The History of Love

At the start of The History of Love, Alma Singer is a dynamic and precocious 14-year-old. She describes herself as “black-haired, gap-toothed, [and] skinny in a bad way” (38). In many ways, Alma is the energetic opposite of Leo. She is young, full of life, and forward-looking, while Leo contemplates death, lives in isolation, and constantly thinks of the past and all he has lost. Alma lives in Brooklyn with her mother and little brother and is obsessed with all things wilderness survival, which she keeps track of in a series of notebooks called How to Survive in the Wild. Alma’s father died when she was seven, and the Singer family remains in various states of grief. Alma still mourns the loss of her father, but she also feels responsible for her mother and brother’s sadness and worries for their well-being. She says, “sometimes my stomach hurts when I think about what will happen to [my mother] when I grow up and go away to start the rest of my life,” and she even worries she’ll never leave because her mother needs her so much. When the letter from Jacob Marcus arrives, Alma sees a chance for her mother to find love and be happy again, so she begins her search for the man’s true identity.

While Alma wants to help her mother, her search for Alma Mereminski is also a coming-of-age quest for her to learn more about who she is and where she came from, as well as connect with the father she barely remembers. Like Leo, Alma is thoughtful and articulate in her thoughts and writing, but words often fail her when communicating with others face-to-face. However, she matures significantly throughout the novel. She begins to open up more to her mother, is more honest with her brother, and begins to experiment with boys. Symbolically, the only dress she owns is too small for her when she tries to wear it to meet Leo at the end of the novel.

Zvi Litvinoff is the only central character in The History of Love who doesn’t tell his story in his own words. The sections about him are narrated in the third person, highlighting that he is known to the world through words that are not his own: Leo Gursky’s The History of Love. As an author, Litvinoff is a mysterious and elusive man. The only details about his life come from his wife’s introduction to the second edition of History, and her “tender and effacing” prose is vague enough to create “a kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination” (66-67). Litvinoff, then, suffers from the same invisibility that Leo fears, even though he is a published author.

As friends growing up in Poland, both Litvinoff and Leo were aspiring writers. However, Leo was the one with true promise, while Litvinoff thinks of himself as “an average man” who “lacked the potential to be in any way original” (116). For years, Leo and Litvinoff’s lives follow similar trajectories. Although Litvinoff escapes Poland before his friend, the war destroys both their lives. Like Leo, Litvinoff loses all his family and friends and lives alone for years in a strange country. When Litvinoff meets Rosa, he is desperately afraid she will realize that he is a broken “shell of a man” (158). Although he doesn’t start copying The History of Love with a clear intention to keep Rosa’s love, the fear that she will discover his emptiness drives him to take the manuscript from the shelf it has inhabited for many years.

For years, guilt eats away at Litvinoff. The truth of his plagiarism manifests as a terrible cough that worsens as he ages, finally becoming so bad Rosa “thought he was going to spit up blood” on the night before his death (188). Litvinoff could be considered the antagonist of The History of Love for stealing his friend’s work and publishing it as his own. However, his remorse makes it difficult to see him as a bad man. The Holocaust’s history also complicates his original plagiarism, as he reasonably believed that Leo was dead. Like all the other characters in The History of Love, he does what is necessary to create a reality he can survive in.

Emanuel Chaim “Bird” Singer is Alma’s little brother and the final narrator of The History of Love. At nine years old, Bird finds a book called The Book of Jewish Thoughts in his father’s things and becomes devoutly Jewish. He believes he can speak to God and is a lamed vovnik, one of 36 Jewish holy people who can pray to God, and maybe even the Messiah. Named after a Jewish historian, a Jewish cellist, a Jewish writer, and his mother’s uncle who was killed in the Holocaust, Bird’s religious devotion represents a way to connect to his heritage, particularly to his father, of whom he has almost no memory. Bird has always been eccentric. As a child, Alma explains how her brother “went through fifteen or twenty names,” refusing to respond to Emanuel and making up a new name whenever someone asked. At six years old, Bird jumped out a window trying to fly and broke his arm. After this incident, people started calling him Bird, and the name stuck.

However, Bird’s commitment to his religious beliefs takes his strangeness to new levels. It is all-consuming and alienates him from his classmates. Other children tease him, and his only friend is Mr. Goldstein, the elderly janitor “who mumbled in three languages, and whose hands left behind more dust than they cleaned away” (36). This doesn’t seem to bother Bird, though, and he spends his time selling lemonade and working on a mysterious project that turns out to be an ark meant to keep his mother and sister safe from the flood he believes is imminent. With his lemonade money, Bird plans to fly to Israel, where he will fulfill his destiny as a lamed vovnik.

Alma worries about what will happen if her brother doesn’t try to fit in. She advises him to “push down [his] feelings” as she does (204), and Bird tries to take her advice to heart, keeping track of the number of days he behaves normally. Toward the end of the novel, Bird’s faith is tested with a string of bad luck. He cannot buy a plane ticket to Israel, his ark is destroyed, and Mr. Goldstein falls ill, but Bird chooses to reaffirm his faith instead of following his sister’s advice. The guiding question of “would a lamed vovnik do this?” eventually leads Bird to help his sister connect with Leo and solve the mystery of The History of Love.

Bruno is an important character because he is evidence of Leo’s attempt to make the impossible possible in order to survive. Throughout the novel, Bruno is Leo’s best and only friend. The two grew up in Poland together but were separated during the war. One day, Leo improbably hears Bruno’s voice on the sidewalk in New York City, and the two are reunited. After Bruno’s wife dies, he moves into Leo’s building, and the two old men continually check on one another. They “make little excuses” to confirm that the other is still alive (4). Bruno is Leo’s only connection to the outside world, the only one who would notice if Leo died or would look for him if he went missing.

However, Leo reveals at the end of the novel that Bruno died in 1941. He says that in reality, his friend is “the greatest character [he] ever wrote” (249). As a child, Leo learns that he can “make [him]self see something that wasn’t there” (228). He uses this strategy to make his life bearable in the face of all that he loses, saying, “The truth is the thing I invented so I could live” (167). Bruno is a figment of Leo’s imagination, an invention so he doesn’t have to be alone.

Charlotte Singer is Alma and Bird’s mother. She is an Englishwoman who met David Singer in Israel the summer before she started at Oxford University. The two fell in love, and David sent her back to England with his copy of The History of Love. Charlotte loves language and literature, and she used language to deepen her connection to David. She learned Spanish to read The History of Love and Hebrew to better communicate with her lover. She dropped out of Oxford and moved to Tel Aviv to be with him. The two were married, and Charlotte became a translator. The couple moved to New York, where they started a family. Alma reports that her mother “read three gazillion books on a wide variety of subjects” while pregnant with her and another “eight gazillion books” while pregnant with Bird (41).

After David’s death, Charlotte becomes depressed and withdrawn. She never stops loving her husband and barely leaves the house, where she “subsists for days on water and air” (45). Charlotte cares for her children but doesn’t show much maternal instinct. She barely cooks, shows little concern as Bird’s eccentricities grow, and spends most of her time reading and “giving out Posthumous Nobels” to dead writers (47). Alma worries about her mother’s loneliness and feels suffocated by the responsibility of being the only object of her mother’s affection, wishing she could ask Charlotte to “love [her] less” (43). Like Leo and Litvinoff, Charlotte uses language and literature to quell her loneliness. She throws herself into her translation work with little regard for anything else. Alma describes her mother as separated from the world by a “wall of dictionaries” that “gets taller every year” (45).

David Singer died seven years before the novel’s present day, yet he remains a guiding force in his family’s life and is a key character in the novel’s plot. As a young man, he found a copy of The History of Love while traveling through Buenos Aires, and thus the novel entered the characters’ lives, initiating the connections between them. Alma, Bird, and Charlotte are all trying to retain their connection to David, which remains the strongest unifying factor in their family. Alma emulates David’s interest in wilderness survival, Bird hopes to get closer to his father through religion, and Charlotte throws herself into translating The History of Love, a gift from David during their courtship. David is an almost mythical, larger-than-life character, especially in the eyes of his children. Bird, who barely remembers his father, often asks his sister to tell him what David was like, and Alma, whose memories are also fading, invents stories, creating a man that is ever more a figment of their imagination.

When Zvi Litvinoff begins transcribing The History of Love, he changes the names of people and places as he goes, but when he reaches Alma’s name, he pauses. He realizes that he cannot replace her name because “to remove her name would be like erasing all the punctuation, and the vowels, and every adjective and noun. Because without Alma, there would have been no book” (184). Although Alma has passed away when Nicole Krauss’s History starts, she continues to drive the plot and permeate every aspect of the novel, from Leo’s memories to Alma Singer’s search. Leo fell in love with Alma when they were both 10 years old and remains in love with her throughout his life. When she was 20, Alma left Poland for the United States and learned that she is pregnant with Leo’s baby upon her arrival. She wrote to Leo but received no response and assumed he was killed. She married another man, her boss’s son, and lived in New York. In the fictional The History of Love, Alma is the name of every woman, representing love as a general concept. However, the real-life Alma Mereminski illustrates the more complicated, messy realities of love.