By Pam Jenoff L’01
Park Row Books, 336 pages, $28.99
A novelistic exploration of the Nazi store in Paris where Jewish prisoners were forced to sell stolen possessions.
By Julia M. Klein
As a US State Department diplomat in Poland, Pam Jenoff focused on Holocaust-related issues, a remit that has influenced much of her fiction. In an author’s note at the end of her latest novel, Last Twilight in Paris, Jenoff says that she always looks for “a piece of history that is so untold that it makes me gasp.”
In this case, she found it in the story of Lévitan, a Parisian furniture store that the Nazis converted into a work camp for Jewish women. The women sorted merchandise plundered from Jews and sold it to Nazi officers. A site of hunger, grief, anxiety, and forced labor, Lévitan also functioned as a refuge from even worse dangers—a place where prisoners, if they were lucky, could survive.
Cleverly constructed, swift-moving, and often poignant, Last Twilight in Paris tells the story of two women leading parallel lives that eventually converge.In form and content, it leans heavily on the metaphor of a puzzle. At the center of the tale is a heart-shaped necklace, a lover’s keepsake designed to split in two. The plot also features an actual jigsaw puzzle, intersecting mysteries, and a narrative that deftly interweaves multiple time frames and characters.
A third-person prologue, set in 1943, introduces readers to Helaine, a Jewish woman arrested in Paris by the Nazis and on her way to some fearsome destiny. The tale then jumps forward to 1953, to the first-person narration of Louise, a woman trapped in a troubled marriage in the stiflingly small English town of Henley-on-Thames in a house with “cracks at the foundation.” It then backtracks again, to Helaine’s difficult childhood.
After she recovers from a near-fatal bout of influenza, Helaine’s overprotective parents, fearing for her health, essentially imprison her at home. (Confinement is one of the novel’s recurrent motifs.) Helaine escapes via her imagination, by reading and writing stories.
Eventually, at her insistence, her mother allows her to take walks. On one such excursion, she meets a (non-Jewish) musician, Gabriel, and, over time, falls in love. Against her shocked parents’ wishes, she marries him, creating a painful familial estrangement. When Gabriel departs, under duress, to play his cello in Germany, she is left alone amid the Nazi occupation and mounting anti-Jewish restrictions.
Meanwhile, in England, Louise’s boyfriend Joe splits up with her when he goes off to war, hoping to spare her grief. The break-up leaves her, too, sad and alone, but also free. She volunteers for the International Red Cross, becomes enamored of her supervisor, Ian, and befriends an actress, Franny. While Ian and Louise distribute care packages at German POW camps behind enemy lines, Franny (a character inspired by Édith Piaf)sings for the prisoners and their captors. At one point, tragedy strikes. Franny, who has been aiding the resistance, dies in what Ian insists is a hit-and-run accident.
Years later, Louise is still haunted by her friend’s death, as well asher attraction to Ian. These unresolved emotions imperil the postwarlife she has built with her two children and now-husband Joe, who returned to her when the fighting ended. Despite their love, the war “lies silent and unspoken between us, a dark divide,” Louise thinks. Both husband and wife, it seems, are nursing lingering trauma.
The narrative’s inciting incident is Louise’s discovery, in the thrift shop where she works part-time, of a gold link necklace with “a charm shaped like a heart with a jagged edge, as though half is missing.” It is familiar to her; she believes she has seen it before, during the war. The only other clue she has is the name etched on the crate where she finds it: Lévitan. Louise decides to return to France to learn more, and Ian (rather improbably) joins her for the caper.
Jenoff, who teaches law at Rutgers University, is not an elegant or inventive stylist. Her skill is in constructing suspenseful, propulsive narratives against the backdrop of history. And the history she plumbs here is as compelling as it is little-known. Lévitan, a department store of stolen goods, emerges as a distinctive prison, a not-quite-gilded cage within the larger prison of occupied Paris. There Helaine and other women try to stay busy, healthy, and as inconspicuous as possible to avoid deportation to someplace worse.
The novel’s mysteries are straightforward: Will Helaine find her way to freedom? Will Louise unearth the secrets she seeks? At what cost? What will become of their families, friends, and the men they love? And, finally, can a Holocaust story have a happy ending? The answers Jenoff ultimately provides aren’t terribly surprising. But readers will likely enjoy piecing together her narrative puzzles along the way.
Julia M. Klein is a frequent contributor to the Gazette.
