KRAUSS - "The History of Love"
An exploration of love, literature, and the immigrant experience.

by SIMONE KUSSATZ, special guest writer

With so many books produced every month, how does one decide which novel is worthwhile reading? This question can be answered easily with regard to New York author Nicole Krauss. I first came across Nicole Krauss when I read a sample of her second novel “The History of Love,” published by W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., and which appeared in New Yorker Magazine in the summer of 2004.
It was in an absurd and humorous scene involving the novel’s main character, Leo Gursky, with which Krauss’s writing had caught my attention. A graduate from Stanford, Oxford, and the Courtauld Institute in London, Krauss read from “The History of Love” on October 22, 2005 at the American Academy in Berlin, where I had a chance to meet her in person.

When she was only 31 years old, Krauss’ first novel “Man Walks Into a Room” was named ‘Book of the Year’ by The Los Angeles Times. Aside from her appearance in New Yorker Magazine, Krauss has also written for The Paris Review, Esquire and Best American Short Stories. She is married to writer Jonathan Safran Foer. They live in Brooklyn, New York.

Pregnant, and expecting her first child, Krauss stood before her audience at the American Academy in Berlin. With her parents seated at the forefront, she explained why she had written the “History of Love.” She had a soft voice and remained very calm while talking.
“One reason,” she said, “was to honor my grandparents, who fled from Europe before World War II, and before the Nazis came to power.”
(Photograph by Joyce Ravid)

Although “The History of Love” is not an autobiographical story, Krauss drew heavily from the experiences of her grandparents in the creation of her characters. The story is about their hardships and about the forces that had kept them alive.

“The History of Love” tells the story of 80-year-old Poland-born Leo Gursky, a locksmith who lives in New York. 14-year old Alma Singer is a girl who had been named after the main character in a book called “The History of Love.” She had lost her father when she was seven, and her mother, a literary translator, wasn’t able to overcome the loss.
Alma makes a futile attempt to match her mother up with Jacob Marcus, the man who asks her mother to translate “The History of Love” from Spanish to English. But while Alma’s mother escapes into the world of books, Alma’s nine-year old brother, Bird, escapes into the world of religion. One day he thinks that he becomes a “lamed vovnik,” or a Messiah.

The most connecting element among Krauss characters is their shared passion for writing and literature. Whether it’s in the case of a minor character, such as a customer of Leo Gursky’s, who had locked himself out of his house one night, and whose shelves are filled with books: among them a novel by Leo Gursky’s famous son Isaac Moritz. And in the case of a major character like Alma Singer, who keeps a notebook she calls: “How to Survive in the Wild.”
The book seems to be a declaration of love to various forms of writing. Krauss uses letters, diaries, non-fiction, fiction, and little notes by which her characters are able to communicate with one another. We can find letters written by Alma addressed to her dead father, correspondence between Alma and a Russian girl by the name Tatjana, and even between Alma and Jacob Marcus, a man who turns out to be a fictitious person.

Krauss’ “The History of Love” doesn’t follow a simple narrative. First of all, there is “The History of Love” that Krauss herself wrote, but then there is also another novel within that novel that goes by the same name. We then learn about Leo Gursky and his imaginary friend Bruno, whose storyline runs parallel to that of Alma Singer and her family, and the two sets of lives converge only at the end of the novel.
It is in this way that the reader is able to dive from one story to the other. On top of that, we are also pulled into the life of the character Zvi Litvinoff, who is the author of the novel “The History of Love” in Krauss’ own novel, “The History of Love.” The reader needs to pay close attention in order not to get lost discerning among the lives of the different characters.

Aside from love, loss is another theme that runs throughout the book. On an explicitly character-driven level, Krauss portrays the loss of Alma’s father and the loss of Leo Gursky’s son Isaac Moritz.
She also explores a more broad sense of loss in by exploring the loss of an immigrant’s cultural identity in an unfamiliar environment. It is in this way that Krauss’s book is not only a reflection on the life of her grandparents and the Jews during World War II, but also a reflection on the lives of all immigrants. Immigrants experience an overwhelming sense of loss when they leave their own countries behind and find themselves torn between the new and the old worlds. This conflicted experience is expressed in the scattered narrative of Krauss’ novel.
The ideas of visibility versus invisibility, and disappearing versus appearing, also play a major role in her work. In “The History of Love” the reader ultimately becomes sensitized to the situations of victims of war who hid from the enemy to become invisible, or who suddenly disappeared altogether.

Similarly, Krauss’s book also reveals isolation as an inevitable aspect of the overall process of writing. In an interview with Alden Mudge, Krauss said it was easier for her to identify with 80-year-old Leo than with Alma. This makes sense, considering the fact that writers most likely work in solitude. Like the character of Leo, they are familiar with the fact that they must make an active effort to break out of their isolation.

“Sometimes when I’m out, I’ll buy a juice even though I’m not thirsty. If the store is crowded I’ll even go so far as dropping my change all over the floor, the nickels and dimes skidding in every direction. I’ll get down on my knees,” he says.

Yet, love seems to be what conquers the hardships of these characters. There is the love between Alma and her mother, the love between Alma’s brother and his teacher, between Leo and Bruno, between Zvi Litvinoff and Rosa, and then also each character’s personal love for literature and language.

This is expressed in the references that Krauss makes to renowned writers Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Goethe, Shakespeare, Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Tolstoy, and Philip Roth. She also does this by having the characters converse in different languages: Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian, Spanish and English. Some chapters carry titles written in Hebrew letters or with Hebrew words like: “Shalom,” “Sham,” “Shaman,” “Shamble.”

Krauss emphasizes the idea of naming as an important aspect in the creation of art. As a reader of “The History of Love” we come across the titles of famous literary works, such as: “Anna Karenina” and “Ulysses,” or well-known songs like: “Hava Nagila Hava,” “Here Comes the Sun,” and the titles of Hitchcock films like: “Rear Window,” “Strangers on a Train,” and “North by Northwest.” And some chapters in Krauss´ novel carry only a title, but no text.
“The History of Love” is also suspenseful. Like in a detective story, one gets excited with Alma as she conducts her research on the character Alma Mereminski. Alma’s research entails endless phone calls and visits to the New York City Municipal Archives, where the records of births and deaths are housed.

The novel also retains interest for the reader through the many shifts in geographical locations. One time we are in a little village between Poland and Russia, another time between Chile and Argentina and New York City. But as mentioned earlier, what makes Krauss’ novel most refreshing, I think, is the unconventionality of some of the scenes. 80-year old Leo Gursky, for instance, signs up to be a nude model for a drawing class.

But most interesting to me, however, were the blank pages at the end of Krauss’ novel, as well as the pages that were only filled with one sentence, or just a single paragraph. There is once again explicit emphasis on the ideas of visibility versus invisibility, or appearing versus disappearing. Perhaps they are also a tribute to just one of the many experiences of a writer. There are days a writer doesn’t find the right words to fill a page.