The World That We Knew (Hoffman)

The World That We Knew 
Alice Hoffman, 2019
Simon & Schuster
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501137570


Summary
This stirring tale takes place in 1941, during humanity’s darkest hour, and follows three unforgettable young women who must act with courage and love to survive.

In Berlin, at the time when the world changed, Hanni Kohn knows she must send her twelve-year-old daughter away to save her from the Nazi regime.

She finds her way to a renowned rabbi, but it’s his daughter, Ettie, who offers hope of salvation when she creates a mystical Jewish creature, a rare and unusual golem, who is sworn to protect Lea.

Once Ava is brought to life, she and Lea and Ettie become eternally entwined, their paths fated to cross, their fortunes linked.

Lea and Ava travel from Paris, where Lea meets her soulmate, to a convent in western France known for its silver roses; from a school in a mountaintop village where three thousand Jews were saved. Meanwhile, Ettie is in hiding, waiting to become the fighter she’s destined to be.

What does it mean to lose your mother? How much can one person sacrifice for love?

In a world where evil can be found at every turn, we meet remarkable characters that take us on a stunning journey of loss and resistance, the fantastical and the mortal, in a place where all roads lead past the Angel of Death and love is never ending. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Adelphi University; M.A., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


Alice Hoffman was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. After graduating from high school in 1969, she attended Adelphi University, from which she received a BA, and then received a Mirrellees Fellowship to the Stanford University Creative Writing Center, which she attended in 1973 and 74, receiving an MA in creative writing. She currently lives in Boston ,Massachusetts.

Beginnings
Hoffman’s first novel, Property Of, was written at the age of twenty-one, while she was studying at Stanford, and published shortly thereafter by Farrar Straus and Giroux. She credits her mentor, professor and writer Albert J. Guerard, and his wife, the writer Maclin Bocock Guerard, for helping her to publish her first short story in the magazine Fiction. Editor Ted Solotaroff then contacted her to ask if she had a novel, at which point she quickly began to write what was to become Property Of, a section of which was published in Mr. Solotaroff’s magazine, American Review.

Since that remarkable beginning, Alice Hoffman has become one of our most distinguished novelists. She has published a total of twenty-three novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults.

Highlights
♦ Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights.

♦ Practical Magic was made into a Warner film starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.

♦ Her novel, At Risk, which concerns a family dealing with AIDS, can be found on the reading lists of many universities, colleges and secondary schools.

♦ Hoffman’s advance from Local Girls, a collection of inter-related fictions about love and loss on Long Island, was donated to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA.

♦ Blackbird House is a book of stories centering around an old farm on Cape Cod.

♦ Hoffman’s recent books include Aquamarine and Indigo, novels for pre-teens, and the New York Times bestsellers The River King, Blue Diary, The Probable Future, and The Ice Queen.

♦ Green Angel, a post-apocalyptic fairy tale about loss and love, was published by Scholastic and The Foretelling, a book about an Amazon girl in the Bronze Age, was published by Little Brown. In 2007 Little Brown published the teen novel Incantation, a story about hidden Jews during the Spanish Inquisition, which Publishers Weekly has chosen as one of the best books of the year.

♦ More recent novels include The Third Angel, The Story Sisters, the teen novel, Green Witch, a sequel to her popular post-apocalyptic fairy tale, Green Angel.

♦ The Red Garden, published in 2011, is a collection of linked fictions about a small town in Massachusetts where a garden holds the secrets of many lives.

Recognition
Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by the New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People magazine. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and other magazines.

She has also worked as a screenwriter and is the author of the original screenplay "Independence Day," a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel Aquamarine was made into a film starring Emma Roberts.

In 2011 Alice published The Dovekeepers, which Toni Morrison calls "... a major contribution to twenty-first century literature" for the past five years. The story of the survivors of Masada is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece. The New York Times bestselling novel is slated for 2015 miniseries, produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett, starring Cote de Pablo of NCIS fame.

Most recent
The Museum of Extraordinary Things was released in 2014 and was an immediate bestseller, the New York Times Book Review noting, "A lavish tale about strange yet sympathetic people, haunted by the past and living in bizarre circumstances… Imaginative…"

Nightbird, a Middle Reader, was released in March of 2015. In August of 2015, The Marriage Opposites, Alice’s latest novel, was an immediate New York Times bestseller. "Hoffman is the prolific Boston-based magical realist, whose stories fittingly play to the notion that love—both romantic and platonic—represents a mystical meeting of perfectly paired souls," said Vogue magazine. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
[A] hymn to the power of resistance, perseverance and enduring love in dark times…. [G]ravely beautiful…. Hoffman the storyteller continues to dazzle.
New York Times


[A] bittersweet parable about the costs of survival and the behaviors that define humanity. [Hoffman] makes the reader care… about the fates of all of the characters. [She] offers a sober appraisal of the Holocaust and the tragedies and triumphs of those who endured its atrocities.
Publishers Weekly


One of America’s most brilliant novelists…. Hoffman uses her signature element of magical realism to tackle an intolerably painful chapter in history. Readers know going in that their hearts will be broken, but they will be unable to let go until the last page. —Beth Andersen, formerly with Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal


An exceptionally voiced tale of deepest love and loss...one of [Hoffman’s] finest. WWII fiction has glutted the market, but Hoffman’s unique brand of magical realism and the beautiful, tender yet devastating way she explores her subject make this a standout.
Booklist


Hoffman employs her signature lyricism to express the agony of the Holocaust with a depth seldom equaled in more seemingly realistic accounts.…Ava the golem is the heart of the book.… A spellbinding portrait of what it means to be human in an inhuman world.
Kirkus Reviews


[A] breathtaking, deeply emotional odyssey through the shadows of a dimming world while never failing to convince us that there is light somewhere at the end of it all. This book feels destined to become a high point in an already stellar career.
BookPage

Discussion Questions
1. This novel is both historical fiction and magical realism. How does Alice Hoffman achieve her unique writing style? What details does she use from each genre? What do each add to the emotional content of the story?

2. After reading the novel, re-examine the title. Consider who "we" refers to in relation to the story and to your own life.

3. How do you feel about Ava’s relationship with the heron? Has an animal ever affected your spiritual life? Are emotions bound to human experience?

4. In one of the darkest periods of human history, why do the characters still yearn to live even as the world is falling apart? What makes life precious? Is it love, family, memory, hope?

5. In fairy tales, beasts are often humane, and humans are often cruel. In The World That We Knew the same is true. Discuss this theme in the novel and in your favorite fairy tales.

6. Julien and Victor Lévi are brothers with very different paths. How does each handle their wartime experience? What do they share despite their differences, and what aspects of their past influences them most?

7. Marianne initially leaves her father’s farm “to find something that belonged to her and her alone” (99), which leads her to Paris. Despite ending up where she began, do you think she has achieved this goal? Why or why not? Did her love story surprise you? What do you think the future holds for her?

8. We learn halfway through the book that Hanni instructed her daughter to destroy Ava once Lea is brought to safety. Why do you think Lea defies her mother? Do you think she made the right decision? What may have changed her mind?

9. The book begins with Hanni making a great sacrifice to save her daughter and ends with Ava doing the same. What do these women share? Is it possible to love someone else’s children as if they were your own?

10. Ava is a golem, a mysterious creature of Jewish legend, controlled by her maker and created to do another’s bidding, but something changes. She longs for free will. Do you think she finds it?

11. Ettie yearns to be a scholar and a rabbi, but because she’s female these goals are unavailable to her. How does she create her own fate, and what leads her to rebel against the constraints of gender and history? Does war create opportunities for women to act outside of conventional roles?

12. Lea’s mother’s voice is heard throughout the novel in the italicized sections. The loss of a mother and the loss of a child is central to the story. How are the long-lasting effects of loss woven through the novel?

13. Can Ava posses a soul due to her ability to love? How does love change a world of hate, and how does it affect the characters in the novel?
(Questions by the pubishers.)

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