53 pages • 1 hour read
The History of Love
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Themes
Survival and the Legacy of the Holocaust
While the Holocaust is rarely mentioned explicitly in The History of Love, the novel is a commentary on the legacy of World War II and the far-reaching consequences for the Jewish Diaspora. Having lived through the Holocaust and lost everything, Leo and Litvinoff are the two characters with the most direct experience, but the Holocaust’s events remain present in the minds of the younger generation, too. Alma notes, for example, that Bird was named after an uncle who was killed by the Nazis. All the characters in The History of Love are scattered and cut off from each other, physically but also emotionally. They struggle to form new connections in the face of their trauma. Instead, they attempt to cope by engaging in some kind of invention or act of creation, working to change truth or reality in order to make it livable.
As a boy, Leo learns he can “make [him]self see something that wasn’t there” (228). When he spots an elephant in the town square, he knows it isn’t real, but he says, “I wanted to believe. So I tried. And I found I could” (228). He employs this strategy throughout his life, describing truth as “the thing I invented so I could live” (167). He creates the imaginary companionship of his friend Bruno, who died during the war, and constructs elaborate fantasies about meeting his son. In his old age, Leo has so completely blended fantasy with reality that he says, “I can barely tell the difference between what is real and what I believe” (230). He is sure he is imagining Alma and her letter, and he is shocked to realize the girl is real. Litvinoff, who likewise lost everything and everyone in the war, describes a similarly ambiguous relationship with the truth. The loss of his family is something he can never accept, but he must live with it all the same. He has to “squeeze around” and “crawl under the truth” every day, willfully ignoring it “like living with an elephant” (156). Driven by the fear that Rosa will discover the secret of his brokenness, Litvinoff creates a new reality, copying the words of his more talented friend to foster the illusion he is a writer. Even Rosa, when she discovers the truth of her husband’s lie, destroys the original manuscript to preserve the fragile reality they have constructed and keep their relationship alive.
Symbolically, Alma becomes obsessed with wilderness survival after her father dies. She keeps a series of notebooks called How to Survive in the Wild as well as a backpack full of outdoor gear. She dreams of an expedition to the Arctic and spends her time learning how to distinguish edible plants and berries. On the one hand, this obsession is a way to connect with her father. On the other hand, it reflects Alma’s feeling of being lost in life. Her interest in wilderness survival is a coping mechanism in her daily life as she navigates the loss of her father, her mother’s depression, and her brother’s eccentricities. While Alma fantasizes about the Arctic tundra, Bird believes he is the Messiah, and their mother is lost in a world of books. In The History of Love, each character does what they feel they must to survive. Each of these coping mechanisms also connects them to Jewish history, representing some of the ways Jewish people and culture have persisted through persecution and in the diaspora: literary culture, religious study, and raw survival. Still, the result is that they end up inhabiting fundamentally different realities, making connections between them that much more difficult.
The Connective Power of Literature
Krauss’s The History of Love is a book about a book, illustrating how literature both connects and isolates individuals. Nearly all the characters in the novel are writers of some kind and hope to use their writing to relate to others: Alma and Bird keep journals and write letters, their mother is a translator, Isaac Moritz is a famous author, and Litvinoff is a journalist before he plagiarizes The History of Love. Leo is perhaps the most gifted writer in the book, yet he is also the most isolated character. He initially writes hoping it will strengthen his bond with Alma Mereminski, but this fails, and he spends the rest of his life alone. When he returns to writing, it is with the conviction that no one but him will ever read it; he uses literature to solidify his isolation.
On the other hand, Leo’s The History of Love takes on a life of its own and brings other couples together, including Zvi and Rosa Litvinoff and David and Charlotte Singer. When Zvi Litvinoff publishes The History of Love, he imagines the books as “a flock of two thousand homing pigeons” that might impact the world and come back “to report on how many tears shed, how many laughs, how many passages read aloud, how many cruel closings of the cover after reading barely a page, how many never opened at all” (71). Even though The History of Love is largely overlooked and ignored, one copy is all it takes to create a domino effect of meaningful connections.
Many of the characters in The History of Love are also avid readers, and the novel is littered with references to famous authors and literary works, including Nicanor Parra, Leo Tolstoy, Cervantes, Franz Kafka, and Bruno Schultz. These references suggest the connective power of literature in a broader sense, as a thread that winds through human history and connects all those who encounter a particular work. However, the novel also implies the derivative nature of literature. Litvinoff remarks that the printed edition of The History of Love, which has been transcribed, translated, and printed, is “a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of the original” (111). All literature draws on literature that came before it in a process that becomes largely circular.
While much of the novel is concerned with rightful authorship, Leo’s character arc in particular posits that literature’s purpose is not individual fame so much as connection and community. Litvinoff’s plagiarism is morally wrong and he struggles with his lie, but his publication of The History of Love had positive results; it unifies the Singer family and allows Alma to live forever in print as Leo intended. The final misattribution of his novel to his son allows Leo to feel connected with him, and Bird’s two forged notes allow Alma Singer and Leo to come together in the book’s final catharsis.
Love, Communication, and Silence
The History of Love is based on the many intertwined relationships between the characters. Although there is much love between them, the characters experience difficulty communicating this love and cannot speak when they most need to express themselves. Language, which looms so large in the lives of the novel’s readers, writers, and translators, often fails them when communicating with loved ones, suggesting the vast complexity of fostering true connection. Furthermore, the characters speak a variety of languages. Things are always lost in translation, and many of the couples in the novel don’t have the same mother tongue, suggesting the inevitability of miscommunication.
In his writing, Leo is precise, articulate, and obsessed with accurately describing the world. He calls his second book Words for Everything, even though he admits, “words often failed me” (17), and through his suffering, he has come to believe that it is “impossible to find the right [words]” for life (9). He almost abandons one language entirely, explaining that he and Bruno no longer speak Yiddish together because “life demanded a new language” (6). When faced with loved ones like Alma and Isaac, Leo’s words often leave him completely. The only time he meets his son face to face, Leo only “flapped his hands” (25), unable to speak. Later, at Isaac’s funeral, Leo loses his ability to speak English. He cannot explain to Isaac’s brother who he is, because he can only speak Yiddish.
Similarly, Alma explains, “[T]he things I want to say get stuck in my mouth” (137), and she repeatedly finds herself unable to express her feelings to those she loves, especially Misha and her mother. Instead of confessing her feelings, Alma resorts to calling Misha and hanging up before he answers, too frightened to speak. Litvinoff also cannot speak at the end of his life, silenced by a hacking cough and the fear of revealing himself as a fraud. He wants to tell Rosa his secret, but “the more he longed to say it, the more impossible it became” (110). He dies without confessing and without knowing that Rosa is also maintaining her silence regarding the truth of The History of Love.
At the end of the novel, Leo finds himself again unable to speak when confronted by Alma Singer. Her presence overwhelms him, and he wants to say her name aloud, but he stays silent, “afraid [he]’d choose the wrong sentence” (245). Rather, Leo tries to communicate without words, tapping Alma twice in a code he and Bruno used to signify “yes.” Instead of distancing the characters, Leo’s non-verbal communication brings them closer. Alma seems to understand him perfectly, tapping “yes” back to Leo. This moment seems to be a confirmation of Leo’s assertion that sometimes the perfect word does not exist, but also that finding the right words might not be necessary to foster true connection and understanding.
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By Nicole Krauss
