AFTER THE END

A Jewish girl searches for her family in the aftermath of the Holocaust in Christiansen’s historical novel.

Sarah Morgenstern is only in her early 20s at the end of WWII, but she’s already witnessed the death of her sister and was separated from her parents when she and her family were sent to Nazi concentration camps. Yet this novel is not really about Sarah’s trials in the Łódź Ghetto or her suffering at Auschwitz. It opens, instead, with her liberation from the Wobbelin camp by American soldiers after the war, though flashbacks reveal the traumas Sarah endured during the Holocaust. In the immediate aftermath of gaining her freedom, Sarah is still stuck at the camp waiting for the sick and dying to be evacuated first; she knows that she must find her missing family soon. Fluent in several languages (her father was a language professor in Berlin), Sarah eventually takes a position as an interpreter for the American soldiers, and she works with them to try to locate her parents. Among the Americans who offer her support is a young Jewish soldier from Chicago named Ben Lehmann. Sarah and Ben seem to have a connection and constantly reunite during Sarah’s efforts to find her family. As her search for her family progresses, Sarah must also decide how to move forward with her life: Will she return to Berlin? Will she join some of the women from the camps and move to Palestine? Or will her relationship with Ben blossom into something serious? Christiansen’s attention to the postwar period is compelling, particularly in a literary landscape saturated with Holocaust fiction. After the war, Sarah’s life is in flux. But the author parlays this uncertainty into an absorbing bildungsroman about a woman finding her way in life. Occasionally, Christiansen’s prose can be overly reliant on anaphora and repetition (“Her dreams sent her on interminable voyages, train rides east, train rides west, train rides northwest, train rides southeast, back and forth, back and forth, ending up nowhere”), and the dialogue and conversations often prove too repetitive. But the novel’s strengths are its characters, especially the determined Sarah, who will no doubt serve as an inspirational heroine.

Well-plotted historical fiction whose strong focus on character development never impedes the pacing.