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A Thread of Grace: A Novel, by Mary Doria Russell
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Set in Italy during the dramatic finale of World War II, this new novel is the first in seven years by the bestselling author of The Sparrow and Children of God.
It is September 8, 1943, and fourteen-year-old Claudette Blum is learning Italian with a suitcase in her hand. She and her father are among the thousands of Jewish refugees scrambling over the Alps toward Italy, where they hope to be safe at last, now that the Italians have broken with Germany and made a separate peace with the Allies. The Blums will soon discover that Italy is anything but peaceful, as it becomes overnight an open battleground among the Nazis, the Allies, resistance fighters, Jews in hiding, and ordinary Italian civilians trying to survive.
Mary Doria Russell sets her first historical novel against this dramatic background, tracing the lives of a handful of fascinating characters. Through them, she tells the little-known but true story of the network of Italian citizens who saved the lives of forty-three thousand Jews during the war’s final phase. The result of five years of meticulous research, A Thread of Grace is an ambitious, engrossing novel of ideas, history, and marvelous characters that will please Russell’s many fans and earn her even more.
- Sales Rank: #634274 in Books
- Brand: Random House
- Published on: 2005-02-01
- Released on: 2005-02-01
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.52" h x 1.23" w x 5.71" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 430 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
Mary Doria Russell's extraordinary and complex historical novel, A Thread of Grace, is the kind of book that you will find yourself haunted by long after finishing the last page. It opens with a group of Jewish refugees being escorted to safe-keeping by Italian soldiers. After making the arduous journey over a steep mountain pass, they are welcomed into a small village with warm food and clean beds. They have barely laid their heads to rest when news is received that Mussolini has just surrendered Italy to Hitler, putting them in danger yet again. This opening sequence is a grim foreshadowing of the heart-breaking journey these characters will experience in their struggle for survival.
The rich fictional narrative is woven through the factual military maneuvers and political games at the end of WW II, sharing a little-known story of a group of Italian citizens that sheltered more than 40,000 Jews from grueling work camp executions. Rather than the bleak and hopeless feeling that might be expected, the novel has the opposite effect; it reminds us that just as there will always be war, crime, and death, so too will there be good people who selflessly sacrifice themselves to ease the suffering of others. Perhaps best of all, Russell succinctly opens and closes her writing with short pieces that bookend the story with the force of a freight train. Her moving finale wraps up her narrative in the present day, with a death bed scene that's sure to rip the heart out of readers of every faith and ancestry.
On the surface, Russell's third novel may seem quite different from her earlier works. Both The Sparrow and its sequel, Children of God , were futuristic stories about Earth's first contact with alien life forms, but a closer look reveals several similarities. Fans of her earlier books will be pleased to find that Emilio Sandoz, the charismatic Jesuit priest from the first two books, finds new life in Renzo Leoni--A Thread of Grace's charming and haunted chameleon. The two have different circumstances and histories, but both characters are made of the same cloth--tormented by their consciences and plagued by unrequited love. Also similar to her earlier books, the characters in A Thread of Grace don't all enjoy a happy ending. A note in the reader's guide tells us that Russell flipped a coin to determine the fate of some of the characters. This may be upsetting for many readers, particularly those used to Hollywood endings, but it does serve as a frank reminder of the arbitrary nature of war and death. --Victoria Griffith
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Busy, noisy and heartfelt, this sprawling novel by Russell—a striking departure from her previous two acclaimed SF thrillers, The Sparrow and Children of God—chronicles the Italian resistance to the Germans during the last two years of WWII. Three cultures mingle uneasily in Porto Sant'Andrea on the Ligurian coast of northwest Italy—the Italian Jews of the village, headed by the chief rabbi Iacopo Soncini; the Italian Catholics, like Sant'Andrea's priest Don Osvaldo Tomitz, who befriend and shelter the Jews; and the occupying Germans invited by Mussolini's crumbling regime. In the last camp is the drunken, tubercular Nazi deserter, Doktor Schramm, a broken man who confesses to Don Osvaldo that while working in state hospitals and Auschwitz, he was responsible for murdering 91,867 people. Meanwhile, Jewish refugees in southern France, including Albert Blum and his teenage daughter, Claudette, are fleeing across the Alps to Italy, hoping to find sanctuary there. Russell pursues numerous narrative threads, including the Blums' perilous flight over the mountains; Italian Jew Renzo Leoni's personal coming to terms with his participation in the Dolo hospital bombing during the Abyssinian campaign in 1935; the dangerous frenzy of the Italian partisans; and the bloody-mindedness of German officers resolved to carry out Hitler's murderous racial policy despite mounting evidence of its futility. The action moves swiftly, with impressive authority, jostling dialogue, vibrant personalities and meticulous, unexpected historical detail. The intensity and intimacy of Russell's storytelling, her sharp character writing and fierce sense of humor bring fresh immediacy to this riveting WWII saga.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
In Thread of Grace, Russell-a Roman Catholic of Italian heritage who converted to Judaism-explores Italy’s response to German occupation, the fate of its Jews, and the actions of individuals. The story, which shifts to different (and sometimes unrelated) characters and subplots, alienated a few critics. Most, however, found that the depth of characterization forged a cohesive narrative and created complex layers of emotion, history, and horror that aptly represent wartime. Reviewers also forgave the ambiguous motives that seemed to drive the characters, who exhibit extreme behavior, from selfless to evil. Yet, by the end, readers will understand the old Hebrew saying, “No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there’s always a thread of grace.”
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
94 of 94 people found the following review helpful.
An absorbing, generously proportioned novel
By Bookreporter
I'm a Jew from a family so assimilated that I never set foot in a synagogue until I was almost 40. Yet it is part of my identity in a way that has nothing to do with religious observance, and throughout my life it has struck me with particular force when confronting the Holocaust --- reading Anne Frank's diary; seeing the movie Judgment at Nuremberg; weeping at Yad Vashem, the museum and memorial in Jerusalem. Being Jewish makes me feel proud, different, and vulnerable all at the same time.
A THREAD OF GRACE is part of that tragic narrative, but a more obscure one. Set in the ports and valleys of northwestern Italy (Aosta, Piemonte, Liguria) during the last two years of World War II, it tells the story of Jews, 43,000 of them --- both native-born Italians (of which there were many; the Jewish community in Rome is the oldest in Europe) and refugees from eastern Europe --- whose lives were saved by ordinary citizens. Russell, who calls herself "a Jew by choice and an Italian by heritage" (she is a convert, though she doesn't give details), seems the ideal writer to bring this piece of history to life, and she does it beautifully in an absorbing, generously proportioned novel.
This is the kind of book you need to read with a cheat sheet because there are so many personalities and interwoven story lines (Russell considerately provides a cast of characters; I could have used some maps, too). There are the Italian Jews, particularly the chief rabbi, Iacopo Soncini, and his wife, Mirella; and Renzo Leoni, a hardened former pilot who has as many identities as he has scars, and his mother, Lidia. There are the Italian Catholics: priests, nuns, and ordinary farmers and peasants who help shield the Jews --- and a big, innocent Calabrian infantryman who marries one. There is the Jewish refugee contingent, especially a Belgian teenager named Claudette Blum --- families who, as the story opens in 1943, are making their way across the Maritime Alps from southeastern France to Italy, which has just surrendered to the Allies. Unfortunately, Italy only seems safer: Mussolini's ouster sets up two years of bitter fighting among Germans, Allies, and partisans. A British Special Ops signalman parachutes in to gather information on the ground. Nazi officers try vainly but brutally to stabilize the area for Hitler. And a renegade German doctor, Werner Schramm, who presided over the vilest concentration camp experiments, is slowly dying of guilt, drink, and tuberculosis.
The book is, I admit, a bit heavy on "types" familiar from World War II movies: the selfless religious, the noble peasant, the apparent cynic who is a secret hero, and so forth. Indeed, there is an old-fashioned flavor to the whole novel --- the way Italian or German or Hebrew words are thrown in to indicate which language is being spoken; the stately pace; the headings that tell you precisely where and when the action is taking place. A THREAD OF GRACE doesn't reinvent the war novel as THE ENGLISH PATIENT did, with its spare language and mysterious shifts between myth and reality, past and present. But the author's emotional commitment to her characters is such that they soon grow on you, transcending cliché and laying claim to your heart.
Russell was originally a paleoanthropologist --- a scientist who studies human fossils --- and the training shows in her meticulous portrait of the region and its people. Although her previous books, THE SPARROW and its sequel, CHILDREN OF GOD, are science fiction, the methodology was similar: She invented an entire alien culture, building it up in brilliant, believable detail. (These earlier works, by the way, are fascinating, suspenseful, and altogether wonderful; grab them even if you don't ordinarily like the genre). There is a scientist's mind at work here as well as a novelist's imagination.
There is also a challenging ethical complexity to A THREAD OF GRACE. Russell does not preach or sentimentalize (which is easy to do in the face of the Italians' courage and self-sacrifice), and she doesn't glorify war; rather, she underscores its moral ambiguities. Werner Schramm, for example, is a walking, talking human monster, but he began as an idealist. Renzo Leoni is guilty of killing civilians, too, though on a lesser scale: In 1935, during the Italian-Abyssinian war, his squadron famously bombed a civilian hospital, and he is tortured by the memory. When local partisans show no mercy to captured Nazi officers, Renzo knows the massacre is wrong, but unstoppable. "I've sworn off ethics," he says afterward. "What's the point?" A THREAD OF GRACE, like THE SPARROW and CHILDREN OF GOD, is powerfully (though not didactically) imbued with a plea for cultural and religious understanding --- to respect what is radically different in other societies and faiths, while embracing what we have in common.
The evocative title comes from a remark by Rabbi Soncini at the book's end. "There's a saying in Hebrew," he says. " 'No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of grace.' " Mary Doria Russell's novel is a bit like a great textile --- rich and broad and intricately figured --- and in its design there is a glint of something like hope. These days, we could use it.
--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman
157 of 166 people found the following review helpful.
Strangely touching....
By Robert Busko
I've read Mary Doria Russells other books, The Sparrow and Children of God and enjoyed both. I was a bit skeptical when I read the jacket material on Thread of Grace. Well, I should have known better. Thread of Grace is a tremendously well written and well researched novel. You will remember reading this book far into the future.
Thread of Grace is well written but very busy with crossing storylines. You may indeed need a list to keep things straight. Ms Russell pays great attention to detail in both her description of the physical location of the story (NW Italy) and in the characters she includes in the story. It is this detail that may overwhelm the casual reader.
The premise of the story, that there is a safe haven in Italy for Jews as they try to hide from their ultimate slaughter by the Nazi's is a compelling one. And it is true. The characters, a Jewish Rabbi, a Catholic Priest, the Italians of the region, and the Germans (collectively) face the moral and ethical dilemma all humans face in war. Russell does an excellect job dealing with the whole war/morality issue without preaching one way or the other.
Truly a worthwhile book. Get it and read it. I suspect we'll hear from Russell again.
57 of 59 people found the following review helpful.
Gracefully woven
By zbg97
Unlike Ms. Russell's previous works, "Thread of Grace" takes place in the past, not the future. Incredibly well-researched, it begins with Italy's armistice with the Allies, which is not good news for the Jewish people living in Italian-occupied territories. Accompanied by retreating Italians, they flee for Italy, only to discover, soon after, that the Germans have mostly taken control of Italy, too.
Italian Jews and foreign refugees must all go into hiding, many assisted by Italian Catholics, and a few Italian Jews who hide in plain sight. We also meet many of the German officers who control the small, fictionalized area of Italy in which the story takes place.
Just like "The Sparrow" and "Children of God", however, Ms. Russell's characters are wonderfully crafted, and the story is told in a remarkably beautiful manner. Faith, philosophy, humor, warmth, despair, and humanity are all wrapped up in one moving, poignant package.
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