The World That We Knew

“If you do not believe in evil, you are doomed to live in a world you will never understand. But, if you believe in it, you may see it everywhere.”

The grim world in which the story is set, the world created by the Third Reich, is purely evil. Those who commit heinous crimes often reconstruct evil into more harmless concepts to try to explain their motivations. The novel rejects such obfuscation or abstraction. The world is evil. Initially, the novel offers two alternatives for life in an evil world: ignorance or despair. Jewish families living in 1941 Berlin greeted anti-Semitism’s insidious rise either by turning away and pretending the status quo was still operational or by conceding to the pull of surrender. Professor Lévi, immersed in his deep study of mathematics, does the former. Lea’s mother, on the other hand, does the latter after Nazis viciously kill her husband, a doctor, during a riot and she’s desperate to protect her daughter—desperate enough to seek the longshot hope of enlisting the rabbi to fashion her daughter a golem. The novel later offers a third strategy: tapping the radiant energy of love itself. 

“It may look human, but it has no soul. It is pure and elemental and it has a single goal, to protect […] All things yearn to be free, even a monster wants that for itself.”

According to Ettie, who is coaxing river mud and rainwater to life, a monster is a creature without a soul. Certainly, the golem they call forth qualifies as that. Fiercely loyal to Lea, she’s courageous and powerful.