The World That We Knew

In The World That We Knew, the fantastic regularly and unapologetically intrudes on a narrative otherwise grimly realistic. Angels hover above the streets of Nazi-occupied Paris and in the trees of the French countryside; a life-sized doll made of gloppy mud from the banks of the River Spree suddenly glows and comes to life; birdsong is a language, as a heron chats with Ava and even alerts characters of an impending Nazi raid; Azriel, the Old Testament Angel of Death, appears just before someone is to die; wolves in the wild are inexplicably docile, even gentle. The characters accept these fantastical elements without question. In traditional works of magical realism—a genre of experimental fiction that dates to the mid-20th century and found its most sophisticated expression in works of Latin American fabulists such as Gabriel García Márquez and American Nobelist Toni Morrison—straightforward, realistic narratives suddenly introduce elements of the supranatural, the fantastic, the magical. Unlike fantasy fiction, magical realism never abandons the real world; rather, these fabulous elements are matter-of-fact, without intrusive explanations or an exaggerated sense of wonder.

Thus, magical realism imbues the real-time world with the possibility of wonder and enchantment by blurring the boundary between the fantastic and the familiar. Since the Allies liberated the death camps, novelists have struggled with how to tell the story of the Holocaust, how to hold within the logic of plot an historic event that defied logic and challenged fiction’s ability to make sense of experience. Given the historical grounding of The World That We Knew and the novelist’s careful research into the era (to by the novel’s bibliography testifies), this novel opts to approach the Holocaust through the eyes of children. Thus, despite its sobering details of the killing fields in France and Germany, the novel conveys the fantastical feel of a fairy tale in which touches of the supernatural deconstruct the brutal and horrific real-time world into an environment of possibility. Without minimizing the Holocaust’s reality, the novel uses the license of magical realism to gift that terrifying world with the grace and magic of the impossibly possible. The novel uses magical realism to introduce elements that defy the normal definition of reality and, ironically, asks which is more unbelievable, which more defies explanation: a dancing heron or Hitler’s concentration camps; a golem becoming human or the steady crematoria fires at Auschwitz? In the end, however, the novel offers the energy of love as the greatest manifestation of magical realism.