Cost: Kindle: 9.99. Nook: 9.99. Hardcover: 155.00. Paperback: 14.95.
Age Group: Adults. Definitely mature.
Rating: 1.5 stars.
I'm going to give this book the benefit of the doubt and say that I was too young for it. It's a rare occasion that my age keeps me from enjoying something I read, but that's my main explanation for why this gets such a low rating from me.
"Those Who Save Us" is two stories in one. We spend most of our time with Anna in SS-Regime Germany, where (this doesn't count as a spoiler because the only one who doesn't know is her daughter) she meets a much older Jewish doctor, has an affair with him, and has his baby after her father turns him over to a concentration camp. She lives in a bakery, proceeds to lose everyone she loves except her daughter, and has a relationship with a Nazi officer. Meanwhile, her daughter Trudy is a fifty-odd year old woman teaching Holocaust history at a college without ever hearing her mother's story.
All right, now that we've got that out of the way, let's move on to the main reasons I didn't like the book. Keep in mind that they're very subjective (well, of course they are! This is a random girl writing a book review on the internet!)
To start off, I don't like sex in my books. Yes, people have sex. Yes, most people like sex. Yes, most people think about sex a lot. I still don't want to read about it. And Anna doesn't even like the sex she has! It's not even titillating! So yes. That happens. We get lots of graphic detail about Anna's breasts and what her daughter and men do to them (some of that part is pretty dang awful-- we won't go into that. I'm blocking it from my memory). Lots of nightgowns rip and clothes don't fit well-- this despite the fact that everyone is starving.
Second, and this is PURELY me, but there were no quotation marks in the book. Maybe some people were okay with that, and obviously the editor and the author had a reason (maybe in Germany they don't use quotation marks. I don't know), but for me it just looked wrong and made it incredibly difficult to follow, no matter how far I got into the book.
We're getting closer to the big reasons, now. Here's my second biggest one: I felt no connection with the characters. Towards the beginning Anna was a bit of a Cinderella with an attitude figure (knows she's pretty, uses it, likes to play chess with the guy of her choice, poisons her awful dad's bratty dog so she can go flirt with her boyfriend...), and I thought I could get to like her, but the further on in the book I got, the less connection I felt with her. She was just kind of there, on another level than I was. The book was talking AT me, not TO me.
Trudy's section was just as bad, if not worse. She's a college professor? Well, she must not be a very good one-- all her students seem to be idiots who are just there because they need the gen eds (in a HOLOCAUST class-- that's not Western Civ, that's pretty advanced history). Honestly, I've seen more enthusiastic students in the gen eds at my community college. According to her biography, Blum is also a college professor-- well. Nice to know she enjoys her job.
***We interrupt this review to bring you a small rant about college professors***
All right. So you're a professor. Your students aren't responding to your lecture. You feel like they don't care. This hurts you, because you love your subject, and you want other people to love it too. So what do you do?
A) You sit back and make passive aggressive remarks in your head about how your students talk "Like, professor? I think I like, forgot to, like, tell you I was a valley girl? So I'll, like, be needing extra help with your class-- and I'm, like, supposed to be a normal girl in your, like, class?" (This is what Trudy does.)B) You keep doing what you've been doing and hope desperately that someone SOMEWHERE learns something.
C) You give up and just tell the students to read the book. They don't care, why should you? (I had a professor who did this.)
D) You change your teaching style and learn to reach your students. Instead of having a lecture class, you make it a discussion, so that your students have to talk to prove they've done the reading. You bring up interesting topics. You look up what is cool for your students at the moment and learn about it, and once in a while make a reference to it in class (without trying too hard to be 'hip'). You watch cool movies. You make interesting projects. You let your students know you and not just your topic. (This is the right answer, in case you didn't get it.)
So if Jenna Blum is writing Trudy as the first kind of professor, and maybe the second kind of professor, I don't think she's the kind of person I want to meet. I was offended by her portrayal of my ilk and think that she should be fired from her position as a professor of wherever because if this is her idea of what it's like to be a professor, then she's not cut out for the job.
*** We now return to your regularly scheduled broadcasting***
So yeah. I obviously didn't connect well with Trudy, either. She's a middle-aged woman with issues who has some serious resentment to work through both with her mother and with her job.
Other characters and facts, too, were unbelievable. Mathilde is inconsistent, and an entire town in Minnesota hates a woman for half a century simply because she happened to be from Germany. All the background characters are small-minded, and if it's to make the main characters look better, it doesn't.
Plus, is this really what Germany was like during the time? I've talked to a friend of the family who was there then-- interviewed her, even! and she never mentioned anything like this. She talked about getting shot at once because she was a traveling actor on the wrong bridge at the wrong time, but she never mentioned any of the awful details in here. Yes, the Nazi party did some horrible things. But their soldiers were people, too-- which is what I THOUGHT this novel was trying to point out.
That's another thing. For a book that seems to be about showing how the German/Jewish rivalry can be gotten over (the author's biography also mentions explicitly that she's German and Jewish), it's very aware of race, and not in a good way. I'm dating a guy whose parents are first-generation Haitian immigrants. I have no plans to write a book about interracial couples-- particularly not in the way she does it. It's heavy-handed. All the characters are far too aware of their own races versus other people's.
We'll stop for a second to point out that Judaism is a religion, not a race. You can't convert to being Asian. You can convert to being Jewish. From now on we shall use the term ethnic background to describe German versus Jewish.
All right. Got that over with. Maybe this is also my point of view, but I've never thought about it. I was pretty sure that by 1996 people had mostly gotten over the German/Jewish thing. Nobody hates my very German neighbor because she happened to be living in a country where some people did some awful things to some other people. Nobody blinked that my Jewish uncle decided to marry my half-German aunt-- my very Christian family blinked when she converted to Judaism, but as far as I can remember, the thing people talked about is how long they shared an apartment before they got around to being married, not the fact that decades ago they'd never have been allowed to date (we'll avoid going back to my boyfriend as an example here).
Maybe I live in a bubble. It's very likely that there are still Jewish people out there who are very upset with German people for what happened. It's even more likely that there are a lot of Germans going around with 'White People Guilt' who feel the need to put themselves down because their ancestors did something awful, or someone who looked kind of like them did something even worse (Did you know that if you are white you need to feel bad for how your relatives might have treated the Black people or the Native Americans or the Asians or the Italians who are also white?).* I haven't met any of them, and am pretty sure that there are a lot more people out there who just want to move past it all: All right, it happened, it was awful, let's not do it again, the end.
The big thing about the novel, though, is that it's pretentious. Jenna Blum was not walking along one day thinking about something random and hit by a burst of a story that she kept playing with 'til it became a whole long plot that she wanted to write down and share with people. She was working on her job which had to do with Holocaust survivors and she thought 'you know what? Why doesn't anyone interview the Germans?'
And then she decided to write a book about this. Because there isn't enough Holocaust literature out there.
All right, I'm being kind of rough on her here. Yeah, we do focus a bit too much on Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Yes, it was probably awful to live in Germany at that time (just like it was awful to live anywhere in Europe and be a civilian), and yes we don't talk about that because then we have to bring up the fact that they ELECTED Hitler and then we have to think about how they were really desperate and that's why they did it, and then we have to realize that they're all humans and we don't want to do it because it means that maybe our guys were too hard on Germany at the end of World War I and then we have to realize that the world isn't black and white and it's not the evil man with the mustache leading his mindless evil drones to war, it's a guy with a vision convincing other people that his way is the best way out of this, and then it's guys who are soldiers because that's a career and you take what you can get in times like this and maybe they didn't stop it and maybe it's 'cause they were as scared of dying as everybody else and WE DON'T WANT TO THINK ABOUT THAT (except that we do because it makes us feel highbrow).
If you read that paragraph, good for you. The point is that she has a point with her book's topic. But I honestly think the TV show Cold Case did a better job of it than she did (a rare thing-- Case Closed isn't my favorite cop show). Because they weren't trying to prove themselves.
Jenna Blum never forgets what she's trying to do here, and she doesn't let you forget it, either. She's constantly pushing it in your face. 'See what I'm doing here? I'm writing a book about Germans during World War II. I'm showing a different point of view. I'm going to show you exactly how hard it was for them.' She didn't write this because she loves writing, she wrote this because she wanted people to think she was a brilliant person. And it worked-- at least somewhat. Did you see that cost for the hardcover? First editions of most books don't go for that much. Not 'til after the author's dead, at least. And I can buy a smallish hardcover for the price of her paperback book (thankfully I got this for free-- it's not worth the money). It isn't a book to read for enjoyment, it's a book to read so you can tell people you read it. From the title down through the ending paragraph, you can tell it's trying very hard to be poignant, and not doing it very well.
I don't want this review to be entirely negative, though, so I'll need to think of something positive. Hmm... Ah! The least heavy-handed thing in the book was the way Trudy's narrative paralleled Anna's, albeit in a much more subtle way. That was... all right. And this might be the kind of book for middle-aged women who think college students are stupid, have rape fantasies, and want to be considered smart, worldly people without reading things by dead white guys.
To sum it up: Heavy-handed and not as meaningful as it obviously wants to be.
*Seriously. If you haven't been racist, don't feel guilty because your ancestors might have been. Only feel guilty when you start stereotyping for yourself. Then stop, rethink things, and move on.
