THE WORLD THAT WE KNEW

By Alice Hoffman

Arguably, every single historical novel should evoke those two much-quoted lines of William Faulkner’s: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” But coming away from Alice Hoffman’s gravely beautiful new novel, “The World That We Knew,” historical fiction that transports you to Germany and France in the 1940s and, thus, the Holocaust, those words ring particularly true. Her subjects are preteen and teenage refugees on the run from Berlin and Paris, but with them, she conjures up contemporary children fending for themselves after being separated from their parents by today’s horrors.

Her hymn to the power of resistance, perseverance and enduring love in dark times employs a character of ancient magical realism, the golem. Although it brings together several narratives, it’s primarily the story of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, Lea Kohn, who manages to flee Berlin on a train bound for France in the spring of 1941. Lea’s father, a doctor, has been murdered, and Lea has narrowly escaped being raped. Her mother, Hanni, and grandmother, Bobeshi, know they will soon be taken by the Nazis, and their only hope is that Lea will survive. Everyone is desperate. In Berlin, the newspapers print photographs of Jewish businessmen, lawyers and professors with captions calling them animals. “That was how evil spoke. It made its own corrupt sense; it swore that the good were evil, and that evil had come to save mankind. It brought up ancient fears and scattered them on the street like pearls. To fight what was wicked, magic and faith were needed. This is what one must turn to when there was no other option.”