Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi

Eight years ago, I went through a World War II/Holocaust period in a personal exploration of the humanities, taking in as much art, literature, and film about the era as I could.

A stunning exhibition of "sur-rational" paintings by a Holocaust survivor, the late Fritz Hirschberger, triggered my passion for the subject. I arranged for his exhibition, Indifference, at the College where I worked at the time. After many telephone conversations to write promotional materials for the show and to arrange media interviews for its East Coast premier, I developed a lasting friendship with an extraordinary man.

It was really the first time I had heard the complete story of the Holocaust from the Jewish perspective, and it deeply affected me.

During my self-directed immersion into literature about the middle of the last century, I read Maus, A Survivor's Tale by Art Spiegelman, World War II for Dummies, Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally, and The Reader by Bernard Schlink, among other excellent books.

But my favorite book about the period was a piece of historical fiction entitled Stones from the River by Ursula Hegi.

Stones from the River is Trudi Montag's fictional chronicle set in Germany between World War I and II. Trudi is a zwerg, a dwarf. After giving birth to a physically defective child, her mother Gertrude, Trudi's namesake, descends into mental illness. So, Trudi is raised by her caring father Leo, who runs a small pay library, and others in her close-knit German town until she is barely old enough to take care of herself.

Hegi deftly arouses the reader's empathy for Trudi beginning with the first paragraph of the book when we learn about Trudi prayers to grow and her attempts to stretch herself and shrink a head far too large for the rest of her body.

And of course, Trudi is made fun of by other children and spurned in love, and if the reader had no idea of the heartache that dwarves and little people face before reading the book, they are deeply aware and sympathetic thereafter.

As Trudi grows, so grows the Nazi influence in her town. Her little town is a microcosm of horrors mounting across Germany as Hitler comes to power. The persecution of the Jews reaches a fever pitch in Trudi's little town. A Gentile at risk herself of persecution herself because of her own physical differences from the Aryan ideal, Trudi reaches out to protect the Jewish families who loved her and helped raise her when her mother abandoned her.

Trudi's story is a tale of heartache, but mostly one of courage--of Herculean proportions.That such courage is evidenced in such a tiny form, someone marginalized by the rest of society, is what makes this book special.

The inscription in Fritz's painting Indifference was written by Edward Yashinsky, a Yiddish poet who survived the Shoah only to die in a Communist prison in Poland. Though it's difficult to read as it appears in Fritz's painting at the top right corner of this blog, I have shared it below because it dovetails beautifully with Hegi's theme:

Fear not your enemies,

for they can only kill you.

Fear not your friends,
for they can only betray you.

Fear only the indifferent,
who permit the killers and

betrayers to walk safely on earth.

I don't want to share all the trials and travails Trudi faces to protect the ones she loves from both deliberate harm and benign indifference. I may have given away too much of the plot already. However Stones is more than exquisite storytelling. It is also written with a grace and sophisitication that lifts Hegi's prose far above that of other contemporary storytellers.

Stones from the River affected me more deeply than some of the classics I revere such as Tess of the D'Ubervilles because it is a set in the most blighted time in the history of our civilized world, a time when scientists and doctors and all manner of educated people, educated mind you, marshaled their resources for the eradication of a race of people--God's chosen people.

No other fictional work made that abomination or the heroism of individuals working against the Nazis more clear to me than Stones from the River.

Note: The thumbnails of paintings in this post are all part of Fritz Hirschberger's series of Sur-rational Paintings called Indifference. From top to bottom the paintings are entitled Indifference, The Last Lesson, and Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes Free"--the lettering over the entrance to Auschwitz).

Technorati tags: Stones+from+the+River, Holocaust+fiction, book+review, Fritz+Hirschberger