A captivating story about breaking and healing and unending love. The magical way Hoffman writes engulfs you so completely it's as if all the fairy tales in the world are real. In this book she writes in a way that contrasts in the most gorgeous way to the horrific time of World War II, putting the harshness of war up against the motivation for love. I didn't connect as closely with the characters as I hoped I would but by the end I truly felt this one was meant to be driven by the magic the symbolism and the love and loss faced. Lea and Ava are bound together for life after Lea's mother has Ettie create Ava, a golem to forever protect her. Their lives are intersecting and evolving in the best way through hardship and an inspiring need to survive. The story is constantly in motion as they fight to survive and resist the devastation and the heartbreak. I adored Lea finding love and Ava growing more human than golem as the story unfolds and the fight in Ettie to be on equal footing as her male counterparts as part of the resistance. It's a vivid story that will appeal to fans of fantasy and historical fiction alike.

Beautiful atmospheric story. I ended up listening to this on audio be reading the ARC and it made all the difference.

1941 and the Jews of Germany are living through dangerous times, many have already been arrested, sent to "death camps" and struggle for daily survival. In Berlin with a roundup of Jews only days away, a mother needs to save her daughter from the Nazis. In that effort to save her daughter, Hanni resorts to "mysticism" ...Jewish mysticism. Through the rabbi's daughter, a golem is created to protect her young daughter, Lea. This creation is a figure artificially constructed in the form of a human being and endowed with life and endowed with the power to protect Lea. There is much to learn here in the book even though it is fictional. There are questions, some with answers, some will have the answers deep within themselves. The humanity and inhumanity of people, the cruelty, the love of one another. This is more than a story of WWII, more than a story of mysticism, it is a story of human nature, a story of beliefs. No one could write a story like this except for Alice Hoffman...she is eloquent in the telling and in the telling their is knowledge, there is much to learn.

My thanks to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Hoffman once again excels at taking magical realism to new heights. With all the historical fiction written about WW2 this is the first one that I've read that incorporates a golem as one of its characters. More importantly this golem is perhaps the most likeable and relatable character of them all.

With this being the seventh read of her works, I judge this is as a quintessential Hoffman tale, with its blend of magical realism and historical events in an allegorical tale of the power of love and courageous sacrifices in the conflict of good versus evil. She is at the top of her form in engaging storytelling and character development, conjured up with lyrical prose with the power of an incantation. In this case her subject is coming of age by Jewish youth in the time of World War 2 and the Holocaust. Some mature to find love, which gives them purpose in their pursuit of survival, while others are inspired to fight with the Resistance or to help with saving and escape of Jewish families to Switzerland.

Lea is a Jewish girl of 12 in Berlin when her mother saves her from an attempted rape by a soldier, which move her to plan on sending her away to France.

"In stories, it is possible to tell who is human and who is not. But here, in their city, it was impossible to tell them apart. A demon could look like a man; a man could do unthinkable things."

She requests of her rabbi the creation of a golem to protect Lea from danger in her future, and when he refuses, his 18-year old daughter Ettie, based on her secret readings of his hidden texts from the Kaballah, successfully carries out the mystical process to instill life from clay. The golem, in the form of a woman they call Ava, is alive like an animal but has no soul. Ettie reflects on how the Talmud reveals that Adam himself was a golem until God gave him a soul. Her readings inform her about its powers (which all play out in the story that follows—enough said to avoid spoilers):

"It can use the language of birds and fish, tell time without a clock, and leap from a roof like a bat. It can see the future, commune with the dead, overcome demons. It can tell the day and hour of a person’s death. It can spea9k to angels and live among them. … It continues to grow stronger each day, so much so that it can become too dangerous to keep."

A bit of an outline of major content of this tale might usefully inform your choice to pursue this novel, but skip this paragraph if you see such revelations as a spoiler. Lea flees with Ava to Paris, where she is hidden in the home of a professor named Levi. There she experiences a budding love for their scholarly 14-year old son Julien. With the German invasion of France, Lea is sent away to a rural region of southeastern France under Vichy control near Lyon, where she hides as a gentile in a convent school. Meanwhile, the housekeeper of the Levi home, Marianne, returns to her family in a farming village in the same region, a community of Huguenots that is motivated to help Jews due to their long history of oppression (historically, it is believed they saved 3 to 5 thousand Jews). We experience her transformation into taking an active role in guiding Jewish refugees over the mountain to neutral Switzerland. She joins forces with the Levi’s other teenaged son, Victor, who takes up with local guerilla operations. Ettie also has fled to the region, and the trauma of losing a sister to Nazi brutalist has led her to dedicate herself to violent resistance in partnership with Victor.

There are many who say that the reality of the Final Solution needs only first-person accounts and historical analysis to convey its meaning, and that fictional accounts, especially those that are infused with romance and mystical elements, undermine or blur the truths of this genocide. I disagree. If you skipped the foregoing, I think it safe to read this summary by Lea, toward the end at age 16, which captures the allusive power of Hoffman’s prose and impact of including magical realism elements:

"I remember when my mother would do anything for me, when we discovered we were not hunters, but wolves, when the world was taken away from us, when we hid in an attic, when the roses bloomed with silver petals, when a bird danced like a man, when I saw Paris for the first time, when I saw your face in the hallway as you turned to me, when they believed we were worth nothing, when we were sent away on trains, when my father bought my freedom, when the souls of our brothers and sisters rose into the trees, when we ran through the woods, when I loved you above all others and you loved me in return."

For my part, I loved the portrayal of Ava the golem. As with Wecker’s marvelous “The Golem and the Jinni”, we are treated to a poignant moral struggle of the creature to become human and somehow gain a soul (also an arc in the fable of Pinocchio and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”). Here it feels as if Ava represents all of humankind in the face of this and other genocides that emerge within vision of the civilized world.

This book was provided by the publisher for review through the Netgalley program.

Fans of historical fiction and magical realism will love this unique story! It is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Set in the early 1940’s, a desperate time for many in Europe, a Jewish mother seeks salvation for her only daughter, even if it is unconventional. That’s where the mysticism comes into play - she creates a golem to protect her daughter as she escapes from Berlin. I gotta say it got really difficult for me at that point. I try to be open-minded and read all genres, but this was too much of a stretch for me. I will give it bonus points for originality and depth. This is a long, very detailed book. Kudos to Hoffman for tackling this beast.

I'm a huge Alice Hoffman fan. This one seemed a bit different than her other books, but I still couldn't put it down. Some of it was sad and heartbreaking, but I still liked it.

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Netgalley but all opinions provided are my own.

Alice Hoffman’s The World That We Knew is unforgettable. Set during the years 1941-1944 and featuring several different perspectives, The World answers the question of what we have to live for in a time of terrible loss and sorrow: love.

The book opens in Berlin, where Hanni’s husband has recently been murdered and her pre-teen daughter, Lea, attacked. As a Jewish woman, Hanni knows that her daughter will be safer somewhere else, but she also feels that she can’t leave her elderly mother behind to travel with her. In her desperation, Hanni pays someone to create a golem—made of clay, able to speak and to protect but bound by her master’s wishes—to travel with her daughter Lea. After the war, Lea must kill the golem, whom they’ve named Ava.

The juxtaposition of someone—Ava—being born into a world where so many are killed and dying is stunning. Devastating. Because Ava’s so very happy to be alive, even as horrific things are happening and even as she fears for her Jewish charge, Lea. Hoffman heartbreakingly complicates this, too; because Ava knows that her greatest responsibility, her obligation, her desire, as she comes to know Lea, is to keep Lea safe no matter what, an act which will eventually necessitate Ava’s own death.

Tangled in this story of Lea and Ava are other stories too: of Lea and Julien, a young man she meets in Paris who becomes a lodestar; Ettie, the golem’s creator; and Marianne, a former servant who worked in Julien’s home. Each story is beautifully told; each one tells a version of war where no one is unaffected, where everyone pays a great price but there is some redemption to be found, too.

The World that We Knew had my heart in its hands. It’s a big story—one that includes folklore and the concrete details of a people suffering and surviving, one that feels very much rooted within a particular time period and also part of a larger story about how humanity at its worst, and best, treats others. And it’s ultimately a celebration of love, of the sacrifice that love sometimes demands and the bravery that it can engender.

5 stars

I really enjoy Alice Hoffman generally and was excited to read this title. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t get into this one the way I normally do, It was well written, it just wasn’t for me. Thank you to NetGalley for the chance to review this title.

Thank you to NetGalley, Alice Hoffman and Simon & Schuster for this AMAZING ARC.

I'm a huge Alice Hoffman fan, so I was very excited to read this book. It. Is. Amazing. Like, Practical Magic movie amazing. Alice Hoffman artistically weaves the horrors of the Holocaust with magical realism that just makes for an amazing book. Loved everything about this, and will definitely be purchasing this for my 16 year old daughter and 18 year old niece.

Thank you NetGalley and Publishers for granting me early access to "The World That We Knew".

This book did top my favorite reads this year, however I'm currently in the middle of a major move, and will definitely come back at a later time and write out a full review and rating.

Thank you so much!

If anyone could successfully merge magical realism with one of the darkest periods in modern history, it is Alice Hoffman. She did so, beautifully.

<i>The World That We Knew</i> is a book that I’m sure many people will love. It’s a WWII story, an era which is always popular with the historical fiction crowd. The writing is quite lovely in its simplicity. The main characters are predominantly strong women, and one of the novel’s biggest themes is the strength of a mother’s love. And of course, it has a slight fantasy twist, drawing from Jewish mythology to further explore ideas about family, loyalty, and promises. But for me, the elements didn’t gel together quite as nicely as I would have liked.

<b><i>The World That We Knew</i> is very broad in its scope, so it is a bit tricky to summarize, but I’ll do my best.</b> It beings in Berlin, in the early days of World War II, with a woman named Hanni and her daughter Lea. When a traumatizing event causes Hanni to realize that her family is no longer safe in the country, she arranges a bargain with the rabbi’s daughter, Ettie, to create a golem: a Jewish mythological creature, a being of clay made flesh, with incredible strength and unflinching loyalty to its maker. She names the golem Ava and tasks her with loving Lea as her mother would, helping Lea to escape the country and stay safe throughout the war.

So begins a great fracturing of paths and a journey across several years. Hanni stays home with her ailing mother while Ava, Lea, Ettie, and Ettie’s sister flee to France, their paths even further diverging as time passes. The novel is <b>a constellation of the stories of these women and the many people whose paths intersect with theirs,</b> including a boy who excels at math, a former maid who now works for the French resistance, and a doctor still reeling from personal losses long ago.

There was a lot to enjoy in this book. <b>Alice Hoffman is a highly skilled writer,</b> and she manages to beautifully telescope from individual experiences to global consequences even within a single sentence. The language is simple and direct, not overwrought, and <b>humming with magic in the spaces between sentences.</b> She effects a beautiful balance between being hazily atmospheric and pointedly emotional, which is a perfect fit for a story of this nature. At times it does become a bit heavy-handed or repetitive, especially when it wants to make sure it’s driving home some point about Hanni’s love following Lea wherever she goes—I understand why those scenes are written the way they are, but the effect for me was not exactly the one desired, I think.

And of course, <b>strong women deserve to be spotlighted like the ones in this book are.</b> Lea starts out uncertain but grows to be fierce, strong in her convictions and stronger in her love for her mother, for Ava, and for the boy she falls in love with. Ettie is brilliant and a fighter, always willing to do what’s right and tackle any challenge head-on. And watching Ava’s development, as she tries to figure out what it means to be “human” and why she isn’t, is a fascinating meditation on the nature of humanity and personhood, and on the line between duty and belief.

The thing is, there are a few parts of this book that ring slightly hollow. I am all for beautiful and sometimes painful descriptions of things, but <b>some moments of imagery were just weird</b>—when creating Ava, for instance, the women want to make sure she becomes a woman, not a man, so they have one of the girls smear period blood (from inside her underwear) onto the crotch of the clay figure. It was a brief moment, but it was a little messed up and didn’t seem necessary to further anything about the story. And while I won’t say anything about the ending itself, I will say that it felt too abrupt and rather like a cop-out of a conclusion.

<b>Finally, I found the suggestion that this book is historical fiction with some magical realism to be misleading</b>—there was a <i>lot</i> of straight-up, fantasy-like magic. It wasn’t just the existence of the strong surrogate mother figure of Ava, the woman made of clay; it was everything that came with Ava. She could talk to birds. She went dancing with a heron and had the bird fly messages back and forth between Lea and the boy she fell in love with. She had supernatural baking abilities and could make delicious food that everyone loved out of the meagerest supplies. I didn’t mind, but I think that someone who went in expecting mostly real with a sprinkle of magic would find a much larger dollop of fantastical, fairy-tale elements.

<b>In short: this is a beautifully written, if a little discordant, story of faith, family, and female strength</b>, of love and resistance and the indomitability of the human spirit. It has some shortcomings, but most of those are more issues of personal taste than problems with the book itself. Personally, I probably would not read it again, but I can certainly see why others would.

Everything about this story and Hoffman's writing was stunning. With the Nazi regime drawing closer, Hanni, a widowed mother decides to send her 12 year old daughter Lea to France. The way she goes about ensuring her safe travels will require suspension of disbelief but I had no problem becoming immersed in every aspect of this story. The story alternates between Lea's journey and Ettie who was an integral part of helping Hanni get Lea to France. Along the way, we get to know many memorable characters and I found all the stories equally compelling and many times heartbreaking. Overall this story is one I will remember, it was just brilliant.

Alice Hoffman is an expert in the genre of magic realism. Her characters are well imagined and unique. In this complex story of love and loss, she introduces the golem of Jewish folklore. A fascinating and unique character in the midst of a rich narrative.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an eARC of this book.
Love Alice Hoffman and maybe this one most of all. Beautifully written with carefully nuanced characters. WW II, the holocaust, sad. Sacrifice, love for children, the battle between good and evil. Magical realism, Jewish mysticism brings it all together. A must read.

Wow, what did I just read?! It's beautifully written, but such a sad story. It was difficult to pick up at points, I just couldn't handle it. At the same time, it's absolutely a story that needs to be told and known by everyone . Alice Hoffman's hands are just the ones to do it - the mix of magical realism, historical fiction and Judaism. The story of the Holocaust for Jews in France for most of the book, it weaves in real life events and people with fictional characters to paint a masterpiece. I loved the character of Ettie, I wish she had been a larger piece of the story. The characters were so well done, I shed some tears along the way. I definitely recommend this book.

Sometimes it feels that while the Holocaust should never be forgotten, perhaps there have been enough tales of families lost and the overwhelming grief that ensues for the survivors. How to remember while forgetting, and living, has been the blessing and the curse. Then along comes Alice Hoffman with her gift for the magical amidst the banal and the reader is at once uplifted, beyond the grim facts and the horror. She writes of bravery and weakness, violence and tenderness, love and evil. And she does this almost exclusively through the eyes and actions of children and teens although this is an adult book. While we wonder how the evildoers will ever regain their humanity, she offers us a Golem in search of a heart. Not unlike the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz but the Golem doesn’t quite know for what it searches. This book is a wonder. I received my copy from the publisher through NetGalley. Many thanks for the privilege.

Published by Simon & Schuster on September 24, 2019

This is only the second Alice Hoffman novel that I have read and I now realize that I am not her target audience. I am sure that audience will appreciate The World that We Knew more than I did. The novel is grounded in the superstition of religion, set in a world that humans share with unseen angels, where to speak the secret names of God causes lips to burn. Stories that depend on religious mythology might be more meaningful to readers who embrace religion than to readers who view mythology in fiction as a subset of fantasy. With few exceptions, I prefer the kind of fantasy that builds a separate world, one that stands apart from reality. The World that We Knew is an uncomfortable mix of the real and the supernatural. I suppose the book might be seen as magical realism, blending reality and fantasy to invite the reader to find beauty in the midst of ugliness, but if the beauty isn’t real, the invitation only emphasizes the ugly horror of reality.

In 1941, after killing a German soldier to save her daughter Lea from rape, Hanni Kohn decides to send Lea away from the growing threat to Berlin’s Jewish population. An elderly neighbor advises Hanni to visit a rabbi and ask him to make a golem to protect her daughter. The rabbi’s wife will not allow Hanni to speak to the rabbi, but the rabbi’s daughter knows the secret to golem creation and is willing to be bribed.

The golem is fashioned as a woman and given the name Ana. She is grateful to her maker for the chance to be in the world, but her devotion is to Lea. Tradition requires a golem to be destroyed before it becomes too powerful, but Ana loves being alive and at a later point in the story, contemplates running away. The prevailing belief is that Ana has no soul since she was not made by God. Killing a self-aware being who is otherwise indistinguishable from a human is not supposed to be morally troubling, at least to people who believe that the soul has an independent, God-made existence. I give credit to Hoffman for exploring that question (as science fiction writers have long done, and in greater depth), asking whether every living thing might have a soul. A character who considers dogs and doves simplistically concludes that “if you could love someone, you possessed a soul.” I would have been happy to see the philosophical golem behave selfishly by yielding to her instinct for self-preservation (selfishness, Hoffman tells us, is the first human trait a golem acquires), but like every other character in the novel, the golem’s actions are predictable.

Ana and Lea depart on a train, watching other Jewish women meet the Angel of Death as they try to escape from Germany. The story branches out at that point to follow both Lea, who is sheltered by various people in France in between hair-raising escapes, and the rabbi’s daughter Ettie, who abandons Orthodox teachings and adopts a new persona in a French village with the laudable but improbable goal of joining the Resistance and exacting revenge against the Nazis.

Lea and Ana crash the home of Lea’s distant cousin just as their maid, Marianne Félix, abandons the family in the belief that they do not “understand their slow disenfranchisement and the erosion of their rights.” Marianne returns to her family in the countryside near Lyon and eventually helps the Resistance. Hers is another branch of the story, joined with the story of a resistance fighter named Victor. A final branch is a love story involving Ana and Victor’s brother Julien, who find an unlikely way to tell each other to stay alive even after they are separated.

Holocaust stories are important, but they have often been told. Except for the addition of a golem and other elements of magic, and apart from Hoffman’s graceful prose, this one does little to distinguish itself from similar stories. In fact, the Holocaust is largely relegated to the background. I understand that writers rely on the supernatural to illuminate the natural world (even when the world becomes as unnatural as it did during the Second World War), but I can’t say that I am a fan of that device here. The golem, the glowing angels that occasionally surround her, and the birds that do her bidding transform a story of gritty realism into a tale that might be found in a comic book.

The relationship between Lea and her mother-surrogate golem struck me as hokey, although other readers might find it touching. The two love stories, one tragic and the other not, are predictable. Ettie’s storyline is both predictable and too improbable to accept, even in a story that includes a golem who speaks birdsong. The novel’s final chapters rely on a string of coincidences to bring characters together. In the end, the novel isn’t even true to the mythology upon which it builds. Hoffman changes the nature of the golem to make a point about what it means to be human, but I don’t know that it makes sense to both accept and reject a myth.

The Angel of Death, the golem, the ability to foretell the future, chatting with birds, fortuitous coincidences, all in jarring contrast with the harsh reality of the Holocaust, didn’t juxtapose well for me. Layer that with trite pop song pronouncements about the power of love, and it was all just too much. Hoffman’s prose is beautiful, to be sure, and the story will certainly appeal to fans of romance fiction who have the ability to suspend their disbelief that a magical world could coexist with the greatest evil of the twentieth century, but I’m not that reader. I therefore recommend the novel only to fans of romance fiction and magic, and only then because of the strength of the prose.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Alice Hoffman’s, “The World That We Knew” is powerful story filled with magical energy, heartfelt love & hope in the face of evil. The World that We Knew had my attention throughout the book, I would look forward to grabbing moments to read. I recommend reading this wonderful book. Each character’s development, I thoroughly enjoyed, Hanni for her love, courage to protect her daughter Lea. The young yet powerful wisdom of Ettie, Ava’s strength, the clarity of Ava for her ability to feel emotions in a beautiful yet evil world. Many heart throbbing emotions while reading, it has been years since I found a book so exciting. Ms. Hoffman’s cast of characters, Hanni, Lea, Ettie, Maureen, Victor, Julien, Madeleine each unique and profound. Alice Hoffman’s “The World That We Knew” sets the bar for me at the top of my list for 2019.