The World That We Knew

“It may look human, but it has no soul. It is pure and elemental and it has a single goal, to protect […] All things yearn to be free, even a monster wants that for itself.”

According to Ettie, who is coaxing river mud and rainwater to life, a monster is a creature without a soul. Certainly, the golem they call forth qualifies as that. Fiercely loyal to Lea, she’s courageous and powerful. The novel’s central moral drama, however, is not the daring escapades and tragic failures of the Jewish Resistance movement but Ava’s slow-motion redemption into humanity. Here, Ettie warns Lea that the golem they’ve created, no matter how lifelike it looks or how courageous its actions, is in the end an “it,” a soulless monster. However, Ava eventually claims her humanity, and the Nazis are clearly the monsters without souls. 

“It was not a miracle, it happened every day, it was the rising of the soul. That was how quickly a life could be lost, in the time it took to breathe and breathe out.”

Ettie struggles to understand what’s happened to her sister in a speechlessly quick moment as the two dash from the train to avoid Nazi soldiers. Marta is killed. In the world of the Nazis, the world that the novel comes to challenge and, in the end, overcome, death is just that: a match-flick moment in which is becomes was. After Marta’s inglorious murder in an open field along the train tracks, Ettie must keep running for her life. A fighter, Ettie understands that death in this world is not special. She pays lip service to the concept of a soul. Understanding that her sister is dead, she doesn’t pause to consider the contrived consolations of some mythical afterlife; she wants revenge. 

“He had no idea who she or her companion might be, but at least something interesting was happening. Something that might wake up this sleepwalking household.”

Love’s genesis is an essential mystery. Up to this point Julien is a bored, spoiled 14-year-old who dabbles in sketching and fancies himself, with the consummate ego and unchecked pride of a child, a frustrated artist because his father wants him to study mathematics. In a world collapsing in chaos and violence, Julien supremely cares only for himself—until he sees Lea. This rom-com cute meeting marks the beginning of his own evolution, like Ava, into a creature with a soul. Love is the answer. 

“This one saw Ava for who she was. A creature like no other. The heron walked to her and she to him. This is how it began, out of water, out clay, out of air, when it was not expected, when it should never have happened, when no one else understood who she was.”

The novel relies on several elements of magical realism. Here, for instance, a heron is the one who first recognizes that the golem Ettie created is something different, something special. In the figure of the heron and Ava’s joyous interactions with the bird, Ava comes to express her evolving humanity. The friendship, which begins here in their chance encounter, triggers Ava’s unofficial education in the world’s quiet, stunning wonders. The heron will serve as her mentor, her education a tonic countermovement to the Nazis’ grim world. 

“Everything might disappear, but not these stars. Her father should not have the strength to climb that hillock, but he did it anyway, and he trusted her to do what was best. […] Standing beside him, she felt fortunate to have found her way home.”

At the center of more than two millennia of Jewish culture is the concept of the strong and loving family. Although the world regularly implodes into vicious hate and violence, the family offers the shelter of support and the consolation of welcome. Marianne returns to her farm five years after leaving for Paris to find a more exciting life. Her return marks a tearful reunion with her ailing father. In this scene, the novel affirms the strength and dignity of family as Marianne and her father sit together in comfortable quiet under the stars. For the Jewish families that the Nazis separated and sent off to concentration camps, the loss of family is the greatest sorrow, and the reunion of family is the greatest joy.

“They sat (in the garden) facing each other. Everything else dropped away, everything changed between them, they were of one mind, and as they looked into each other’s eyes neither has the desire to look away.”

Here, Lea and Ava bond. While the golem’s humanization begins in her joyous friendship with the magical heron, what grounds Ava’s transformation is her emotional relationship with Lea. As the one whom the golem is to protect, Lea understands that (per her mother’s instructions) once the war is over and she’s survived, she must destroy the golem because Jewish tradition cautions that a golem, because it’s soulless, isn’t entirely trustworthy. This moment captures the love the two feel for each other, a love driven by Lea’s need for a maternal figure after Hanni’s death and by Ava’s growing wonder over the emotions she experiences. 

“When the war is over, and you are safe, you must kill her.”

For her entire brief existence, Ava knows that she’s under a death sentence. Not technically alive, she’s doomed to be destroyed. The note that Hanni places in the locket she gifts Lea before Lea leaves for France creates the suspense in the story of Ava’s evolution into humanity. In a story in which death hangs constantly, Ava’s story offers the difficult lesson that only against the pressure of death, only in understanding its reality, can the truest and most profound experiences of life have sufficient meaning. For Ava, knowing that Lea must destroy her when her mission is complete only makes her celebration of the world that much keener.

“When he and Marianne were together, he felt like a carefree boy, helping her father with chores, sneaking up to her room when the old man was safely asleep […] But as soon as he left the farm he was someone else entirely, and a darkness lingered in him.”

Victor should be the story’s hero. From a pampered and privileged life, he rejects comfort and complacency to join the high-risk underground resistance to the Nazis. In a family that survives under Nazi rule by ignoring the pernicious reality of the Third Reich, Victor engages that difficult world and, like Ettie, resolves to fight it. Here, he reflects on how with Marianne, his lover, he finds his way emotionally to the carefree innocence of his childhood—but how, once he leaves, he returns to being a hard-core militant guerrilla. The darkness that lingers in him is as much hatred as it is courage. 

“They were themselves there by the stream and they knew each other and they could feel each one another’s loneliness. When you are a wolf, no place is safe, no one can be trusted. Unless you are what you are. Hunted.”

In her confrontation in the woods with the wolf, Lea recalls her grandmother’s fairy tales and her admonition that wolves and hunters make up the world. Here Lea feels a close affinity with the wolf, a wily creature who must live in a hostile world and does anything to survive the threat of the hunters. The wolf is a metaphor for the scrappy and resilient Jews in Nazi-occupied France. 

“A single day to look at her so that he would never forget the smallest detail. The mole on her neck, the way she bit her lip when she in pain, for she never complained.”

Although Dr. Girard—the country doctor Ettie befriends who helps treat wounded Resistance operatives—is a minor character, the backstory of his wife’s death from breast cancer poignantly underscores the larger theme that love is the only answer in a world of hate. Despite the novel’s fairy-tale feel, it’s no fairy tale. Dr. Girard recalls his wife’s last few days and the profound sorrow he endured. Even when love works out, one lover must watch, helpless, as the other dies. 

“In Kafka’s work, the world made no sense, fates were cast for no reason, men were beasts or insects or they were simply lost, wandering through corridors that led nowhere, beset by those who followed orders no matter how foolish those orders might be.”

The novel’s periodic descriptions of the Nazis’ atrocities and brutality draw heavily on the worldview of Kafka, here described by Julien, who reads Kafka during his stint as a teacher. By any measure, the world the Nazis fashioned was at best absurd, even surreal—a world in which otherwise ordinary men and women dedicated themselves to a demonstrably inhumane doctrine and carried it out without objections, with no moral or ethical qualms. In Kafka’s world—and the world of Nazi-occupied France—trust is dangerous but, ironically, love is the only hope.

“Everywhere he went, he dreamed of dancing with her in the grass. They did so now, as if enchanted, as if no other time or place existed.”

The “he” in this passage is the magical heron that befriends Ava. This moment marks the bird’s return from his migration and the giddy reunion between the two. Their dance, at once absurd and inspirational, celebrates the spontaneity of their feelings, a telling sign that Ava—created without a soul and without emotions—is certainly developing those very attributes. 

“The goal was to rid the earth of him, but for that they needed patience.”

As the novel’s opening sentence cautions, living in a world of evil without acknowledging the reality of that evil leaves a person vulnerable and a victim. Ettie emerges as the novel’s heroic champion for fighting back. Her sister’s cruel death sets her resolve. In her suicide mission with Victor to kill the Gestapo captain responsible for killing more than a dozen schoolchildren and teachers is the novel’s single expression of militant quid pro quo. This passage describes the irony. Ridding the earth of a single barbarian, sadly, did little to address the much wider question of humanity’s inhumanity. 

“People said love was the antidote to hate, that it could mend what was most broken, and give hope in the most hopeless times. That time was now.”

Ettie and Victor prepare to execute the bombing of the Gestapo captain. The two aren’t lovers. The love here is a broader sense of agape, a love of humanity that alone drives the Resistance to undertake the massive, ironic task of bringing down the Third Reich one officer at a time, one bridge at a time, one train track at a time. That love is the only countermeasure to the Nazi’s raw gospel of hate. 

“She had her own mind and her own desires. She had wanted to remain in this glorious world, despite how wicked those who inhabited it might be.”

Stunningly, this passage describes Ava—the glob of clay shaped like a woman. At this point, she brings to the novel the principle that even amid the horrors of the Nazi regime, life persists, and the hearts of even the most oppressed yearn to live. Humanity is capable of evil, stupidity, ignorance, and hate—but despair can never be the last word. Ava delights in the inexhaustible small wonders of the world all around: the seasons, the sun, the birds, the sensual celebration of every day. This is a bold gospel. 

“You can’t have her.”

The showdown between Ava and Azriel is the novel’s dramatic highpoint. In challenging the Angel of Death and, in turn, saving Lea’s life when bees swarm her, Ava reveals the mark of her emerging humanity. The Angel of Death dismisses Ava out of hand. Ava, however, prevails. She’s more than a golem. She’s cunning, bold, compassionate, and willing to sacrifice everything to spare the girl to whom she’s become emotionally attached, not like the bodyguard she was created to be but more like the mother that the orphan Lea needs. 

“Ava knew that her maker was wrong. She was born to walk through the reeds and dance with the heron; she was made to watch Lea sleep safely through the night and feel the sun on her skin and to stand here […] beneath a bower of green leaves.”

This quote is from Ava’s final conversation with Ettie—the rabbi’s daughter responsible for her creation (“her maker”)—before Ettie departs for what turns out to be a suicide mission to kill the Gestapo captain. Ava defies the proscription of ancient Jewish law that defined a golem by its function, by its mission to protect. Ava asserts, with a defiance that defies her clay and river-water birth, that she was born to do more than Ettie’s bidding: She was born to live. Her sense of liberation, of spiritual and emotional emancipation, appears here without irony. Even as she asserts her right to feel, to live, Ava watches a frenzy of swifts swoop above her in crazy gyres. 

“Ettie did not see clay before her, but rather a woman who had been made by women, brought to life by their blood and needs and wants.”

Ettie, in her heart certain that she will not return from the mission with Victor, understands now the dimension of what she’s created: nothing less than a life. Ava’s delight in the world reveals the earliest and most childlike emotion, selfishness. Through Ava’s love of the world, her love for Lea, Ettie understands that this thing she created is no longer a golem; Ava is now magically, wonderfully alive. 

“Everything was so loud it was as if the world was beginning or ending. When the angel finally took her, she was grateful. In his arms, she forgot everything, except for the grass in fields where they jumped from the train, her sister’s hand in hers.”

This describes Ettie’s dramatic death amid a series of explosions as all the detonating devices in Victor’s car go off after the otherwise successful mission to kill the Gestapo officer. In her heroic death, in her noble gesture of sacrifice to end evil, Ettie recalls the moment that began her campaign to fight evil: the death of her sister on the way to Paris two years earlier. In introducing Azriel, the novel gives Ettie’s death a grand sense of cosmic importance. The only memory left as she’s escorted away is of love. 

“She was especially glad that she had slept with Victor the last time, when the bee flew in his mouth, when she feared she would lose and they spent all night together in bed.”

Death is never the last word. Marianne, devastated over the news of Victor’s arrest and his death at the concentration camp, mourns the loss of her love. However, she knows in her heart that she’s pregnant from their last long night together. That their last night together creates life is real-time, real-world magic. This affirmation of continuing life represents love and hope against the backdrop of the Nazi occupation. Like Ava, who loves the world despite its evil and thus receives life, Marianne’s pregnancy suggests her own Resistance movement, her own dramatic assertion of the heroic energy of life itself. 

“She was without a maker. She was herself.”

At its emotional core, the novel investigates the devastating impact of the death of a parent. The novel opens with the drama of Hanni struggling desperately to save her daughter through the agency of the rabbi. Parents struggle to protect their children, parents offer reassuring comfort, they love their imperfect children without condition. Their deaths offer moments of both intense sorrow and a dark, necessary joy. Hanni dies to save Lea. Marianne’s father dies to save Marianne. Professor Lévi seals his and his wife’s fate when he barters his antique watch to secure Julien’s release from the stadium detainee camp. Each child now faces the uncertainty of defining an identity without parents. When Ettie, her maker (and thus her parent) dies, Ava sorts through her anxiety and emptiness and the complex feeling of now being on her own. 

“If you could love someone, you possessed a soul.”

Herein lies the lesson of the novel’s affirmation, its optimism. As long as the heart finds its way to love, humanity is immortal. That the character who offers this observation is Dr. Girard—who, by his own admission, watched hundreds of good and loving people die without logic or reason—underscores how dramatically the novel resists surrender to death, even on the horrific scale of the Holocaust. The doctor admits to struggling with the idea of a soul as his profession directed his energies to the body. He can never entirely abandon his faith in the soul, that humanity was something more than what can die. All the characters, in turn, find their way to love even when death interferes. Death is never the last word.

“There above them hanging from a rope was the heron, shot, with blood on his breast, gray feathers littering the forest floor. A howl escaped from her throat.”

The death of Ava’s heron marks her difficult transition into humanity. Being human cannot be just dancing in the morning sun or watching swoops of swifts in the sky at night; it also means experiencing sorrow, anger, and moral outrage. The death of her spirit animal, the companion who’d shared her joys, drives Ava to act entirely unlike a golem. She attacks the Nazi soldier who so gratuitously slaughtered the bird for sport, even though the Nazi presents no direct threat to her. Here, Ava is not protecting Lea. For the first time, Ava acts to avenge a wrong, to right a manifestly evil deed. These motivations are not part of being a golem.