The Sweetness of Forgetting

Rose’s experience of AD highlights one of the novel’s major themes about the power and persistence of memory. Rose illustrates how much of one’s identity and self-knowledge is invested in memory. Due to her present being increasingly lost to her, she places new value on knowledge about her family, the main pillars of her early life. Burying memories of her birth family, the Picards, and not speaking of Jacob was the way Rose handled the grief over losing everyone she loved. However, she realizes the cost of this as the end of her life approaches. This knowledge of the Picards’ fates becomes part of the family legacy she wants to bequeath to Hope and Annie. This need to remember names, a type of survival, also drives the larger work of Holocaust remembrance sites and memorials. Harmel suggests that preserving the names of those murdered in the death camps becomes a tribute, and the larger work of remembering is for the living to carry out.

Olivier Berr, whom Rose meets in Chapter 11, is a comment on this work of memoriam. While the Shoah Memorial in Paris records the names of the dead, Olivier has made it his life’s work to collect the stories of the survivors, including details of the families they lost. Olivier more fully gives tribute to lives rather than deaths. This suggests that the persistence of memory can be key to survival.

The novel traces tangible and intangible memorials. The two stars Hope sees traveling across the sky at the end represent the reunion of Jacob and Rose in another form of existence. They mark the passing of a life, but just as Rose knitted the existence of the ancient stars of the Big Dipper to the identities of her lost family, the stars Hope sees are another kind of memorial with unique significance to her.

The novel also confronts the heavy death toll of the Holocaust and all its horrors, including the brutal extermination of children, but Harmel also handles the toll of survival. Olivier, like Jacob, lost everyone in his family. Rose believed the same. These losses, Harmel shows, hold a devastating emotional toll for survivors. Those who went on to live long lives were marked by the trauma of their experience, most literally in the tattoos the Nazi guards gave to each prisoner.

Hope is also undergoing her own version of survival after losing her mother, ending her marriage, and confronting the gradual loss of Mamie. Like Mamie, Hope makes the North Star Bakery the work of memory, perpetuating this tradition as a kind of tribute. Jacob’s story, too, shows another dimension of survival; though he was financially successful and contributed to charitable organizations, he spent 70 years longing for what was missing from his life—Rose. The novel suggests that survival can have its own emotional pains and burdens, and memory can perpetuate wounds as much as it preserves moments of joy.