A review by scarpuccia
Chasing the King of Hearts by Hanna Krall

5.0

This is the fictionalised true story of Izolda Regensberg and her WW2 experiences which include escaping from the Warsaw Ghetto via the sewers, impersonating an Aryan woman during which she is persecuted by doubts that Jews have a distinctive way of performing virtually every commonplace gesture and being deported to a variety of camps, including Auschwitz. The king of hearts of the title is her young husband Shayek. The laconic, almost breezy tone of this novel, written in the present tense in simple terse sentences, is unique among Holocaust fiction. The horrors of the Holocaust Izolda experiences as inconveniences, obstacles in preventing her from her mission which is to rescue her beloved husband from Mauthausen concentration camp. Often in fictional accounts of the Holocaust characters are depicted as bewildered, terrified, horrified: big life changing emotions are continually pumped into the text: not surprisingly there’s a failure of imagination in the author’s power of empathy. Izolda is never prey to such sweeping all-consuming emotions; she is pragmatic, battle-hardened, nervously alert rather than terrified, and as a result her voice rings much truer than most Holocaust fiction. You get a sense of how relentless horror becomes the everyday norm you have to take in your stride, of how often you have to look the other way unless your spirit is to be annihilated. Izolda is tortured by the Gestapo, twice she finds herself at Auschwitz; she even makes Dr Mengele laugh and yet she understates all these experiences as hurdles to be surmounted rather than horrific monumental moments of spiritual disintegration. The novella is no less moving after the war when Izolda, now in Israel, is called upon by her family to evaluate and articulate her wartime experiences and we see the damage the war did to her and her family. It’s a short book, incredibly easy on the eye but deeply moving and, one feels, much truer to the day by day emotional reality of the Holocaust than most other fictional accounts.

Thanks to Roger and his fantastic review (much better than mine!) for leading me to this moving and memorable book.