The World That We Knew

As the two girls begin their separate adventures, Lea in occupied Paris and Ettie in the French countryside with its network of freedom fighters, the novel develops the three dynamics introduced in the first chapters: the world of wolves and hunters, specifically strategies the wolves take to survive; the increasingly complicated yearning to relish the joy of being alive in a world of stunning and senseless death; and the rich reward of love in a world of hate.

In these chapters, the French Resistance emerges as a manifestation of Lea’s grandmother’s wolves in the dark forest. Like the wolves in the Russian woods, these freedom fighters are determined to survive, to resist the implications of mass death and genocide that the Nazis represent. Ettie, reeling from her sister’s senseless death, introduces the wolf spirit: “She knew that thousands of young men and woman, both French and Jewish, had escaped forced labor camps to disappear into the forests or safe houses in villages and towns in order to fight back against the Germans” (90-91). As Victor, back in occupied Paris, begins to realize, cooperating with the Germans—which his parents tried and which Julien believes will work—only creates a greater evil, a more menacing threat. He rejects that sort of collaboration with evil. Like Ettie, Victor adopts the spirit of the wolf—to attack when threatened; to be elusive, shadowy, devious when outnumbered, outgunned, and outmanned. Victor decides to never surrender to gentler emotions, never show mercy, and never deal with the hunters in any way other than what they are: a potent and immediate threat. Indeed, the novel makes no effort to humanize the Nazis; it leaves them two-dimensional and distant, never examining their motivations, never engaging their psychologies. They embody evil, disciplined by hate and driven by paranoia, and kill for the blood-rush of killing. When Ava kills the Nazi soldiers who threaten Lea and Julien, she displays the perfect killing machine of the soulless golem. She does exactly what her creators brought her to life to do. The killing, however, foreshadows Ava’s later attack of another Nazi, an attack then provoked not by programmed cunning but by the grief and sorrow in her heart.

The dynamic of embracing life against the raw immediacy of death emerges here through Marianne, the maid from the Lévi household, who returns to her father and her childhood farm, far from Paris. Death is everywhere in Paris. One of the most harrowing moments occurs when Ava, gifted with visionary sight to identify angels and demons, sees legions of black-winged angels forming a canopy over the Paris streets, intent on confusion, chaos, and death. Ironically, when Marianne initially left home as a brash and confident 18-year-old, she saw Paris as an ideal, perfect world—a world as far away as she could get from her tacky rural homelife: “She thought of everything she would never see or do. Marianne was young but her life seemed already ordinary” (97). She wanted to live a more cosmopolitan life in the glittering, distant city. However, the reality of the Nazis, and the routine horrors she saw in the streets, and the Lévi family’s constant anxiety and dread convinced Marianne that the city was no place for her. Her return to the simple farm where she grew up symbolizes her rediscovery of simple joys, which as a child she disparaged as onerous and oppressive. She embraces her aging father, delights in resuming backbreaking chores, takes in the exhilarating delights of the morning air, basks in the afternoon sun. Like Ava discovering the small miracles that animate the world around her, Marianne reclaims the tonic wonders of a world the Nazis don’t define or destroy.

The novel embraces what’s emerging as its defining hope: the sweet energy of love, uncomplicated by irony, defying a world of hate. The love that develops between Lea and Julien is difficult. They are from radically different backgrounds. Their families, their cultural makeups, and even their personalities are different: Lea is outgoing, precocious, and curious; Julien is narcissistic, preening, and tends toward sarcasm and a foolish sense of bravado. In the long afternoons they share in the family’s library, however, a tenderness develops. Lea wants to share with Julien her deepest secrets, wants that level of trust and intimacy. Julien, despite his arrogant sense of himself as a promising artist, has never shown his sketches to anyone until for reasons he cannot explain he shows them to Lea. When Julien sketches her portrait, Lea realizes that he sees her as beautiful, an idea she dismissed since she so deliberately chopped off her own hair after her near-rape in Germany. Julien knows she is rapt: “As far as Julien was concerned, he had captured her completely” (104). When Julien opts to stay in Paris and Lea, with the urging of Ava, flees the city, their goodbye offers a moment of genuine tenderness. Lea cannot accept the absoluteness implied by his decision: “Somehow she would find a way” (141) back to him. Her parting words, the whispered “Stay alive” (141), mark the moment when Lea leaves her childhood behind and enters into the adult risk of love in a world that seems at best indifferent to such urgencies and at worst a dark agent seeking to render such emotions ironic. Their love story begins to center the novel’s movement toward reclamation and redemption.