or feel that we don't have the same care for each other that we once did. Perhaps it is on me to try and infuse some more romance into our relationship.
Posts
