A Thread of Grace
Mary Doria Russell, 2005
Random House
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449004135
Summary
Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.
It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.
Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell’s many fans and earn her even more. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—August 19, 1950
• Where—Elmhurst, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A. University of Illinois; M.A. Northeastern
University; Ph.D. University of Michigan
• Awards—The John W. Campbell Award, 1998
• Currently—lives in Cleveland, Ohio
Mary Doria Russell was born in suburban Chicago in 1950. Her mother was a U.S. Navy nurse and her father was a Marine Corps drill sergeant. She and her younger brother, Richard, consequently developed a dismaying vocabulary at an early age. Mary learned discretion at Sacred Heart Catholic elementary school and learned how to parse sentences at Glenbard East High; she moved on to study cultural anthropology at the University of Illinois, social anthropology at Northeastern University in Boston, and biological anthropology at the University of Michigan.
After earning a doctorate, Russell taught human gross anatomy at Case Western Reserve University in the 1980s but left the academic world to write fiction, which turned out to be a good career move.
Her novels have struck a deep chord with readers for their respectful but unblinking consideration of fundamental religious questions. The Sparrow and Children of God remain steady sellers, translated into more than a dozen languages. Russell has received nine national and international literary awards and has been a finalist for a number of others. She and her family live in Cleveland, Ohio. (From the publisher.)
In her words
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I honestly think getting up early gives you cancer. You should definitely sleep in as often as possible.
• Coffee is good for you. Don't believe anyone who says different. All research concluding that coffee is bad is seriously flawed in scientific design.
• Here's how you know when you're grown up: you decide if you get to have a pet. You don't have to ask anyone else's permission. I just got myself a 4-year-old miniature dachshund named Annie from Petfinder.com. She makes me laugh out loud first thing in the morning, and at least half a dozen times a day after that.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence (1935). I saw the David Lean movie Lawrence of Arabia when it first came out in 1962. I was twelve then, and ripe for hero worship, living in Lombard, Illinois, but ready to imagine a larger world than the Chicago suburbs. I found a musty old copy of Seven Pillars, and to this day I remain fascinated by the book and the man who wrote it. I can name a number of direct effects of reading the book.
Initially, I became interested in archeology because of Lawrence's early work, and that led me to anthropology, which sustained my interest through three degrees and years of professional work. I keep my hand in by editing the professional papers of friends in the field.
Lawrence taught me that speaking more than one language opens doors to experiences you'd miss if you only speak English. Over the years, I've studied Spanish, Russian, French and Croatian fairly formally, with less studious stabs at Latin, Hebrew, Italian and German. Each one has led me places I'd never have gone other wise. My study of Croatian led directly to the adoption of our son Daniel in Zagreb—so Lawrence is Dan's sort-of godfather!
I learned that intentions are irrelevant and regrets are useless: it doesn't matter what you thought would happen, or that you meant no harm. Unintended consequences of good intentions are a theme I return.
Lawrence taught me that how you write is as important as what you have to tell about. Choice of word, rhythm, detail, editing and overall structure make Seven Pillars literature, not just a military history or personal memoir.
There are echoes of Lawrence's experience in Deraa in my first novel, echoes of his war guilt in my third. I'm beginning research for a novel about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, and will come full circle: T. E. Lawrence will actually be a character in that one.
I also caught the colon habit from reading Lawrence's work: quod erat demonstradum. (Interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
I sense a tension in this writer, who seems torn between a desire to linger and explore her interesting creations more fully and a need to keep the action racing forward. The action wins. An addictive page-turner, A Thread of Grace satisfies our need to be reminded of how warmly inspiring humanity can be when it is moved to be generous, tolerant and forgiving.
Robert MacNeil - Washington Post
Busy, noisy and heartfelt, this sprawling novel by Russell—a striking departure from her previous two acclaimed SF thrillers, The Sparrow and Children of God—chronicles the Italian resistance to the Germans during the last two years of WWII. Three cultures mingle uneasily in Porto Sant'Andrea on the Ligurian coast of northwest Italy—the Italian Jews of the village, headed by the chief rabbi Iacopo Soncini; the Italian Catholics, like Sant'Andrea's priest Don Osvaldo Tomitz, who befriend and shelter the Jews; and the occupying Germans invited by Mussolini's crumbling regime. In the last camp is the drunken, tubercular Nazi deserter, Doktor Schramm, a broken man who confesses to Don Osvaldo that while working in state hospitals and Auschwitz, he was responsible for murdering 91,867 people. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees in southern France, including Albert Blum and his teenage daughter, Claudette, are fleeing across the Alps to Italy, hoping to find sanctuary there. Russell pursues numerous narrative threads, including the Blums' perilous flight over the mountains; Italian Jew Renzo Leoni's personal coming to terms with his participation in the Dolo hospital bombing during the Abyssinian campaign in 1935; the dangerous frenzy of the Italian partisans; and the bloody-mindedness of German officers resolved to carry out Hitler's murderous racial policy despite mounting evidence of its futility. The action moves swiftly, with impressive authority, jostling dialogue, vibrant personalities and meticulous, unexpected historical detail. The intensity and intimacy of Russell's storytelling, her sharp character writing and fierce sense of humor bring fresh immediacy to this riveting WWII saga. This is a worthy successor to high-caliber, crowd-pleasing WWII novels like Corelli's Mandolin or The English Patient.
Publishers Weekly
In 1943, teenaged Claudette Blum scales the Alps with her father, hoping to find sanctuary in Italy. It took the author of the highly regarded The Sparrow five years to research this book, which highlights the network of Italians who saved 43,000 Jewish lives during World War II.
Library Journal
Stateless Jews find refuge in the valleys of northwest Italy, thanks to the humanity of supposedly thick-witted peasants: a rich, rewarding, and well-researched tale of WWII. Piedmont, the province north of Genoa, in the lee of the Maritime Alps, is now largely off the American tourist map. But in 1943, when the Italian Fascists surrendered to the advancing allies, Piedmont was desperately attractive to the thousands of Jewish refugees who were forced to flee the Germans marching into the political vacuum in Mussolini's former European territories. Brutal as the Italian fascists were, they had been notoriously slow to turn over their Jews to Germans, and the Piemontesi had a reputation for sanctuary. In his third outing, science-fiction author Russell (Children of God, 1998, etc.) weaves oral and written histories and a large cast into a fast moving story that switches back and forth between the scarcely populated agricultural valleys at the edge of the Alps and fictitious Porto Sant'Andrea, an unexceptional industrial city somewhere on the Ligurian coast. An odd coalition of native Italian Jews, Roman Catholic clergy, communists, and unaffiliated anti-Fascists, have united in a conspiracy to protect the stream of refugees coming on foot through the mountain passes from France at the very moment that the Nazis are turning against their former Italian hosts. The masterminds of the Italo-Jewish effort are Lidia Leoni, an aristocratic and supremely sophisticated communist and her boozy, brilliant, protean son Renzo, a much-decorated flier haunted by his role in Italy's Ethiopian adventure. Knowing the efficiency and ruthlessness of the Germans who now hold power in Porto Sant' Andrea, the Leonis steer money and refugees to the tiny hamlets in Valdottavo, where peasants have already begun to harbor Transalpine guests. The one "good" German in Russell's adventure is Werner Schramm, a doctor in flight from his past as an obedient euthanizer and witness to the death camps who is now witness to the humanity of the Jews and the charity of the mountain peasants. Beautiful, noble, fascinating, and almost unbearably sad.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Renzo and Schramm have both committed crimes against civilians during war, but the priest Don Osvaldo feels there is some essential difference between the two men's actions. Is the difference merely a matter of scale, or is there an ethical difference? Does your emotional response to each character color your opinion?
2. Renzo attempts to remain apolitical during the Nazi occupation. Was that a moral position or should he have fought the Nazis from the beginning? Is moderation or neutrality possible or even desirable during war?
3. We are accustomed to admiring the partisan resistance to German occupation during World War II. In today's world there are many places where armed resistance to occupying forces is called "terrorism." What makes a resistance legitimate? Does the motive of the occupying force make any difference?
4. Claudette's children never understand her, and she dies a mystery to them. Have you been affected by the war experiences of a family member? Were you aware of how their experiences deformed them?
5. Was Iacopo Soncini a bad husband or a good rabbi? How does having a family change the responsibilities of the clergy?
6. Imagine that you heard Schramm's confession at the beginning of the book. If you were Don Osvaldo, what would you have told Schramm? Are there unforgivable sins?
7. Was Schramm's remorse genuine at the end of the book? Why did he put his uniform back on when he was ordered to by the German officer at the hospital?
8. How would you feel about a moral universe where Schramm went to heaven and Renzo went to hell?
9. People who didn't live through World War II often believe they'd have hidden someone like Anne Frank or helped refugees from Nazi Germany the way the Italian peasants did. What would be an analogous risk today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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