Mischling (Konar)

Mischling 
Affinity Konar, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316308106


Summary
One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year" (Anthony Doerr) about twin sisters fighting to survive the evils of World War II.

Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past.

Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad.

It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood.

As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain.

That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive.

When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks—a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin—travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo.

As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it.

A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, Mischling defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1978
• Where—raised in California
• Education—B.A., San Francisco State University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Affinity Konar was raised in California. She studied fiction at San Francisco State University and received her M.F.A. at Columbia University.

While writing her 2016 novel, Mischling, she worked as a tutor, proofreader, technical writer, and editor of children's educational workbooks. Her first book, The Illustrated Version of Things, was published in 2009

Konar is of Polish-Jewish descent and currently lives in Los Angeles, California. (Adapted from the publisher.)

Book Reviews
…Ms. Konar makes the emotional lives of her two spirited narrators piercingly real, as they recount, in alternating chapters, the harrowing story of their efforts to survive…What is most haunting about the novel is Ms. Konar's ability to depict the hell that was Auschwitz, while at the same time capturing the resilience of many prisoners, their ability to hang on to hope and kindness in the face of the most awful suffering—to remain, in [Elie] Wiesel's words, humane "in an inhumane universe."
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


There is a reason Mengele’s experiments are rarely discussed. Even in the context of the Holocaust, they are almost unspeakably horrible. Konar’s novel takes an unorthodox, though not unprecedented, approach to these horrors: She describes them beautifully, lyrically, in the language of a fable. Mischling is not for everyone, not least because it is excruciating to read about such pain. I do not remember the last time I shed so many tears over a work of fiction. And it will surely offend those who still chafe at the idea of fictionalizing the Holocaust. But readers who allow themselves to fall under the spell of Konar’s exceptionally sensitive writing may well find the book unforgettable.
Ruth Fanklin - New York Times Book Review


In alternating chapters, the girls chronicle their diametrically opposed mechanisms for coping with the horrors they experience.... Konar unveils Mengele’s atrocities gradually and only in glimpses.... It gets much worse before it gets better.... The novel’s second half takes place after the camp’s liberation. Konar constructs a sinuous plot from the chaos of the postwar landscape. The faster pace frees her from the burden of having the children quite so lyrically narrate their own suffering....  Readers will have varying levels of credulity about 12-year-olds, even precocious ones, forming such perceptions while being starved and tortured.
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post


Konar does not dwell on the horrors, but she does not stint on them either.... But the gruesome plot detail leads to the biggest narrative chance Konar takes: to continue the twins’s story after the liberation of Auschwitz. She follows each to a semi-happy ending in Poland.... That Stasha can express that possibility feels hopeful and extraordinary.... I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to read a happy ending...when, in the balance of history, so many were slaughtered.
Rachel Shtier - Boston Globe


Horrible and beautiful.... It seems a refutation of Theodor Adorno's famous pronouncement that: "After Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric." Konar's novel is filled with exquisitely crafted phrases.... Nevertheless, the aesthetic achievement of Mischling cannot redeem the world after Auschwitz. It merely illuminates it, woefully, brilliantly.
Steven G. Kellman - USA Today


(Stared review.) Without sentimentality, Konar’s gripping novel explores the world of the children who were the subjects of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele’s horrifying experiments at Auschwitz.... Konar makes every sentence count; it’s to her credit that the girls never come across as simply victims.... This is a brutally beautiful novel.
Publishers Weekly


(Stared review.) Titled after the pejorative Nazi German word for "mixed blood,"...this searing work deepens our understanding of the Holocaust. It is highly recommended for that reason and for its stunningly original approach to a subject that would be too awful to read about if rendered in straightforward prose.  —Edward B. Cone, New York
Library Journal


(Stared review.) Fiction of rare poignancy—and astonishing hope.... An unforgettable sojourn of the spirit.
Booklist


Konar is clearly most interested in language, in metaphor and invention. Surely, there are readers who will appreciate this. Some, though, might find that the poetry puts too much distance between the reader and the reality of Auschwitz. Konar approaches a difficult subject with artistic ambition.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to start a discussion of Mischling...then take off on your own :

1. How did you experience this novel? Was it overly gruesome, or did you find rays of hope by the end?

2. Mischling has generated a fair amount of comment by reviewers who have difficulty accepting Affinity Konar's beautiful prose. There is a sense that her poetic writing masks, even separates readers from facing, the horror of Mengele's Zoo. A couple of reviewers mention a famous pronouncement by German philosopher Theodor Adorno in 1949: "after Auschwitz, to write poetry is barbaric." What do you think? Is it immoral to write so poetically about such barbarous actions? Or is Konar's writing a way for us to bear witness to events that are otherwise too terrible to describe and read about?

3. Talk, if you can bear to, about Mengele. How do you come to grips with his monstrosity? How does Mengele eventually die?

4. What about Stasha and Pearl? How do they support one another? How are they alike (aside from appearance) and how do they differ? Consider, especially, their diametrically opposed coping mechanisms.

5. In the twins' narrations, were you able to discern whether they were recounting dreams or suffering hallucinations as a result of Mengele's injections?

6. The children in the Zoo are asked to call Mengele "Uncle Doctor." How does Stasha, in particular, perceive his occasional kindness and at other times his acts of viciousness?

7. What about Dr. Miri and the role she plays? As a Jew, she is wracked by guilt over the surgery she performs in Mengele's Zoo. What is her choice—does she have any? Is it possible to justify her participation in the horrors of Auschwitz?

8. What else do readers learn about the larger world of Auschwitz, which the children hear through gossip?

9. Before handing over her two girls, Pearl and Stash's Mama tells Mengele that Stasha has an imagination. What role does imagination play as a survival tool? By the novel's end, Stasha says emphatically: "I wanted the death of my imagination more than anything. It had no place in this world after war." Is she right? Could her imagination ever offer solace again?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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