As a rule, I don't do the Holocaust.
For me, the horror of what people do to each other just gets worse with age. I remember lying on the floor of my Jr. High library, continuously drawn to a Time Life book on WWII. In it was a double-paged picture of a Jewish woman whose breast had been cut off. I must have looked in that book 50 times. I couldn't believe it was real. I was hypnotized by the mind-numbing atrocity of it all.
Over time, I have sheltered myself from war movies, TV shows, and any book set during WWII. Last year when the high school classes were finished with their Holocaust studies, I asked the head librarian if he would mind shelving the books. I was afraid one of them might open and sear me with yet another miserable image. In the first Middle School where I worked, I stealthily wept while investigating our collection.
So you can see why I was in no hurry to read
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, especially when someone told me that I had to read this book but that the ending would make me cry.
The book kept popping into my existence, however. When you have a book to shelve in the "Z's", you tend to notice it, as there aren't too many of them. On the cover is a finger ready to push over a row of dominos and The New York Times quote that it is "BRILLIANT and hugely ambitious . . . It's the kind of book that can be LIFE CHANGING". So a few months ago, I found a copy at a used book sale at a local library. Fine, I decided. I'll get it.
I put off reading it for a bit. What horror awaited me in its pages? It took me a few months to read it all the way through. I refused to read it at night and let myself get sidetracked by all sorts of other titles in the meantime. But by page 25 I knew I had something special in my hands.
I am a sucker for good figurative language. This book overflows with the most beautiful prose and imagery. It's enough to make you want to eat it up with a spoon.
Her wrinkles were like slander. Her voice was akin to a beating with a stick.
The book is told, in third person, from the perspective of the Grim Reaper, who's awfully busy in this book.
Summer came. For the book thief, everything was going nicely. For me, the sky was the color of Jews.
The book thief is Liesel, a German orphan, who steals her first book on the day her little brother is buried. She is illiterate. A book drops unnoticed from a gravedigger apprentice's pocket. Liesel picks it up. She is on her way to a foster home in Molching. She never sees her mother again. She sees her dead brother nightly in her dreams.
A Photo of Himmel Street
The buildings appear to be glued together, mostly small houses and apartment blocks that look nervous.
There is a murky snow spread out like carpet.
There is concrete, empty hat-stand trees, and gray air.
Hans and Rosa Hubermann take Liesel in. Later, they also take in a Jewish fugitive, Max, who lives in their basement for months and months. Rosa is an insultingly loud woman who makes horrible soup. Hans is tall, quiet, pretty much invisible painter and accordion player who becomes the center of Liesel's world.
Max spend a lot of time writing, down there in the Hubermann's basement, while Liesel is out playing soccer, getting into trouble with her best friend Rudy, and stealing books from Nazi bonfires and the mayor's wife's library. Max writes, among other things, a story called "The Word Shaker". I have never read a more touching fairy-tale-esque take on the Holocaust as this little story that Max writes for Liesel. In it, the Fuhrer decides to rule the world with words. His words create forests of farmed thoughts. Word Shakers climb these trees of terrible words and throw them down to the people below. One Word Shaker has a single teardrop made of friendship that has dried into a seed. She plants it among the other trees. This tree grows faster than all the other trees. The Fuhrer demands that it is chopped down. The Tree Shaker climbs up in protest and stays for many months. No axes are strong enough to bring the tree down. Eventually the Tree Shaker is coaxed down by a friend, the man whose tear grew the tree in the first place. The mighty tree falls and carves a "different-colored path" through the forest of hateful words.
This was the best book I have read in years. Tomorrow I will take it to work and slap a barcode on it and start feeding it to the students who are ready to read it. Maybe if it comes your way, you'll read it too. It's worth it. And you might cry a bit at the end, in the middle, and even in the beginning. It's worth it. Every word of it. Thanks for listening.
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