53 pages • 1 hour read
Nicole KraussThe History of Love
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Joy Forever”
Leo waits anxiously for a response after sending Words for Everything to his son. After two and a half weeks without word, he takes a walk. He ends up at a Starbucks, where he orders a coffee without attempting to call attention to himself. Feeling pleased with his ability to have a cup of coffee “like a normal person” (76), Leo settles into his seat, enjoying listening to the conversations around him. However, the man sitting across from him is reading a newspaper, and Leo sees a photograph of his son, Isaac Moritz, on the back page. He reads the obituary and learns that Isaac died of Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of cancer, at 60 years old.
Leo makes his way home in a daze. The following day, he notices that Isaac’s obituary includes the details for the funeral. He goes out to buy a suit for the service but cannot afford it. Instead, he goes to a shop to have a passport photo taken, something he does occasionally “to steady [him]self” (81). Once, the cousin who helped Leo become a locksmith tried to take Leo’s photograph, but the image always developed as a grey blob, as if Leo wasn’t there. The photo of his cousin developed normally, and Leo reasoned that since he had taken the picture, this was also proof of his existence.
The following day, Leo arrives late for Isaac’s funeral. The body has already been taken away, and Leo stands awkwardly off to the side. Isaac’s half-brother Bernard appears, and Leo seems to lose his ability to speak English, responding to Bernard in Yiddish. Bernard only understands that Leo is from Slonim, the town his mother used to speak about. This is enough to convince Bernard that Leo is a long-lost relative, and he takes Leo back to his home for the rest of the memorial. During the gathering, Leo retreats to a guest bedroom, where he finds a faded photograph of two children. He is overcome because the photograph shows him as a boy with his childhood sweetheart, Isaac’s mother. Bernard sees him with the photo and explains that Isaac found it among his mother’s things, along with several letters. Leo remembers the exact day the photograph was taken but cannot find the words to tell Bernard that he is the boy in the image.
Leo steals the photograph and asks one of the waiting limos to take him home. Back at his apartment, Leo thinks for a moment he was robbed because everything is in disarray. However, he sees that Bruno has baked a cake and left several notes for him. One of them announces there is a gift under Leo’s pillow. He finds a large envelope filled with a manuscript. Leo begins to read. He finds the words strangely familiar, but it takes a minute to understand that he recognizes them because he wrote them. It is The History of Love, the book Leo wrote before he escaped Poland.
Chapter 5 Summary: “My Father’s Tent”
Alma Singer explains that her father did not write letters. She has seen letters that her mother wrote to her father but never his replies. However, once he gave Alma a special pen that could be used without gravity. She put the pen away when her father died but brought it with her when she traveled to Jerusalem for her Bat Mitzvah. Although the trip was expensive for her family, her mother thought it was important for her grandparents to be present. Because she doesn’t believe in God, Alma wrote a letter to her father, which she placed in the Wailing Wall. She told him that she sometimes sleeps in his tent, which survived her mother’s purge of his things.
When she returned from Jerusalem, Alma started a correspondence with Misha Shklovsky, a Russian boy she met through a pen pal. Misha also lives in New York. The two exchanged 21 letters and finally met in person when Misha invited Alma to his Bar Mitzvah. The two became close friends, and now, Alma tells Misha everything about the letter from Jacob Marcus and her hopes for a relationship with her mother. She reads him the draft of the forged letter before she puts it in the mail.
After sending the first installment of The History of Love, Alma waits anxiously for a response from Jacob Marcus. Finally, she receives a thoughtful letter answering Alma’s questions and offering strange details about his life, which “has been pared down to the simplest elements” (102). Alma is perplexed and intrigued by the letter, and she assembles a list of clues as to who Jacob Marcus could be. In her notebook, How to Survive in the Wild, she makes a heading designed to disguise her true intention if anyone else reads it: “How to Survive if Your Parachute Fails to Open.” Under this, she makes a list of nine clues that could reveal the identity of Jacob Marcus.
It occurs to Alma that there might be more clues in The History of Love. She returns to her mother’s translation, reading a chapter called “The Birth of Feeling,” which describes how feelings came into being and how new feelings are still being discovered. Alma begins to wonder about her namesake. Struck by inspiration, Alma hurries downstairs to ask her mother about the character’s last name. Her mother says that a last name is mentioned—Mereminski—which is strange because it’s Polish when all the other names are Spanish. Alma takes this as proof that Alma Mereminski is a real woman and begins searching for her.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Trouble with Thinking”
As Zvi Litvinoff ages, he develops a terrible cough, a symptom of the secret he kept about the origin of The History of Love. Sometimes, he is on the verge of confessing to Rosa but never finds the courage. He remembers the last time he saw a particular friend on his last day in Poland. It is a moment he thinks about every day. Litvinoff often returns to his copy of The History of Love and rereads a chapter called “The Age of String,” which describes a time when humans used string to help words find their way to their final destination. The narrator describes Litvinoff’s version of the book as “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original” (111), which was given to Litvinoff by his unnamed friend as he was leaving Poland.
When Litvinoff was young, he lived in Poland and worked as a journalist writing obituaries for a newspaper. One day in a cafe, he ran into a long-lost childhood friend. The two reconnected and began meeting at the cafe every day. When the writer Isaac Babel dies, Litvinoff writes an obituary that he is incredibly proud of, and his colleagues and friends congratulate and celebrate with him. A few weeks later, Litvinoff’s friend stops coming to the cafe. When his absence continues, Litvinoff is worried and goes looking for him. He finds his friend ill in his flat. He makes him tea, finds him an extra blanket, and stays with him for the night.
While his friend is sleeping, Litvinoff reads some papers on the man’s desk. There is an obituary for Isaac Babel, and Litvinoff is angry after reading it. It is much better than Litvinoff’s, which he considered his best work, and he realizes that he and his friend are very different; his friend is a significantly better writer. There are several other obituaries of writers on the desk, and the last is a self-obituary revealing the name of Litvinoff’s friend: “The Death of Leopold Gursky.” Litvinoff takes the sheet of paper and puts it in his pocket, where he carries it for the rest of his life.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
Themes of death, mortality, and the nature of existence take up much of these three chapters. After the war, Leo feels like he has disappeared. He loses his entire family and all ties to his old life, making him feel like “a man who became invisible” (12). However, Leo perseveres and finds strategies, like making scenes in public, that make him feel more visible. With Isaac gone, Leo loses one of his strongest anchors to reality, again making him feel unmoored. Following his son’s death, much of Leo’s narration moves to contemplating his own existence. He remarks:
Only now that my son was gone did I realize how much I’d been living for him. When I woke up in the morning it was because he existed, and when I ordered food it was because he existed, and when I wrote my book it was because he existed to read it (80).
When he sees Isaac’s obituary, he says, “[M]y heart stopped” (77). Leo’s son is his reason for being, and the news of his death also threatens to kill the old man.
However, as the chapter progresses, Leo discovers reminders that his existence isn’t tied to his son’s. To reground himself, Leo seeks out a physical reminder of his existence, a passport photo. There was a time when Leo was sure he had “lost whatever the thing is that makes people indelible” (81). He didn’t appear in photographs; a “scratchy grayness” developed instead of his image. However, Leo can take pictures, which is a reassurance to the elderly man since creation is proof of life. Photographs are “the opposite of disappearing” (82), and the photo of him and Alma later in the chapter further affirms Leo’s existence, as does the surprise appearance of The History of Love.
In Chapter 5, Alma is searching to validate someone else’s existence. Like Leo, she is waiting for a letter she hopes will change everything: the response from Jacob Marcus. Letters are a reoccurring symbol throughout the chapter. In The History of Love, Love, Communication, and Silence is an important theme. Characters struggle to communicate with one another, and letters are often a symbol of this difficulty. There are several individuals that Alma meets and gets to know through letters. She first laments that her father didn’t write letters, making it more difficult to connect with him after his death. This doesn’t stop Alma from writing to him and leaving a letter in the Wailing Wall. She also describes communicating with pen pals, which is how she meets Misha, who becomes her close friend. However, letters are just as prone to difficulties and misunderstandings as verbal communication, and Alma finds herself perplexed by Jacob Marcus’s response to her mother. She reads the most recent letter a hundred times but says, “[E]ach time I read it, I felt I knew a little less about Jacob Marcus” (104).
Chapter 6, “The Trouble with Thinking,” is pivotal because the narrator reveals Leopold Gursky is the author of The History of Love. The guilt that Litvinoff feels for taking his friend’s work as his own eats away at him as he ages, manifesting in physical symptoms like his hacking cough. This is another example of the theme of Love, Communication, and Silence. Litvinoff finds himself physically unable to speak the truth of his plagiarism, finding himself “overcome with fear of the consequences” (110). Instead of telling Rosa his secret, Litvinoff often rereads a chapter of The History of Love called “The Age of String.” This chapter is significant because it also addresses communication issues and the difficulty of speaking and being understood. Because “[s]o many words get lost” (111), the chapter describes “a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide words that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations” (111).
This idea of words getting lost is important to The History of Love on many levels. First, the fictional version of The History of Love has gotten lost to some degree. Separated from their true author and published in a new language, the words have taken a convoluted path that could have benefited from a guiding string. Secondly, all the characters frequently find themselves at a loss for words. They are often silenced by fear, anxiety, or shyness, creating distance between those they care about the most.
Related Titles
By Nicole Krauss
