Customer Reviews

Louisa

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For the past fifteen years or so, Hungarian Jew Nora Gratz has lived a harsh life with her husband missing for more than a decade and her son now dead. She detests her daughter-in-law Louisa, daughter of die hard German Nazis, but family is family. Truth be told, Louisa is the only reason Nora survived the holocaust because she hid her mother-in-law from the Nazis after her spouse died.

In 1949 Nora, accompanied by her daughter in law, Louisa immigrates to Israel. However, her cousin fails to meet her at the Haifa docks. Nora and Louisa live in a camp where Holocaust survivors treat the younger woman with hatred and contempt. Willing to convert to Judaism, Louisa remains an abomination to the embittered survivors of Europe.

LOUISA, the retelling of the biblical story of Ruth, is an extraordinary work because Simone Zelitch provides perceptiveness into the parallel stories. Readers will feel a sense of time and place through the characters. Readers obtain a feel for the turmoil of the 1930s and 1940s in Hungary as well as a taste of 1949 Israel. The characters are drawn relatively simplistically and unsympathetically, but surprisingly that provides deeper insight into relationships, especially that of Nora and Louisa. The ultimate accolade to the author is that the audience will take a fresh look at the Ruth-Naomi tale.

Harriet Klausner

This book consumed my every free moment for three days. Being very familiar with the biblical story of Ruth, I thought the novel might be too predictable- but I was wrong. The intense characterizations, detail you can almost smell, and narrative pull combined to provide a very satisfying read.

Although the title of this book is LOUISA, the plot and story revolve around the life of its narrator, Nora Gratz. The book's dust jacket describes Nora as a 'prickly, strong-willed survivor of the Holocaust.' Nora and her mesmerizing daughter-in-law Louisa arrive in Haifa after the war, ready to begin a new life.

Before a new life can be started, however, Nora and Louisa must review their pasts and resolve complex issues of their lives together and their lives apart.

Nora's one true love was her cousin Bela. They had a close relationship as children and when Bela immigrated to Israel, Nora was devastated. She marries and has a son, Gabor, but she never forgets the love of her life.

Louisa came from an upper-class German family and enjoyed a protected childhood. Her world is turned upside down when she meets Gabor, a poor but gifted young man. Louisa's relationship with Gabor borders on the obsessed, but they eventually marry.

After the war, Nora and Louisa go to Israel to find Bela. Both women must be very resourceful to survive in this new land. The non-Jewish Louisa is suspect in the holding camp, but Nora defends her presence by repeating: 'She saved my life.' Nora spent many months during Nazi occupation of Budapest in Louisa's basement and feels an obligation for Louisa, but not much more.

The author tells the story of these two women by moving back and forth from past to present and from Nora to Louisa. The effect is sometimes disconcerting and waiting for the entire story to unfold is sometimes frustrating. I was never sure why the author chose to title the book LOUISA, as the story is ultimately Nora's.

On a more positive note, the book offers a look at life in Budapest before the war and it offers an intense look at early life in Israel and would prove educational to anyone interested in that time period

Here's what Beth Kephart @ BALTIMORE SUN wrote in her book review this week: "LOUISA is a smart, ironic, original and structurally sophisticated, a hard-core work of art... The subject at hand is exiles - from country, from idealism, from love... Zelitch uses a complicated stitch to weave the past and present together. She also endows Nora, her chain-smoking narrator, with an impossible omniscience, enabling her to fill in the blanks with anecdotes, details, revelations she'd have no way of ever knowing. Even so...LOUISA remains a masterful concoction, as Zelitch never breaks the spell of disillusionment that binds the story's seemingly dozens of subplots.

Like small pieces of glass rotating and reflecting new patterns, Zelitch's story of the Holocaust, Zionism, and the founding of Israel appears in fragments and rotates upon itself. Scenes move back and forth in time, between characters, between Hungary and Israel, and between first and third person narratives. The reader must work hard here to connect these fragments and to see how all the characters relate to each other, but gradually, the fragments evolve into a whole picture with a depth, scope, and historical grounding that are rare in fiction.

Ostensibly, this is the intriguing story of Louisa, a young German Aryan who marries Gabor, a Hungarian Jew, as World War II is breaking out. But it is equally the story of her feisty mother-in-law Nora, the primary speaker of the narrative, who decides to emigrate to Israel in 1949. The reader learns of the problems each woman has faced in Hungary during the Holocaust, her family history, her involvement in intellectual and cultural life, and her personal relationships. It is a book of enormous, epic reach.

One of the difficulties of developing a story like this in fragments, however, is that the reader is often so busy connecting ideas that s/he remains somewhat distanced from the characters, being forced to accumulate information about them, rather than partipating in the action with them. The characters become players on a stage, in a drama which is not completed until the end of the book. Despite substantial background information, I never felt that I really knew Louisa and Nora or "got inside" their heads enough to be able to understand them or predict how they would behave. Their motivations are often unclear because the fragment of the story which explains motivation appears later in the book. The deliberate parallels between Louisa and Nora and the Biblical story of Ruth and Naomi give depth and scope to their relationship, but they do not fully explain it.

Ultimately, I found this novel thoughtful, enlightening, and even important, but it didn't capture my heart. Its unique approach to the Holocaust story, its slice-of-life pictures of early Israel, its themes, and its "big picture," while truly admirable, do not generate a great deal of warmth or lead to complete characters which linger long in the reader's memory--at least, this reader's. I wish it had been so. Mary Whipple

Louisa is a brilliant novel, both captivating and intriguing. The characters are well developed and believable. I highly recommend this book.

This engrossing, well-told tale of Nora, a Jewish Hungarian woman, and her gentile German daughter-in-law Louisa drew me in from the first sentence. Nora arrives in Israel following World War II with widowed Louisa. The other Jewish refugees resent Louisa and try to pressure Nora to send her back to Europe, but Nora can only reply, "I owe her my life." As for Louisa, she explains her strange desire to convert to Judaism and to become an Israelite as simple love for Nora. But the reader knows that these sentiments, while enough for some people, does not completely explain why they are together in this foreign land. As the women's stories emerge, a uniting force becomes apparent: Gabor, Nora's carefree, reckless, and handsome son.

Zelitch has done an admirable job of characterization, from gritty Nora, to refined but resourceful Louisa, to Nora's idealistic cousin Bela, to Nora's measurement-obsessed husband Janos. This story unfolds at a leisurely pace that never bores; the narrative is full of details that give everything - and everyone - life. Although, as noted by other reviewers, the point-of-view shifts can be disconcerting at first, it was clear to this reader that Nora, not an omniscient narrator, was imagining and embellishing scenes she could never have known first hand in an effort to understand herself how she came to be in the new Jewish homeland with Louisa.

Readers who expect a page-turner should look elsewhere, but those who appreciate the richness of literary fiction should find much to admire.

This historical novel deftly portrays idealism and its dissolution, inhumanity and moral complexity, those who are swept up in history and those who attempt to shape it (sometimes one and the same). The characters are real, nuanced, and absolutely original. While complex in structure, subject, and perspective, it is a page-turner. Cliche as it sounds to state it this way, I literally had trouble putting it down.

I checked this book out from my library because of my interest in the Holocaust.

I must weigh in with the one other reviewer who didn't like the book. It was flat, without motivation (unless you consider the lead character's life-long infatuation with her cousin). I didn't like the flip-flopping back and forth with no warning. I never developed a sense of caring about any of the characters.

This book might be a fresh look at the story of Naomi and Ruth, but it doesn't register with the same sincerity or depth as the original.

I cannot recommend this book.

I see that my opinion is against the grain here, but I must say how disappointed I was with this difficult to read book.

Though the plot was interesting, the author's writing style prevented me from enjoying that effort. First, she brakes a cardinal law of writing. If an author uses the first person, she cannot then act as a omniscient narrator describing what other characters are thinking. The author does this frequently making it seem almost as if there is a disconnect from one sentence to the next. Second, she flips back and forth between the novels present and different parts of the characters' past. Because she does it in a way that is not chronological and can vary dramatically within a chapter, it is very hard to follow. Not only does this prevent the reader from following the story line, it prevents her from getting to or care about the characters.

I was so thoroughly frustrated by this book that I cast it aside with only 20 pages left to read. Life is too short to read bad fiction!