Story for the Week
Corinne has always been fascinated by history. (Her mother…not so much.)
The only C I received in school was in World Civilizations my freshman year of college. I don’t say that to brag. I say it to make the point that I have never enjoyed learning history. I took the course because I had to take one history class, and I figured it would be best to get it out of the way early. I didn’t factor in what a difference it would make being away from home and adjusting to a whole new way of learning and living. And history was my least favorite subject. To be fair, I’m probably lucky I got the C.
If you want to beat me at Trivial Pursuit, choose History for my final category. There’s a better-than-average chance that I’ll blow it. I know my strengths. History is not one of them. Corinne, on the other hand, willingly enrolled in AP World History her sophomore year of high school. Not shockingly, she earned an A.
On her father’s side, Corinne learned the rich culture of the Caribbean. While we have yet to visit there, Dennis was born and raised in Trinidad, and his very large family lives all over the world. He introduced her to Carnival and calypso, roti and curry. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, and my parents grew up in Chicago. I introduced her to…well, basically, where I have lived my entire life.
Thankfully, we live in a city and a country that provides access to a myriad of museums, and Corinne loves visiting them. We are planning to visit the Pompeii exhibit at the Museum of Science & Industry downtown, which she has been wanting to see since it arrived. She insisted that we take in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum when we travelled to Washington, D.C. last March (Swapping One Washington for Another).
A number of years ago, Dennis had wanted to take yet another trip to Disneyworld (his favorite). When I suggested that we try to plan a vacation to somewhere we hadn’t been, he suggested Paris. I asked him why Paris, and he said he had Googled the best European destinations, and it was in the top 10. I told him to ask Corinne where she wanted to go. From the countries on the list, she actually chose Poland.
We are mostly Polish on my mother’s side, so anytime Dennis talked about my heritage, he highlighted Poland. It has always been something Corinne is aware of. When Corinne was about 10, her friend Aly, who was about 13 at the time, asked to watch Schindler’s List. Corinne wanted to watch it as well, but I told her she was too young and suggested she could watch it when she was Aly’s age. Three years later, she hadn’t forgotten, and we watched it. We also watched Sophie’s Choice, a fictional story tied to the Holocaust, and a tragic and moving story.
As she learned more about the Holocaust, it made it much more powerful for her knowing our ancestors are from Poland. I don’t know anyone in Poland. I don’t know when my family came to the States from Poland, but Corinne feels a strong enough tie to it because history in general fascinates her and her personal history includes Poland.
Before he died, Dennis made me promise that I would take her to Poland. She has a friend who goes to visit family there every summer and tells her how amazing it is. We know there’s a lot of history to explore there, and she wants to see Auschwitz. She said she knows it’s sad and horrible things happened there, but she wants to go.
It’s on our bucket list.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐
X Stars for The Porcelain Maker by Sarah Freethy
374 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: November 7, 2023
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press.
Publisher’s Description
Two lovers caught at the crossroads of history.
A daughter’s search for the truth.
Germany, 1929. At a festive gathering of young bohemians in Weimar, two young artists, Max, a skilled Jewish architect, and Bettina, a celebrated avant-garde painter, are drawn to each other and begin a whirlwind romance. Their respective talents transport them to the dazzling lights of Berlin, but this bright beginning is quickly dimmed by the rising threat of Nazism. Max is arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau where only his talent at making exquisite porcelain figures stands between him and seemingly certain death. Desperate to save her lover, Bettina risks everything to rescue him and escape Germany.
America, 1993. Clara, Bettina’s daughter, embarks on a journey to trace her roots and determine the identity of her father, a secret her mother has kept from her for reasons she’s never understood. Clara’s quest to piece together the puzzle of her origins transports us back in time to the darkness of Nazi Germany, where life is lived on a razor’s edge and deception and death lurk around every corner. Survival depends on strength, loyalty, and knowing true friend from hidden foe. And as Clara digs further, she begins to question why her mother was so determined to leave the truth of her harrowing past behind….
************
Main Characters:
- Clara – mid-40s, of German descent but lives in England, on a mission to discover who her father is since her mother’s death three years prior
- Lotte – Clara’s daughter, recently moved in with her mother to her grandmother’s flat, working on a statement of intent for her degree about her grandmother’s artwork
- Max – left his native Austria at 19, an architect and talented sculptor who met Bettina at a party in the late 1920s; they moved together to Berlin in the early 1930s to study at the Bauhaus
- Bettina – a painter whose work tended more toward expressionism, which did not meet the approval of her family
- Holger – oversaw the porcelain factory where Max worked
- Ezra – worked with Max in the porcelain factory
Sarah Freethy’s debut novel transports the reader from an auction in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1993 to early 20th-century Germany as the Nazis came to power. When the story begins, we find Clara as the sole bidder on World War II era porcelain figurines. She asks the auctioneer for the name of the person who sold the pieces. When the auctioneer hesitates, she reveals that she hopes to find the identity of her father, and the auctioneer gives her Ezra’s name and address.
When she visits the assisted living facility where Ezra lives, she is told that he had recently passed away with no known family. Somehow, she is allowed into his room where she discovers a photo of Ezra with her mother and two other men—Holger and Max—and realizes that Ezra and Max had actually been in a concentration camp during the war.
Interspersed with the chapters of Clara trying to find her father’s identity, which early on she believes is Ezra, are the chapters that tell Max and Bettina’s story.
The book delves into an obviously difficult history based in Nazi Germany during a time when Max and Bettina would be forbidden to be together. Max’s artistic abilities along with his friendship with Holger, who has his own secrets, save him from the worst experiences of the labor camps. Nevertheless, he and Bettina clearly didn’t escape Germany together since Bettina died in England around 1990, divorced from the father Clara knew as a child, without ever having mentioned Max, Holger, or Ezra.
The vast majority of the book covers the love story between Max and Bettina and how the porcelain figurines came to be. I suspected early on, as we are expected to, that Clara is Max’s daughter. For some reason, Clara is more confident that Ezra is her father and that she might be one of his daughters renamed.
While I appreciated Max and Bettina’s story, it moved extremely slowly. I am not typically a reader of historical fiction. What drew me to this story was the expectation that it was equally about Clara’s search to discover her father. For the most part, the chapters alternated, but Clara’s chapters were 4-5 pages whereas Max and Bettina’s chapters were 20-30 pages at a time. It really dragged things down for me. And the father “reveal” to Clara felt so matter-of-fact and anticlimactic.
This is a tragic and sad story. The author did her research here, that is clear. If you enjoy historical fiction, this might be for you. It is a solid debut.
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