Publishers Weekly
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.)
Steven J. Ross
"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."
Susanna Moore
"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."
Kirkus Reviews
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.
