The most precious of cargoes A tale

Described simply as "a tale," this swift, intense novelette takes readers to World War II Europe. A woodcutter and his wife live in the forest, near a train track. The woodcutter's wife longs for a child. Another man--a Jewish barber--and his wife have a set of twins. But when the family is captured and sent on the train to a French internment camp, the barber pitches one baby out of the train into the waiting arms of the woodcutter's wife. Grumberg, whose father died in the Holocaust, is known for his plays celebrating the French-Jewish culture. While the unnamed narrator insists that the story is entirely untrue, there's also an appendix detailing the facts the tale is based on. Despite the heavy subject matter, the prose is dreamy and ethereal, repeating themes of milk, sustenance, and what it means to love a child. An excellent choice for book clubs, especially in tandem with one of the many World War II novels that are popular today, such as Martha Hall Kelly's Lilac Girls (2016).

In a fabulist novella, a Jewish man bound for a concentration camp throws one of his twin babies from a moving train; a Polish countrywoman finds the child and raises her as her own. As he and countless other deported French Jews rush toward doom, a father realizes that his wife does not have enough milk to feed both of their infants and so makes the unthinkable decision to throw one of the babies, wrapped in a prayer shawl, from the moving train. As fairy-tale logic would have it, a poor childless woman in the forests of Poland discovers the baby, and she and her husband risk their own lives to raise the girl as their own. Thus the father's Sophie's Choice is redeemed and shown to be one of great humanity. On its face, this story--newly available in English thanks to Wynne's beautiful translation from French--is about the devastating lengths to which parents will go for the sake of their children and about how saving one life can mean endangering another. But it is also an unlikely tale of survival during the Holocaust that is entirely aware of its unlikeliness. Grumberg uses fairy-tale conventions, but he does so winkingly. This self-consciousness reaches its zenith with a metafictional epilogue that directly addresses the idea of "true stories," calling upon the reader to question their assumptions about historical fiction and about the relationships between myth and truth. With subtlety and intention, the novella ultimately implores us to consider the purpose of literature after tragedy: well-trodden thematic territory after 1945, to be sure, but approached here in a unique way. It is difficult, in 2020, to write a work of fiction about the Holocaust that is original; even simply in this sense, Grumberg's work succeeds where many have failed. A postmodern fairy tale, by turns evoking horror and wonder, that scrutinizes the relationship between myth and history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.