As The Lost Baker of Vienna begins, Aron Rosenzweig, an elderly Holocaust survivor, dies in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Aaron has left Zoe, his granddaughter – who he helped raise after her parents died in a car crash – an envelope with clues about what happened to him; Chana, his older sister; and their mother in Jewish ghettos in Vilna and Kovno, a concentration camp in Stutthof, and as post-World War II displaced persons in Vienna.
A writer for a food magazine, Zoe wangles an assignment in Vienna to learn about Chana’s love triangle with Meyer Suconick, a black-market dealer, and Elias Bohm, an apprentice baker, and the deadly fire that changed their lives.
Drawing on her own family’s history for a debut novel that took decades to complete, Kurtzman (who previously worked in television marketing) has Chana express her principal aim: “I think those we’ve lost left their stories etched on their souls so we retell them and keep their memories alive.”
Chana, the heroine of The Lost Baker of Vienna, also gives voice to Kurtzman’s feminist subtext. To enable the Rosenzweigs to emigrate to the United States, Ruth presses her daughter to marry a man she does not love. “In time, who knows what will grow? Someday, you’ll have children and they’ll love you more than anything else.”
What about her aspiration to become a baker? Chana asks. “You’ll bake for your family, if nothing else,” Ruth replies. When Chana insists she wants more, her mother ends the conversation: “We are women and we don’t always get what we want, maidel.” Chana, the narrator, tells us, “couldn’t accept that as a way to live.” She “saw her stubbornness as a strength.”
This historical fiction, potboiler, and melodrama, is, alas, not without flaws. Many of the developments in The Lost Baker of Vienna that drive the plot forward are not credible. And the narrator frequently repeats information has been mentioned previously in the novel.
Here is an extended example:
When Meyer declares that because he was fighting with the Soviet Army, saving others, when his parents were massacred, his “heart will never be the same,” Chana says, “I’m so sorry.” Emotion, Kurtzman adds, “clogged [her] throat.” And yet, Meyer’s account of the massacre is repeated in another chapter, this time with tears spilling down his cheeks, followed by Chana’s “I’m so sorry, Meyer. Truly.”
Twenty pages after the first “sorry,” the author indicates that Chana “would enjoy knowing that softer, more thoughtful version” of the black-market dealer. “It was clear,” Kurtzman emphasizes, that Meyer had “built a thick armor around his heart” and “Chana wondered if she’d ever manage to penetrate it.”
In a subsequent chapter, however, we are reminded that “Meyer was tough and stubborn but also filled with so much good.” Both of them were stubborn and proud, Kurtzman indicates, “only Meyer wore his grief like armor, keeping off anyone who attempted to make him feel again.”
THAT SAID, Kurtzman uses two interconnected narratives to keep her readers in suspense. We don’t know whether Chana will choose Meyer, Elias, or neither. Or whether Ruth, Chana, and Aron will find out where in New Jersey Papa Rosenzweig’s relatives live, or whether they will sponsor them, a requirement for getting permission from government officials to emigrate to the United States. We do not know who perished in the conflagration at the Empress Hotel.
Nor does Kurtzman reveal anything about the reclusive Henri Martin, founder of a baked goods empire based in Australia, who is about to receive the industry’s coveted Lifetime Achievement Award in Vienna. Martin has promised to tell Zoe about his connection to her family on the condition that she sign a non-disclosure agreement, which will prevent her from writing a profile that will get her a raise and a promotion, and probably get her fired.
Most importantly, Kurtzman offers a detailed and often moving account of the precarious existence of displaced persons, especially Jews, in postwar Europe in 1946 and 1947. Without cash or connections, she reminds us, they were often forced to rely on the kindness of, or exploitation by strangers for protection, housing, jobs, food, changes of identity, and passports.
And Kurtzman provides a Dickensian “all’s well that ends well” conclusion to The Lost Baker of Vienna. In accepting his award, Martin pays tribute to his recently deceased wife. “Our bakery,” he says, “was her brainchild, everything a result of her talent and passion.” Martin taps his chest twice over his heart, as Rosenzweigs are wont to do, raises a glass of water, asks the audience to join him in a toast, and proclaims, “To family and l’chaim, which means ‘to life,’ the two most important things on earth.”
Zoe sips her wine, Kurtzman writes, while wishing that Aron and Chana were in the room. “A pleasant warmth swept up her back,” which she took as a sign from the universe that they were.
The writer is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
- THE LOST BAKER OF VIENNA: A NOVEL
- By Sharon Kurtzman
- Viking
- 432 pages; $30