One of the lessons of the Holocaust is how quickly a minority can be demonized and blamed for society’s ills.
Tod Lending’s new novel, The Umbrella Maker’s Son, begins in Poland in the fall of 1939. Reuven is a seventeen-year-old whose future seems endless. During the day, he works in the family’s custom umbrella shop. After the store closes, his free time is spent with his girlfriend, Zelda. Then the Nazis invade and his comfortable existence quickly becomes a memory.
After watching his family being taken from him, Reuven has only one goal: to get back to Zelda. After recovering from a gunshot wound at a rural farm, he returns to his other half. The girl with whom he is reunited is not the one he left.
The hardest part of writing historical fiction is to convey the facts while appropriately inserting the characters and story. Walking a delicate balance, Lending uses Reuven to tell the story of the approximately six million Jews (1.5 million of whom were young people) whose lives were snuffed out. Lending’s decision to tell the story from Reuven’s perspective is a brilliant narrative choice. Instead of being a long series of detached dates, events, and names, history becomes a personal story of a boy whose world is turned upside down. Through his eyes, we experience the joy of being in love and wanting to spend every moment of your day with that person. The fear and anxiety that sink in as your rights and humanity are slowly and painfully taken from you. Running for your life, not knowing if you will be able to get to safety.
This novel will resonate with many readers. In a certain sense, Reuven is a typical young man going through what all of us experience at his age. But in another sense, he is quite different; he has to grow up quickly and make decisions that no one should have to make, regardless of age.
Adina Bernstein has been a writer and blogger since 2014. She lives in Brooklyn and needs writing to survive this crazy world we live in. She can be found online at https://writergurlny.wordpress.com/.