• About
  • Support AJW
  • Jewish Community Directory
  • Subscription Information
  • Contact Us
American Jewish World
No Result
View All Result
  • News
    • All
    • Africa
    • Asia
    • Australia & New Zealand
    • Europe
    • Israel/Mideast
    • Latin America
    • Minnesota
    • US & Canada
    Rabbi Harold Kravitz steps down

    Rabbi Harold Kravitz steps down

    Les Block, our music maven

    Les Block, our music maven

    ‘Rav’ and ‘chaver,’ rabbi and friend, Kassel Abelson dies at 99

    ‘Rav’ and ‘chaver,’ rabbi and friend, Kassel Abelson dies at 99

  • Arts
    • All
    • Blue Box
    • Books & Literature
    • Music
    • Televison & Film
    • Theater & Performing Arts
    • Visual Arts
    Les Block, our music maven

    Les Block, our music maven

    Journey to the old land of woe

    Journey to the old land of woe

    Jews bring the funny to the Fringe

    Jews bring the funny to the Fringe

  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Fashion
    • Food
    • Health & Wellness
    • Home & Garden
    • Travel & Culture
    Robyn Frank finds her niche in the cookie business

    Robyn Frank finds her niche in the cookie business

    Editorial: More from my European vacation

    Editorial: More from my European vacation

    Our Rosh Hashana special edition

    Our Rosh Hashana special edition

  • Editorial
  • Opinion
  • AJW Digital Archives
  • News
    • All
    • Africa
    • Asia
    • Australia & New Zealand
    • Europe
    • Israel/Mideast
    • Latin America
    • Minnesota
    • US & Canada
    Rabbi Harold Kravitz steps down

    Rabbi Harold Kravitz steps down

    Les Block, our music maven

    Les Block, our music maven

    ‘Rav’ and ‘chaver,’ rabbi and friend, Kassel Abelson dies at 99

    ‘Rav’ and ‘chaver,’ rabbi and friend, Kassel Abelson dies at 99

  • Arts
    • All
    • Blue Box
    • Books & Literature
    • Music
    • Televison & Film
    • Theater & Performing Arts
    • Visual Arts
    Les Block, our music maven

    Les Block, our music maven

    Journey to the old land of woe

    Journey to the old land of woe

    Jews bring the funny to the Fringe

    Jews bring the funny to the Fringe

  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Fashion
    • Food
    • Health & Wellness
    • Home & Garden
    • Travel & Culture
    Robyn Frank finds her niche in the cookie business

    Robyn Frank finds her niche in the cookie business

    Editorial: More from my European vacation

    Editorial: More from my European vacation

    Our Rosh Hashana special edition

    Our Rosh Hashana special edition

  • Editorial
  • Opinion
  • AJW Digital Archives
No Result
View All Result
Morning News
No Result
View All Result
Home Arts Books & Literature

Multigenerational tale of love and despair

'Send for Me,' by Lauren Fox, Knopf, 259 pages, $26.95

mordecai by mordecai
February 8, 2021
in Arts, Books & Literature
0
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Reviewed by NEAL GENDLER

Lauren Fox’s sad, engaging Send for Me deftly reverses familiar Shoah stories.

READ ALSO

Les Block, our music maven

Journey to the old land of woe

Fox writes from the other side of heart-rending survivor accounts and diaries of victims that are made sadder for knowing their lives soon will end.

Send for Me is a multigenerational tale of love, relief and despair of a young Jewish refugee whose parents are trapped in Germany.

It’s told mostly through the life of Annelise, the only child of hard-working Julius and Klara, whose successful bakery in Feldenheim produces delicacies with tongue-twisting names.

Snippets from Klara’s letters to Annelise in Milwaukee are a running counterpoint, revealing increasing hardships, longing for her daughter and granddaughter, and desperation to emigrate.

Send for Me is “historical fiction,” a troubling genre because of difficulty discerning history from fiction. Fortunately, Fox, a University of Minnesota MFA graduate, focuses on the emotions of people living that history. In a note at the end, she reveals what’s fact.

We meet Annelise as an inquisitive young child. Her parents, like many Germans Jews then and many American Jews now, are deeply Jewish culturally but unobservant.

Brilliant but messy Annelise is prodded and scolded into improvement by Klara, who, Fox writes, “was training Annelise to function without her…that is the project.” Fox says: “A mother teaches her daughter to perpetuate the tedious rituals of her own imperfect life…instilling in her child the virtues of order.”

As a teen, Annelise serves customers. They include Walter, a charming, prosperous shoe-store owner very attentive to his stunning, aloof wife.

We follow Annelise through adolescence and the Nazi takeover, its “Don’t Buy from Jews” campaign slowly strangling the bakery, and into young womanhood and marriage at 21 to now-divorced Walter, 10 years older, his Goldmann’s Shoes also faltering.

They have a child, Ruth, and during Annelise’s pram-pushing walks in a city of hateful gentiles and Nazi thugs, we learn that Jews are forbidden parks, public benches, restaurants, typewriters and citizenship.

About 1938, Walter, Ruth and Annelise sail for the United States, confident her parents soon will get entry visas and follow. But as conditions worsen, they remain trapped in the State Department documentation blizzard designed to keep Jews out.

The three go to Milwaukee, where Walter sells shoes at Gimbel’s and Annelise takes in laundry and cleans houses.

Ruth marries, but she and husband Mel appear lightly, perhaps a vehicle to get to Annelise’s granddaughter Clare. She’s 28, educated, working at an uninspiring job and attending girlfriends’ weddings.

As a little girl, “Clare had spent long afternoons with her grandparents” while her parents worked. Walter and Annelise diverted her playground requests with indoor activities. Now, as “loneliness accrued around her,” she wonders if some of their sadness had lodged in her.

Helping clean Ruth’s basement of boxes stored after Annelise’s death, Clare discovers Klara’s letters.

“Without telling her mother [Ruth], who was too sad for it, Clare paid to have the letters translated. … She sat on the lumpy green futon couch in her little apartment on a Sunday and read them, start to finish, from 1938 to 1941.”

Klara became real: “She was prickly, desperate. Furious. Lost. Clare, her namesake, lived ordinary days.” Until the letters.

“Someone had to find them. How else would they be here, telling their mundane and anguished story. … From the blankness of their vanished years…the dead rose up and made themselves heard.”

Such wonderful turns of phrase abound. For example, unmarried Annelise is “pulsing with the pain of being unpicked,” as is Clare. Aboard ship, Annelise is “suspended between heartbreak and possibility, regret and relief.” Mensch Walter “is nobody’s misfortune.”

In an American resort cabin, Annelise smells the stove’s history of bacon. “She has never kept kosher but there are some foods so wrong to her that they might as well be poison.”

And Mel mows, wearing “a red T-shirt, yellow Bermuda shorts and black dress socks. He looked like the flag of a small European country.” That flag would be Belgium’s, but perhaps not coincidentally, also Germany’s.

There’s a bit too much foreshadowing, and overdoing about “great, gasping, winged monsters of ruin,” but my only complaint is the abrupt switches of decade and nation, requiring several sentences to figure out. They follow unnumbered pages — maddening to a reviewer — and italicized snippets of Klara’s letters.

Send for Me is beautifully done. While not necessarily a “women’s book,” whatever that is, its men are supporting actors for acute observations that could come only from a sensitive and articulate woman who has a daughter; Fox has two.

***

Neal Gendler is a Minneapolis writer and editor.

 

Related Posts

Les Block, our music maven
Minnesota

Les Block, our music maven

August 8, 2023
Journey to the old land of woe
Books & Literature

Journey to the old land of woe

August 7, 2023
Jews bring the funny to the Fringe
Theater & Performing Arts

Jews bring the funny to the Fringe

August 7, 2023
Repressing memories of a week in 1970
Books & Literature

Repressing memories of a week in 1970

July 23, 2023
A guide to Jewish artists at Twin Cities art fairs
Visual Arts

A guide to Jewish artists at Twin Cities art fairs

July 17, 2023
Book explores the bard of Hibbing’s local roots
Books & Literature

Book explores the bard of Hibbing’s local roots

July 12, 2023
Next Post
Sabes and St. Paul JCCs combine into Minnesota JCC

Sabes and St. Paul JCCs combine into Minnesota JCC

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

RECENT ARTICLES

Rabbi Harold Kravitz steps down

Rabbi Harold Kravitz steps down

August 9, 2023
News from the Jewish World — and the Jewish world

News from the Jewish World — and the Jewish world

August 9, 2023
Les Block, our music maven

Les Block, our music maven

August 8, 2023
‘Rav’ and ‘chaver,’ rabbi and friend, Kassel Abelson dies at 99

‘Rav’ and ‘chaver,’ rabbi and friend, Kassel Abelson dies at 99

August 8, 2023
Journey to the old land of woe

Journey to the old land of woe

August 7, 2023

About

Since 1912 the AJW has served as an important news resource for the Jewish community. The Jewish World unites the main Jewish communities in St. Paul and Minneapolis, as well as those in Duluth, Rochester and smaller cities, and bridges the divides between the various Jewish religious streams.

Quick Links

  • About the AJW
  • Advertising Information
  • Submission Guidelines
  • Subscription Information
  • Jewish Community Directory

Contact Us

The American Jewish World
3249 Hennepin Ave., Suite 245
Minneapolis, MN 55408

Tel: 612.824.0030 / Fax: 612.823.0753
editor@ajwnews.com

  • Buy JNews
  • Landing Page
  • Documentation
  • Support Forum

© 2023 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.

No Result
View All Result
  • Homepages
    • Home Page 1
  • News
  • Food
  • Health & Wellness
  • Lifestyle
  • Opinion

© 2023 JNews - Premium WordPress news & magazine theme by Jegtheme.