Anna and the Swallow Man by Gavriel Savit

Ok, so this is another book that Ansley handed to me... and then got pretty feisty with me until I read it.  (And I thought I was a demanding promoter of lit, sheesh) I have to admit the girl has good taste in literature.

A few years back I got a little done with what I've been calling Holocaust Lit. It's not that I think it's overrated, or bad, or even boring. I just don't enjoy reading it. I can handle sad tragic lit. I love a good cry when I'm not crying over me. The Holocaust though, is on a completely different level from run of the mill tragedy. The reality is that most human tragedy is caused by the people/victims involved. Their choices, while ultimately flawed, make sense to us which is the source of the pathos.

The Holocaust was not tragic in that sense. Nothing those people/victims did warranted or invited what happened to them. It was a senseless reminder of how close to mindless beasts we still are. People talk about it like it couldn't happen any more, but I look at our current political situation here and I feel that we are all too close.

I'm getting off point.

Anna and the Swallow Man is set in Poland right after the Nazis rolled in and carted off all the intellectuals. Anna's father is an intellectual. A linguist to be precise. Anna, as his daughter, already speaks five or six languages by the time she is seven and her father simply disappears. Now a seven year old alone in Nazi Occupied Poland shouldn't stand a chance of survival, but a chance encounter with a strange spindly man with chameleon like powers of adaptation leads to an informal adoption. The pair tramp around the Polish wilderness living off the land and gently swindling people into giving them what they otherwise need. A moving target is hard to find, after all.

The Swallow Man is a vaguely sinister figure. While it is clear that he truly cares of Anna, I never find myself feeling comfortable with their relationship. Perhaps that's the point. Under those circumstances, what does trust really  look like.

I haven't really absorbed the ending yet. I'm not sure what Savit was getting at with it, but the book as a whole is a worthwhile read. Even with my issues reading Holocaust Lit, I found myself drawn in enough to finish it in a an evening.