A Brooklyn Tyro Issues the Holocaust Novel of the Century

(March 2011)

The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
Knopf, 2010, 602pp., $26.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4116-9 (1-4000-4116-3)
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Viking (Penguin), 2010, 624pp., £14.99
ISBN: 978-0-670-91458-6

A 30-SOMETHING Brooklyn author has written a brave and beautiful book about the Holocaust comparable, without exaggeration, to the greatest novels of all literature. Readers must read it, teachers must teach it, and those among us who have survived the horror that it describes must be grateful to its author for making our experience comprehensible for the 21st century.

The debut novel issued by a third-generation Holocaust survivor, The Invisible Bridge is an elegant, tender love story set against the menacing gathering and eventual explosion of a storm of methodically organized insane violence never before experienced by humanity. Language lacks the means to convey adequately through rational description the magnitude of the deed, the sadistic delight of its perpetrators and the numb helplessness of the majority of their totally unprepared victims. Julie Orringer (b. 1973) succeeds by approaching the global tragedy through the specific concerns, passions and loyalties of individuals modelled on her own, Hungarian-born Jewish grandfather and his family as they confront the savagery engulfing Europe.

The Paris Review Discovery Prize and received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford University, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

École Spéciale d'Architecture on a scholarship and falls in love with Klára, a more mature ballet teacher and choreographer, another Jewish-Hungarian. The two become totally absorbed in each other almost oblivious to the increasingly sordid and violent antisemitic incidents proliferating around them. At the start of the Second World War, they are compelled to return home. András as well as his brothers Tibor and Mátyás must eventually serve in various slave-labour battalions.

about grand passions unleashed at a turning point of history. The author handles the challenge with poise sustained by her joy of story telling and a keen ear for the rhythm of speech, backed by formidable research. The rapid pace of the novel leaves her time for loving descriptions of the buildings, flavours and smells of mid-century Paris and Budapest, the excitement of editorial offices and theatrical performances, the complex worlds of markets and café houses. The novel takes us to Nice where the author notes — and she is right! — that the crickets along the French Mediterranean coastline sing a different tune from those of landlocked Hungary. The exuberant sharing, daft sexual possessiveness and sheer exhaustion of the lovers in each other’s arms remind me of being 20.

András on a rare leave home from the Eastern Front: “Her pregnant body was a miraculous thing to him. A pink bloom had come out from beneath the surface of her pale skin, and her hair seemed thicker and more lustrous. He washed it himself and pulled it forward to drape over her breasts. Her areolae had grown larger and darker, and a faint tawny line had emerged between her navel and her pubic triangle, transected by a silver scar of her earlier pregnancy. Her bones no longer showed so starkly beneath the skin. Most notably, a complicated inward look had appeared in her eyes — such a deep commingling of sadness and expectancy that it was almost a relief when she closed them…”

And the Jewish slaves also occasionally found themselves in the thick of the fighting. This happened repeatedly when labourers sent to the battlefield to collect the wounded picked up the weapons abandoned by the fleeing Hungarians and turned them against the advancing Russians for fear of being captured by them. The murder of more than half a million Jewish-Hungarian civilians at Auschwitz was perpetrated later during the most destructive phase of the Holocaust in 1944 when the defeat of the Third Reich and its allies was already obvious.

owed their lives to sheer coincidence and the inability of the killers to kill all their intended victims. Since then, the Hungarian Jewish community has recovered some if its pre-war vitality. But it may well go on mourning its Holocaust dead for many generations to come.

emigrated to the US after the war. In common with many other Holocaust survivors, they maintained complete silence about their experience — until they were questioned closely by the author when she came of age. The novel began as an endeavour to erect a loving monument to honour her Holocaust dead. And like the novel’s protagonists, the author of Hungary’s infamous First Jewish Law also emigrated to the US where he died beyond remorse in 1994 of Alzheimer's disease resembling, according to one who nursed him, an Auschwitz skeleton.

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