The Sweetness of Forgetting

“It’s terrible to see [Mamie] slipping away. It’s like standing on the deck of a boat, watching the waves suck someone under, and knowing that there’s no life preserver to throw in.”

The metaphor of drowning captures the pain of losing a family member. This image anticipates a later image when Rose feels that her memories are lifelines slipping away from her, and when she imagines that she is swimming in memories when she is in a coma in later chapters.

“To speak the truth would be to open a floodgate. She could feel the water surging up behind the dam, and she knew it would spill over soon.”

In this first scene between Hope and Rose, water enters again in this image of the memories Rose wants to share before she loses them. Her silence has been a dam, a protective barrier, but like a dam, the memories might overwhelm and change the life she has protected if they do indeed spill out.

“Although I never doubted that she and my grandfather loved each other, theirs always seems to be a relationship of function more than romance. Had I had that with Rob and thrown it away because I believed there was more out there? Perhaps I’d been a fool. Life isn’t a fairy tale.”

This passage sets up Hope’s character arc toward understanding the nature of romantic love. Here, at the beginning, she hasn’t seen grand passion in her life, and she thinks of it as a fairy tale. This image anticipates the fairy tale that, later, helps Hope understand Rose and Jacob’s love story.

“She had been determined to remain in New York, just in case. It was where she’d always believed she’d be found, in the meeting place they’d spoken of years before. But now, there was no one left to find her. She was lost forever.”

The image of being lost, rather than being the survivor, captures Rose’s grief at learning that her entire family had died in the Nazi death camps. Harmel hints that there is someone else Rose misses and longs for other than her family by using the pronoun “they,” but she does not reveal this information yet, making Jacob’s existence a surprise later. The narrative implies that Rose is speaking of her family, so the information is something of a red herring.

“In other words, I’m in denial. That’s my general approach when things are going wrong; I simply bury my head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass. Sometimes it does. Most of the time, I only wind up with sand in my eyes.”

This passage offers an infrequent moment of humor leavening the otherwise serious tone of the book, which is often sad or nostalgic. Hope compares herself to an ostrich, an animal said to bury its head in the sand when it feels threatened, under the assumption that if the animal cannot see the danger, it is safe. The image of sand in her eyes evokes the setting of Hope’s home on Cape Cod but also conveys that she is not seeing clearly here.

“I remember reading Anne Frank’s diary in school and studying the Holocaust in history classes, but there’s something about reading about it as an adult that has a completely different impact.”

Harmel weaves historical information into her narrative, such as statistics and major events of the Holocaust. The Diary of Anne Frank is alluded to here as an example of relating to historical events through narratives. Anne Frank’s family was captured by Nazis and taken to their deaths in the concentration camps, a parallel to what happened to Rose’s family.

“In the space of a year, I’ve become the divorced owner of a failing bakery, whose daughter hates her. Now I might be Jewish too. It’s like I don’t know who I am anymore.”

The revelation about Mamie’s cultural background compounds the confusion of identity that Hope is undergoing as she confronts divorce, tensions with her daughter, and the bakery’s financial woes. This is a frequent theme in the genre of women’s fiction: The protagonist’s life usually begins in turmoil which she will eventually resolve.

“[Rose] had become skilled at faking happiness over the years. It was, she thought, a terrible talent to have.”

There’s a light irony in calling faking happiness a talent or a skill, indicating the way that Rose feels that closing off her feelings was key to her survival. Rose’s character flaw of not loving her family well enough results from the immense grief of losing her birth family as well as Jacob.

“It’s a romantic thought, but I know that padlock or not, relationships are temporary, even when you believe in them with all your heart.”

As she crosses a bridge in Paris and sees the padlocks that lovers have locked on the bridge to symbolize their love, Hope revisits her feelings about romance. The padlocks hint that her own heart has been fastened shut, but in her character arc, she will gradually learn to open up to others, including her daughter.

“When Ted had promised her a life far away from these hollow-eyed ghosts, far away from New York, in a magical place called Cape Cod, where he said the waves washed up on sandy beaches, and cranberry bogs grew, she said yes. Because she loved him. […] She needed to concentrate on building a family, because the one she’d had was gone forever.”

Rose thinks of the Holocaust survivors she meets in New York City as ghosts, robbed of their souls and lives. The setting of Cape Cod is juxtaposed with Paris, where she grew up, and New York, both places of sophistication and cosmopolitanism, unlike the wilder and smaller beach town which represents escape and new hope for Rose, at the time.

“It was because it made her think of her true love’s promise to love her as long as there were stars in the sky.”

This moment reveals the significance of the stars and star shape to Rose, as the recipe for star pies connects her to her family, while the star shape reminds her of Jacob’s promise. This touches on the theme of Love and Self-Sacrifice.

“We are all speaking to the same God. It is not religion that divides man. It is good and evil here on earth that divides us.”

Here a minor character, Nabi, the Muslim man Hope meets in Paris, pronounces a major message of the book about the unity and shared foundation of religious belief. This offers a commentary both on contemporary divisions and on the divisions that led to the “evil” of the Holocaust.

“Even if we do miraculously locate [Jacob Levy], he’ll probably be married to wife number four or something. He most likely moved on from Mamie seventy years ago. That’s what men do. Besides, it appears my grandmother wasted no time in moving on from him.”

Hope’s internal monologue, as she considers locating Jacob Levy, indicates where she is in her character arc with regard to love. Still hurt from her divorce and Rob’s new girlfriend, Hope dismisses the idea of lasting love. She also doubts her grandmother’s affections as she questions the new information about her life.

“The more times we’ve been hurt, the harder it is to see love right in front of us, or to accept love into our hearts and truly believe in it. And if you cannot accept love, or cannot bring yourself to believe in it, you can never really feel it.”

Alain, as a mentor, can see Hope’s emotional block and comment on her defensiveness. He shares a philosophy that can explain Rose’s reactions to losing her family and the legacy she believes she bequeathed to both her daughter and granddaughter—fear of being hurt by love. Harmel frequently uses Alain as a mouthpiece for the novel’s messages, as she does here.

“I plan to spend the rest of the day with Mamie, beginning to understand the lessons in love that I didn’t realize I was missing until right about now.”

The excitement and suspense of uncovering Rose’s past and connecting with her remaining family have a deeper thematic purpose for the novel: These events teach Hope a lesson in how to recognize, accept, and show love. Rose and Jacob’s love, Alain’s devotion to Mamie, and demonstrations of Gavin’s devotion to her, all serve as examples teaching Hope what love really looks like.

“He thought that in marrying her, and in giving her a good life, he had helped the past to disappear, as she wanted it to. [Rose] could not bear to tell him that in the thirty-three years since she’d last seen those she loved most, the memories, both real and imagined, hadn’t faded at all.”

A theme that grows stronger in the later third of the book is Survival and the Persistence of Memory. Harmel portrays Ted sympathetically as he attempts to help Rose, yet she also suggests that memories cannot fade at will. As Hope discovers Rose’s past, Rose spends more time among her memories.

“I fall asleep that night wishing fervently, for the first time I can remember, that I’m just a big fool and that all the things I’ve grown to believe aren’t true after all.”

This passage captures the present tense narration of Hope’s chapters, which aim to make her experience more immediate, as if it is unfolding in the moment. In contrast, Rose’s chapters are told in the past tense, reflecting that much of her story has passed. These lines also establish the turning point in Hope’s character arc, as she is finally beginning to understand what love looks like.

“Now I’m realizing that by always choosing the safe road, the one that was expected of me, I might have given up more than I ever understood. Had I left behind the person I was supposed to be too? Had I lost my real self somewhere along that road of doing everything right?”

As she travels to locate Jacob Levy, Rose has this crucial moment of self-reflection. In re-examining her identity in light of her Jewish heritage, she is also questioning the values that guided her life. Gavin and Alain serve as her mentors in trying to show Hope how to live. This character arc also fits with the conventional themes of women’s fiction: rediscovering love, identity, belonging, and making peace with the past.

“Maybe this is what I needed all along. Not Matt’s money or his investors. Not someone to rescue me. Just someone who believes that I can do it on my own.”

As part of her self-reflection in this chapter, Hope realizes that her independence can have a positive aspect if she trusts herself to come up with a solution. She is beginning to realize that she can work with and be connected to others without giving up a sense of self. The repetition of sentences beginning with “[n]ot” followed by “[j]ust” mirrors Hope’s journey of rejecting life paths and suitors until she realizes what she wants.

“Until recently, my grandmother had been merely a slightly sad woman who happened to hail from France and run a bakery. Now, as I peel back layer after layer of what she really was, I’m realizing that her sorrow must have gone far deeper than I’d ever comprehended. And she’d spent her lifetime pretending, wrapped up in secrets and lies.”

Hope, who began the novel feeling that she had lost a great deal, sees a parallel in Mamie’s life as she realizes what she has lost. She also realizes that Mamie was playing a role in her marriage, much as Hope was playing a role in hers. The connections deepen the way the two women are reflections of one another.

“[Rose] was a castle surrounded by many defenses. Ted had only made it to the grassy knoll beyond the first moat; there were many more walls to be scaled and many more battles to be fought in order to reach her heart.”

This image of herself as a castle captures how Rose feels that she closed off her heart after she lost her family and Jacob; that not only kept out Ted but also taught Josephine to keep people at arm’s length. The image alludes to Rose’s fairy tales, in which she recasts her own story with herself as an exiled princess.

“I feel like I’m holding on to a piece of the past, the one piece that makes everything complete.”

This image shows Jacob as the missing piece of the puzzle Hope has been putting together about her grandmother’s life. The image is reinforced when Hope realizes that Jacob is her biological grandfather, so he provides a missing piece of Hope’s identity as well.

“I know now that the prince is real, and that the people who love you the most can save you, and that fate might have a bigger plan for all of us than we understand. I know now that fairy tales can come true after all, if only you have the courage to keep believing.”

The fairy tales serve as a plot device showing the connection between Rose and Hope; instead of telling her the real events, Rose tells her history to Hope through the fairy tale, which is how Hope knows where to find Jacob. In a sweet irony, the true love that has always seemed a fairy tale to Hope turned out to be possible.