Unevenness hurts tale of love lost
Print Edition
Michele Zackheim’s books, like treasure hunts, send their narrators scuttling after hidden gems. In “Violette’s Embrace,” an artist travels to Paris to unearth secrets about writer Violette Leduc. In “Einstein’s Daughter,” Zackheim herself goes abroad to investigate the mysterious fate of the scientist’s illegitimate daughter. In her new novel, “Last Train to Paris,” an elderly New York journalist named Rose digs through an old trunk of papers holding reminders of her past life and lost love.
“Last Train to Paris” transports Rose across oceans and eras, back to the sexist, swaggering newsrooms of 1930s New York and Paris, where she worked as a young reporter. The novel pits love against war, and in chronicling Hitler’s rise to power it finds echoes of warfare at the personal and social levels. Rose battles her mother, who has trailed her from America to Europe, even as Germany moves against its neighbors. Lawyers do combat in the French courts: A German national has murdered Rose’s cousin, a Jew, in Paris, and Rose is helping cover the trial. This murder cleverly prefigures Hitler’s invasion of France, which follows within months. (Zackheim based this element of the book on the 1937 abduction of her own distant cousin.)
Zackheim presents startlingly vivid images of life in Hitler’s Europe. She indicates the haunting disparity between two types of passengers boarding a ship in Le Havre: holidaying Americans who dance up the gangplank, bearing gifts; and Jewish refugees fearfully leaving their homes forever.
Describing Kristallnacht in Berlin, she writes: “Because there was no wind, clouds ... of smoke were perched on top of each burning building. In between the buildings ... we could see the stars.” But in filling in the outlines of her characters, Zackheim’s hand grows less steady. Rose is not without her thorns, and her overheated dialogue frequently boils over into insults. Characters snarl and sneer.
These cartoonish interactions point to a deeper problem in the novel: its flat characters. One of Rose’s mother’s defining qualities is her self-loathing anti-Semitism, yet we never learn much about how this attitude came to be. Also, the mother’s hardheartedness strains credulity; Zackheim has given her the emotional acuity of a bedspread. When it comes to developing Rose, Zackheim offers a disorienting mix of redundancies and inconsistencies. Twice, more than 40 pages apart, Rose expresses bemusement at her love life, in nearly identical language. She mentions her lack of empathy for her cousin, only to quickly establish how sad the murder has made her.
Just as characters don’t emerge fully, neither does meaning always arise clearly from her phrases. Reflecting on the killer, Rose notes: “I had to remind myself that Vosberg was a real, honest-to-goodness murderer and I was only an occasional murderer of feelings.” Elsewhere she admits, “I get confused with the truth of the heart versus my everyday life.” Alas, we get confused, too.
Yet nothing matches Rose’s perplexity when, during one of many reporting trips to Berlin, she falls in love with a Jewish man named Leon. Her relationship forces her to confront what it means to be Jewish in Germany during the Third Reich. In Europe, Rose is compelled to identify as Jewish in a way she never did at home, and to face new risks. By the end of the novel, Leon has helped Rose find herself — just as, decades later in New York, she rediscovers lost love in an old trunk of papers.
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