The style of Roxanne Veletzos’s
2018 novel feels artless, but nevertheless it draws the reader into the
heartbreaking story it tells. The story
opens on a January night in 1941, in a Romania allied with Germany and
increasingly hostile to Jews. A small Jewish
girl, Natalia, has been found on her own freezing in front of a block of
flats. She is put in an orphanage and is
eventually adopted by a well-to-do couple, Despina and her charismatic husband
Anton, who are unable to have children.
Anton started with nothing and by
his hard work has built a successful chain of stationery shops. The couple provide a warm loving environment
and Natalia thrives. Unfortunately their
happiness does not last long. The family
has to survive a series of misfortunes: the uncertainties of war, Natalia’s
desperate bout of fever in which Despina is ironically assisted by a German
officer as she seeks medical help, the country’s defeat and occupation by the
Red Army, and then the hardships of the communist period, where hostility for
being bourgeois replaces persecution for being Jewish.
Through the changing political
situation we follow Natalia as she grows and becomes a young woman, facing a
dark future in an authoritarian country where she and her family are despised
for being affluent. The Russian
occupiers are nothing more than looters and rapists, and the Romanian
bureaucrats expropriate the family’s possessions and finally their flat, moving
them to a grim communal apartment while denying Anton the opportunity to
work. Having lost his business and their
home, he becomes a shell of the vibrant man he had been, while Natalia is deprived
of her beloved piano. She has trouble
finding work, and after a stint in the fields outside Bucharest gets a slightly
more congenial occupation packing fruit.
By chance she comes across papers
relating to her birth parents and adoption in a drawer, but when she tries to
find out about her origins she discovers the orphanage has closed and been
turned into a military headquarters.
Eventually she learns that her birth parents, Zora and Iosef, had had to
flee to Switzerland to escape the Holocaust, and they eventually settled in New
York. Had they tried to take her with
them, they would probably all have perished; giving her up was a selfless act
of love. They initially thought they
would be able to return for her, but once the Iron Curtain fell this was no
longer possible, though they never gave up hope and made efforts to secure her
freedom, engaging an American lawyer and saving what little money they could to
pay the necessary bribes to facilitate her emigration.
Salvation for Natalia comes from
an unlikely source. When she was small
her father had befriended a young man, Victor, who had been on the verge of
starvation, becoming almost a surrogate father to him. Now Victor is a senior figure in the
Securitate. When she is in her early 20s
he and Natalia meet by chance after not having seen each other for a decade,
and they become lovers. But there can be
no future for them as he is in a marriage of convenience with the daughter of a
senior Russian official.
However, he is able to expedite
Natalia leaving the country using money sent by Zora and Iosef, and in 1960 she
joins her birth parents in the United States, but at the cost of being wrenched
from Anton and Despina. The ending is
truly moving, as Natalia is reunited with her birth parents but separated from
her adoptive ones and from Victor, who all in their own ways have helped
her. She realises she is much loved, and
the book ends with her happy, thinking of Anton, Despina and Victor, and dreaming
of a time when they might all be reunited (while the reader wonders whether
leaving Anton and Despina was a selfish act reversing their selflessness).
The story is apparently inspired
by Veletzos’ own mother, Alexandra, though one wonders how much, as Veletzos
was born in Bucharest, not the United States, and moved to California in her
early teens. No matter, the story of
Zora, Iosef, Anton and Despina sounds authentically harrowing even when one
quibbles with details (would Iosef and Zora really have left a small ill-clad
child on an icy street where she might have frozen to death before being
rescued?). One black mark against Simon
and Schuster: the cataloguing keywords refer to Hungary and Budapest;
presumably someone in the marketing department mistook Bucharest for Budapest,
which is very sloppy and guaranteed to annoy a Romanian.
