The World That We Knew

A Jewish child coming of age in Nazi Germany, immersed in a menacing world of unprecedented evil and hate, Lea Kohn is a study in survival. In a story that freely introduces elements of the magical and supernatural, Lea’s graceful survival is a miracle without magic, a spectacle without the intrusion of the paranormal. Lea survives because she’s capable—despite, not because of, the world—of embracing a kind of humane and compassionate love uncomplicated by irony. Lea’s is no fairy tale. Although she falls deeply and absolutely in love, hers is no romance.

As a child, even as the Nazi begin their insidious rise to power, Lea listens as her grandmother tells harrowing stories from the Old Country, parables of wolves in snowy forests forever thwarting hunters with rifles on horseback, finding a way to survive. Lea, at the tender age of 12, understands that world. Indeed, in the opening pages a Nazi soldier nearly rapes her in a back alley only a few blocks from her home. “Demons were on the streets. They wore brown uniforms, they took whatever they wanted, they were cold-blooded, even though they looked like young men” (7).

Lea comes to embody the spirit of the wolf, the principal of survival, specifically an exemplum of how the heart, fragile and vulnerable, finds its way to a sustaining tenderness and love that withstands, even thrives, amid the world’s formidable evils.