Poignant glimpses of life during wartime
The Year Is ’42, By Nell Bielski. Translated from the French by John Berger and Lisa Appignanesi, Pantheon, 224 pp., $18.95
Karl Bazinger is a German officer stationed in occupied Paris. A veteran of World War I, he belongs to that generation of Germans who consider themselves part of a more civilized past, who are uncomfortable with Hitler's roughnecks and their new police state. But as a soldier, Karl also takes pride in the Wehrmacht's recent successes. Moreover, life in Paris is very pleasant. He attends some of the same dinner parties as Coco Chanel and Jean Cocteau. He and his young French lover, Madeleine, are working their way through the Kama Sutra. It's all too easy for him to enjoy the present and deny the increasing insanity of what's happening around him.
Then one day his commander gives him a discreet warning: He may be attracting the attention of the Gestapo. He was overheard at a party describing the invasion of Russia as ''a fatal folly" to his French hosts and fellow guests. And the fact that he readily speaks fluent English raises eyebrows as well. Then Karl's old friend Hans Bielenberg arrives in Paris, and none of the reasons he gives for being in the city, or for his errands while there, stand up to scrutiny. Rapidly the uglier realities of life in Nazi Europe catch up with Karl.
On the other side of Europe, Ekaterina Zvedsny returns to her hometown of Kiev to practice medicine and care for her mentally ill father. She lived in Moscow until her husband, a distinguished medical researcher, was named an enemy of the people and sent to a Siberian labor camp. Her closest friends are her Jewish neighbors, the Wassermans, and their granddaughter Agathe. One day Ekaterina learns that all the Jews in Kiev have been asked to report to one location for a ''census."
These two characters, Karl in Paris and Ekaterina in Kiev, stand like the end pieces of a series of painted panels. ''The Year Is '42" is less a continuous story than a series of interlocked vignettes, poignant glimpses of individual lives in Nazi-occupied Europe.
The abrupt shifts of viewpoint may initially confuse readers accustomed to more conventionally structured narratives: We move without warning from the muddled misgivings of Karl to the sharp-eyed fear of Hans, from the childhood memories of Agathe to the adult resignation of Ekaterina. But these shifts are a brilliantly simple stylistic representation of human isolation, the way we exist side by side but contained in our own consciousnesses, until chance creates a connection between us. As one of Ekaterina's fellow medical students says to her in a discussion of neurology: ''A nerve cell is unique. . . . The neurons sit there side by side, but they're not as in all other cells, continuous. There's a space between them . . . called a synapse. Across it there's transmission of energy."
The crossing of synapses, when one person tries to unravel the mystery of another, is the redemptive core of this book. A Jewish orphan bonds with an insane musician; a soldier on leave sees his 7-year-old son for the first time in more than a year; a teacher and a student fall in love. Such moments are not only sanity's best defense against the pervasive rot of Nazism; they're the best moments of any life, wherever or whenever it's lived.
And through these characters, and the ways in which they do and don't understand one another, author Nell Bielski vividly re-creates the multiple atmospheres of wartime Europe. The relations of émigré Russians, occupying Germans, and defeated Parisians are a complicated emotional and psychological dance, in which genuine regard and affection among individuals coexists with a fundamental distrust. Even the most respectable Germans find their lives slowly poisoned by suspicion and fear of each other under the Nazi regime. And Russians learn to survive one horror after another as Stalinist denunciations and purges separate family members forever and the Nazi occupation brings pillage and murder on an unimagined scale.
But just as the narrative slides from one character's point of view to another in a montage of coexisting consciousnesses, so the quiddity of individual life continues amidst historical catastrophe. The novel's epigraph begins, ''Rommel is stalling before Tobruk. The Japanese have taken Singapore." But what really matters to us is the friendship between the Jewish orphan and the mad musician, or Karl fondly recalling the first time he read Kant. That's the brilliance of this book. Bielski never forgets that history matters because it happens to people as unimportant and odd as we are.
