The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean

I saw this book at the Trident Bookseller Cafe waiting for Mer W., requested it from the library, picked it up and read it on the train going home for Passover, all in four days. It was a great read, the kind of book I found myself daydreaming about reading when I was doing other things.

The book follows parallel stories, one in the present and one in the past. In the present, a family is convening in a beach town for a wedding; in the past, the matriarch of the family is a young woman in Leningrad during WWII who works in the art museum. It was a very carefully written book, scarcely wasting a single word. Like A Fine Balance, it was a book that I could watch happening in my head, as if it were a movie. One of the strangest things about the book for me was that it was about a non-Jewish family during WWII. It is interesting to have read Suite Francaise within a few months of this to see how far-reaching WWII was across Europe.

In some ways, the story occurring in the past was a standard war love story. Boy meets girl, boy marries girl, boy goes off to war, girl is sad, boy and girl reunite. But the main character's life while her husband is at war is fascinating, as she and her family survive in a shelter and she continues to work in the art museum as all the art is crated and shipped off.

The writing about love in the book is sublime, "She has been in his life for so long," the author writes, "that he can hardly recall a time before her. Over the years, they have grown together, their flesh and their thoughts twinning so closely that he cannot imagine the person he might be apart from her."

It is no mystery why I found myself cradling the book at times as I was reading.

The modern-day story has some interesting themes, too. The most striking was the questions surrounding care for elder relatives. Also prominent were the dichotomies between someone's life story and how they are perceived as a senior, best captured in this passage:

"...a battered old photograph in a silver frame on her parents' dresser, a studio portrait from the thirties. She was told it was her mother, the only image of her that had survived the war, yet the girl in the photo bore no resemblance to Helen's actual mother. Besides being impossibly young, the girl wore an expression that was not the one Helen recognized, the dark eyes soft and as romantic as a poet's. She didn't think her parents were lying, exactly, but neither could she reconcile this sepia-toned girl with the sturdy woman in shapeless housedresses who cooked liver and onions and ironed gift-wrap and ribbons to be reused. Her imagination failed her."

Perhaps most interesting is that this is a short book to cover all this ground. Just 250 pages or so, with big margins.