The Plum Trees: A Novel

by Victoria Shorr

Overview

A poignant tale about one woman’s quest to recover her family’s history, and a story of loss and survival during the Holocaust.

Consie is home for a funeral when she stumbles upon a family letter sent from Germany in 1945, which contains staggering news: Consie’s great-uncle Hermann, who was transported to Auschwitz with his wife and three daughters, might have escaped. This seems improbable to Consie. Did people escape from Auschwitz? Could her great-uncle have been among them? What happened to Hermann? Did anyone know? These questions are at the root of Consie’s excavation of her family’s history as she seeks, seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, to discover what happened to Hermann.

The Plum Trees follows Consie as she draws on oral testimonies, historical records, and more to construct a visceral account of the lives of Hermann, his wife, and their daughters from the happy days in prewar Czechoslovakia through their internment in Auschwitz and the end of World War II. The Plum Trees is a powerful, intimate reckoning with the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393540857
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/09/2021
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	627,612
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Victoria Shorr is a writer and political activist. She is the author of three works of fiction, including the acclaimed historical novel The Plum Trees. She lives in New York and Santa Barbara, California.

Editorial Reviews

01/25/2021

Shorr’s immersive latest (after Midnight) delves into the fate of a Czech Jewish family sent to Auschwitz during WWII. Consie, a struggling writer raised in America with European Jewish roots, discovers a letter written by her late uncle, who was a soldier in Germany just after WWII. In it, she learns that her grandfather’s brother, Hermann, might have escaped from Auschwitz, prompting Consie to research Hermann’s fate. Through various historical sources, including an oral history made by Hermann’s late daughter, Magda, Consie absorbs accounts of the brutal treatment of the Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe and later at the death camps. Shorr draws from real-life accounts for gruesome details of the latter, in which babies were burnt alive, young girls with “beautiful skin” were turned into gloves, and survival “was less a matter of heroic triumph than of simple chance.” After Consie remembers a story Magda had told her about Hermann, she imagines a continuation of his life, as the elusive search for Hermann’s story teaches her to embrace the Holocaust victims “all as heroes.” This moving account makes clear the need to remember the horrors of war. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Victoria Shorr’s poignant novel, The Plum Trees, is less fiction than a reckoning with the past. Shorr tells a story of the evils that confronted millions of wartime Jews through the prism of one family’s desperate attempt to survive and the narrator’s equally desperate effort to find them decades later."

Steven J. Ross

"In Victoria Shorr’s searing novel, horror encompasses the characters in ways unknown to others less afflicted as they struggle to understand all that has been sacrificed and lost, at last finding solace in their uncompromising refusal to allow the crimes of the past to diminish and defeat them."

Susanna Moore

2021-01-14
A woman retraces her great-uncle’s steps through Auschwitz.

Grieving and disoriented at her uncle’s funeral, Consie is handed a letter that seems to indicate something surprising: Another uncle—the uncle’s uncle, in fact—might have escaped Auschwitz. Though his three daughters survived the camp, they’d long presumed both their parents dead. Consie is shocked to hear that Hermann might have staged an escape. In what seems to be the present day, she begins tracking down information—mainly oral testimonies from other Auschwitz survivors—that might indicate what happened to Hermann. One of these, a recording made by Hermann’s oldest daughter, Magda, makes up the crux of Shorr’s very fine novel. It’s a story within a story, and it’s so vividly and urgently written that, reading it, it’s easy to forget about Consie and her search entirely. But when Magda’s story ends, Consie’s continues. Shorr’s prose is powerful but never overblown, and while the details she includes about the suffering endured at Auschwitz might not be entirely new to most readers, the novel as a whole is still deeply moving. There’s also a subtle and very smart commentary running through the book about not only how history is recorded, but how it is then experienced and sometimes resisted. Consie notes how different her reaction to the oral testimonies was compared to her experience reading Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.When the book became “so disturbing as to be unbearable, she could still slam it shut and put it back on the shelf.” She could do no such thing with the stories she hears. As for Shorr’s book, you’ll have trouble putting it down at all, much less slamming it shut.

Written with urgency, elegance, and grace, Shorr’s novel is a deeply moving account of a family’s suffering.

Kirkus Reviews