In Aaron’s Leap, Magdaléna Platzová tells the stories of various artistic characters whose lives intimately connect over the span of a century. The book centers around the story of Berta Altmann, a victim of the Holocaust, whose brash art and modern lifestyle inspire a present-day Israeli film crew who create a documentary about her life. Two members of the crew, Melina and Aaron, are attracted to each other and have an affair despite Aaron’s disclosure that he has recently fallen in love.
Melina learns more about Berta’s life through her diaries, which were given to Melina’s grandmother, Kristýna, before Berta was transported to Terezín and eventually murdered at Auschwitz. Berta’s life, before and even during the war is filled with modernism and new twentieth-century ideas, from her love affairs to her interest in modern art. Berta struggles with issues of feminism; she wants to be independent and concentrate on her art, but she also feels like a failure as a woman for choosing to have abortions from her affairs instead of marrying and having a child. Excerpts from her diaries are interspersed throughout the book.
The story is told from the various characters’ perspectives and frequently switches time periods. These changes can be confusing at times but they create a fluidity between the lives of these characters and their relations with each other.
Platzova’s mulit-dimensonal characters come to life through their struggles to understand the purpose of art and the political opinions of the people around them in a time of war and uncertainty. Art and modern thought are at the center of these characters’ lives and they seek truth through art, love, and friendship, inviting the reader to join them on this journey of self-discovery.
Related Content:
- Reading List: Translations and Translators
- Reading List: Terezin
- The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer
Jamie Wendt is the author of the poetry collection Fruit of the Earth (Main Street Rag, 2018), which won the 2019 National Federation of Press Women Book Award in Poetry. Her manuscript, Laughing in Yiddish, is forthcoming in the early Spring of 2025 by Broadstone Books and was a finalist for the 2022 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry. Her poems and essays have been published in various literary journals and anthologies, including Feminine Rising, Green Mountains Review, Lilith, Jet Fuel Review, the Forward, Poetica Magazine, Catamaran, and others. She contributes book reviews to the Jewish Book Council. She received a Pushcart Prize Honorable Mention and was nominated for Best Spiritual Literature. She was selected as an International Merit Award winner in the Atlanta Review 2022 International Poetry Competition. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska Omaha. She is a middle school Humanities teacher and lives in Chicago with her husband and two kids.
