Those Who Are Saved - Alexis Landau
Vera and Max are Russian émigrés living in Paris with their 4 year old daughter. Once the Nazis enter the country their wealth and social standing cannot help them, and thus begins a journey where choices are made that will mark each one of them for the rest of their lives. When the couple are ordered to present themselves at an internment camp for foreign nationals they decide to leave their daughter with her governess Agnès, with the plan that they will hide in Agnes’ remote hometown until Vera and Max can safely return to collect her. Vera and her friend Elsa are able to escape from Gurs, the internment camp, and thanks to Elsa’s husband they are able to secure US visas for the four of them. Vera and Max spend the war safely in California, while Lucie is stuck in France, no one knowing when and if they will ever see each other again.
Those Who Are Saved was a slow burner for me. It took me a while to get into it, but once I did I was hooked. This isn’t your average WW2 historical fiction romance, it’s a deeply researched historical novel based on a lot of facts, and explores the choices that we make, and the consequences of those choices, during times where we really have no choice at all. There are several narrators in the novel: Vera, Lucie, and a man named Sasha, who emigrated to the US as a little boy, and who has a chance encounter with Vera on the day of the Pearl Harbor bombing. We see the war through the eyes of a little girl who is kept hidden from the worst of it, despite it happening on her doorstep. We see the war through a woman whose heart aches for her child, both trapped in different places across the world. And we see the war through the eyes of a man who returns to European soil for the first time since he left as a child, fighting to make it back home again and continue his dream of writing and directing in Hollywood.
The war is the backdrop of this novel, the foreground being the intricate development of the characters and the way they try to live with the lives that they now live, and the choices that they have made. Relationships fall apart and new ones are forged, bonds are broken but forged back together again. The writing is absolutely beautiful, Alexis Landau has this way with words where they seem to paint an image in watercolor, infusing emotions and perceptions into every page.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book.