53 pages • 1 hour read
Nicole KraussA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
The History of Love begins with Leo Gursky, a retired locksmith with a weak heart, in his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He is thinking about what will happen when he dies, particularly who will be the last person to see him alive. Leo worries about dying “on a day when [he] went unseen” (4), so he draws attention to himself when he goes out by dropping change on the floor or trying on shoes that he has no intention of buying. When Leo sees an advertisement for a nude model in the newspaper, he calls the number immediately, amazed by the opportunity “[t]o have so much looked at. By so many” (4).
Leo’s friend Bruno lives in the apartment upstairs. The two knew each other as boys in Poland but were separated during the war. Years later, they ran into one another on the New York sidewalk, and when Bruno’s wife passed away, he moved into Leo’s building. After a neighbor died alone in her apartment and wasn’t found for several days, Leo and Bruno started dropping by to check up on each other and ensure the other was still alive. Leo describes Bruno as a short, bespectacled man who was an aspiring writer as a child. Leo also dreamed of becoming a writer, completing three books before he turned 21. The first was a realistic depiction of his hometown of Slonim, but when he gave it to his childhood sweetheart, she told him she preferred his imagination. The next book Leo wrote was utterly fantastical, but the girl he loved told him maybe it was a mistake to “make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything” (8). Not to be dissuaded, Leo started his third book, even though the girl left for the United States.
During the war, Leo lost his entire family and spent years hiding out in forests. Disillusioned by his suffering, Leo stopped writing until he had a heart attack, which brought him back to his typewriter for the first time in 57 years. He begins writing his life story, detailing how he fell in love with a girl in Poland, but they were separated. When he found her again in New York, he discovered that she had given birth to his son, a boy named Isaac, but married another man.
After modeling for the drawing class, Leo goes home to bed but is woken by a phone call from a man looking for a locksmith. Leo explains that he is long retired, but the man is desperate. Leo calls a car, and a limo comes to pick him up. When he arrives at the man’s house, he unlocks the door, and they both go inside. The man has an impressive library, and Leo finds a book by his son, Isaac Moritz, on the shelf. The book prompts Leo to remember a book signing, the only time he was face-to-face with his son. When Leo reached the front of the line, he tried to tell Isaac who he was, but he couldn’t speak, only move his hands.
When he returns to his apartment, Leo sits down at his typewriter and gives his book a title. He tries out several before choosing Words for Everything.
Fourteen-year-old Alma Singer lives in Brooklyn with her mother, Charlotte, and her little brother, Bird. She is named after “every girl” in a book called The History of Love, which her father gave her mother when they first met. Her younger brother is Emanuel, but he tried to fly out of a second-story window when he was six, and now everyone calls him Bird. Ten-year-old Bird is a devout Jew and good friends with the Hebrew School janitor. He has recently begun writing Hebrew letters for God on anything he can find.
Alma’s mother is English, and her father, David, was from Israel. The book he gave her, The History of Love, was written in Spanish, so she began learning the language to read it. After a year at Oxford, she dropped out to move to Tel Aviv. Charlotte and David were married, and Charlotte began working as a translator. The couple moved to New York, where they started a family.
When Alma was six, her father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died nine months later. After his death, Alma became obsessed with wilderness survival, learning what plants are edible and how to start a fire in the woods. She stores a backpack filled with supplies under her bed and keeps a series of notebooks called How to Survive in the Wild.
After her husband’s death, Charlotte became depressed and solitary. Alma can remember her going on just two dates, and she spends most of her time in her pajamas, absorbed in her translation work. Alma worries that her mother is lonely, and she worries that her brother is becoming too religious. He believes he might be a lamed vovnik, one of 36 Jewish holy people who can pray to God.
One day, Charlotte receives a strange letter from a man named Jacob Marcus. Having read Charlotte’s translation of the poet Nicanor Parra, he hopes she will translate an obscure book called The History of Love, written in Spanish by the Polish writer Zvi Litvinoff. He offers her $100,000 for the project, to be paid in four installments. Both Charlotte and Alma are astonished by the offer, and Alma hopes that her mother and Jacob Marcus will fall in love. However, when Alma takes the first installment of the translation to the post office, she peeks at the letter her mother included and is disappointed to find nothing romantic.
Alma reads one of the chapters of The History of Love, which describes “The Age of Glass,” when people believed certain parts of themselves were made of glass and went around carefully to avoid breaking them. Instead of going to the post office, Alma drafts a new letter from her mother, which she slips in the package and sends to Jacob Marcus.
Zvi Litvinoff is the presumed author of The History of Love. In her introduction to the book’s second edition, his wife, Rosa, describes her husband’s life and work. She tells how the couple met in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1951, their first conversations in a café; he spoke Yiddish, and she knew from his accent that he was a refugee. She explains that Litvinoff wrote The History of Love in Yiddish, which she helped translate into Spanish. The original manuscript was lost when the couple’s house flooded. The narrator points out that Rosa’s depiction of her husband is missing important information, and “[w]hat is not known about Zvi Litvinoff is endless” (68).
The man lived in Valparaíso for 37 years, teaching Hebrew and literature at the university after his book was published. The History of Love was published in a small run of just a few thousand copies, and one made its way to Buenos Aires, where it ended up in a bookshop near the home of Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The owner of the shop opened the book one day and read a chapter called “The Age of Silence,” which described a time when humans could speak only in gestures. Touched by the book, the bookseller placed it in the window, hoping it would find just the right reader.
One day, a young man from Israel came to the shop. He had just finished his military service and was traveling around South America. He bought the book and wrote his name, David Singer, on the title page. David went on to marry Charlotte and name his daughter, Alma, after The History of Love.
The first three chapters of The History of Love introduce the three initially separate storylines the novel will follow. Each storyline has a distinct narrative voice and technique. The first two chapters are narrated in the first person by Leo Gursky and Alma Singer, respectively. Each begins by stating their full name, then tells the reader the narrator’s story, moving backward and forward in time to fill in the details of their lives. Their voices are distinct and personal as each one describes their own experiences. Leo’s narration embodies his age and maturity. He’s preoccupied with the imminence of his death, which he imagines could happen “tomorrow. Or the next day” (4), and he drifts in and out of his memories with a fluidity that suggests he spends much of his time dwelling in the past. He speaks with honesty and resignation about his life and shortcomings, particularly his failings as a writer. After the war, Leo loses his faith in language. However, at the end of his life, he decides to give writing another shot, no matter how imperfect the result might be. Leo claims to be writing for himself, but deep down, he worries about being forgotten after he dies, admitting “the truth was that I wanted someone to read it” (17). Despite his general melancholy and resignation, Leo’s narration is continually punctuated by the phrase “and yet,” always adding one more thing, suggesting that Leo still holds onto a bit of joy and optimism.
On the other hand, Alma Singer’s narration reflects her youth and the future ahead of her. While she also moves backward and forward in time rather freely, she organizes her chapter into 34 brief subheadings, creating a life with more structure and delineation. After her father dies, Alma’s mother tells her daughter, “From now on […] I’m going to treat you like an adult” (43), and Alma seems to have taken this to heart. She feels a sense of responsibility toward her mother and brother and reflects on the loss of her father, her brother’s religious fanaticism, and her mother’s loneliness with maturity and seriousness. However, there is also a certain naiveté and youthful hopefulness as she imagines the possible romance between her mother and Jacob Marcus.
The third chapter, which begins the story of Zvi Litvinoff, is narrated in the third person. This underscores the idea that Litvinoff is the most mysterious character in the story. Unlike Alma and Leo, he cannot communicate in his own words even though, out of the three of them, he is known as a published author. Many other characters in the novel record their lives in writing (keeping notebooks, writing fiction, and communicating through letters). However, Litvinoff left no journals, no writing besides The History of Love, and no correspondences. This lack of literary evidence and the chapter’s third-person narration symbolize that Litvinoff is not a true writer. He is known for The History of Love, but those words are not his own. As a result, the facts of his life “were lost to oblivion like so much about so many who are born and die without anyone ever taking the time to write it all down” (70). It is left to Nicole Krauss’s narrator to fill in the blanks, a sort of meta-commentary on the role of literature, as one author illuminates the life of another. This introduces the key role that literature and narration will play in the novel, particularly the theme of The Connective Power of Storytelling. Litvinoff manages to connect individuals by publishing The History of Love, but all the details of his life are forgotten, and his own narrative thread ends. This danger of being forgotten is precisely what Leo is trying to avoid with his impulse to return to writing after so many years.
These first three chapters also introduce the novel’s different settings, moving between Poland in the 1930s and 40s, New York City in the early 2000s, and Chile from the 1940s to the 1970s. These varied and distant locations and time periods also speak to the connective power of literature and storytelling, illustrating how The History of Love connects individuals around the world from very different walks of life.
By Nicole Krauss