The Woman with the Blue Star, Pam Jenoff [highly recommended books txt] 📗

the sewer isn’t who we are, just a tiny piece of our rich, full lives. “There are other places,” she adds. “The places Papa and I used to walk and play, and a memorial in the ghetto.” Tiny pieces, I mused, that would at last complete the puzzle of our family history.

“Did you ever have children?”

“No, I never married. I never had a family of my own—at least not until now.” She squeezes my hand. “I’m all alone.” She smiles brightly, but there is a catch in her voice that tells me she minds more than she would like to admit.

“Not anymore.” Her fingers lock with mine, skin withered, but grasp firm and strong.

I notice then a necklace tucked within her collar. “What’s that?”

Sadie pulls out the chain around her neck to reveal a small gold charm with the Hebrew letters making up the word chai. Sadie has chosen to live her days under Ella’s name, yet she has not completely denied our family’s Jewish faith. “This belonged to our father. Ella hid it for me during the war and I was able to get it back from her at the end.” She reaches behind her neck and undoes the clasp, then passes it to me. “You should have this now.”

“That isn’t necessary,” I protest. “It’s yours.” But it is the only memento of my family I have and I am secretly glad when she closes my fingers around it.

“Ours,” she corrects. “Come. There’s so much to see. We’ll start now, even though it’s late.”

For a second, I am overwhelmed. “I’m supposed to be leaving tomorrow.” Even as I say this, I know I won’t be going so soon after I found my sister. Rebuilding our family history together is not the project of a single day, but a road we will build over time, stone by stone, now while we still can. “I’ll have to see about extending my hotel.”

“Stay with me,” Sadie urges. “We’ll have more time to catch up that way. I have a lovely apartment in the Jewish Quarter.”

“Can you see the stars from there?” I ask. Astronomy has always for some reason been a passion of mine.

“All of them.” She smiles. “Come, let me show you.”

Author’s Note

This book was inspired in part by the true story of a small group of Jews who survived World War II in the sewers of Lviv, Poland. The account that I have written and set in Kraków is wholly fictitious. I have nevertheless endeavored to remain true to the heroism of these brave people and those who helped them and to accurately depict the ways in which it was possible for them to survive. If you would like to read more about the true story, I recommend the nonfiction book In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall.

Acknowledgments

Like the year 2020, this book seemed, in many ways, doomed from the start.

The saga began in December 2019 when (keeping it real here) I turned in a book to my editor that was not at all right. We agreed that I needed to essentially start over, something that I had never done before. After a five-minute moan, I reminded myself of that quote from The Godfather Part II, “This is the business we’ve chosen,” and set about the task before me. I scrapped 90 percent of the book and began to rewrite at breakneck speed with the unfathomable goal of finishing in about five months. To get this done, my Five A.M. Writers’ Club suddenly became Four A.M.

In the course of the revision, I decided to move the book’s setting to Kraków, Poland, and I planned a research trip there. (When I was younger, I had lived in Kraków for several years. However, due to family constraints, I had not been there in nearly twenty years.) I booked that trip to depart on March 11, 2020—the very week the COVID-19 pandemic erupted and international travel was largely suspended. The cancellation turned out to be a good thing, because the day I was supposed to fly to Poland, I instead found myself hospitalized for an emergency appendectomy! I returned home from the hospital to find the world shut down and the COVID quarantine in full effect. Like so many of you, I had to adapt to a new normal: homeschooling three kids and teaching remotely, all the while finishing this book.

Despite all of this, The Woman with the Blue Star came to life. I did not set out to write a book that was relevant to the pandemic. (How could I have possibly known?) Yet I found in the process of writing this book that themes emerged of coping with isolation and an uncertain future, which were more relevant to our current world situation than I ever could have imagined.

As I sit here writing this to you in late August 2020, we are still under lockdown, with so many of the things we took for granted still gone. Though writing is solitary, I am a person who thrives on community. I miss our elementary school and the moms on the playground, my colleagues and students at Rutgers Law, the synagogue and the Jewish Community Center and the five libraries I patronize each week. I want to walk into my local independent bookstore and hug readers again.

Yet even with all of the hardships we’ve all experienced, so many bright lights endure like the stars in the night sky Sadie dreamed of seeing from her confinement in the sewer. Our community of readers and writers still flourishes. Despite the months apart from readers and book friends, I still feel you out there and I am grateful for the ways in which books have been a lifeline and how the writing community continues to support one another, the librarians and independent bookstores and booksellers who keep finding ways to get books into our hands, the bloggers and book influencers and sites who have recognized that writers and readers need to