Aaron's Leap
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A multigenerational saga inspired by Bauhaus artists and the impact of the Holocaust’s lingering legacy on their children and protégés
In a Europe torn by war and revolution, Berta Altmann comes of age as a gifted artist and independent woman. Her search for freedom leads her from Vienna to the Bauhaus school, Weimar Berlin, and Prague. As she encounters the celebrated artists of her time, she engages in aesthetic and ideological battles that will prove to have life-and-death consequences.
Based on the real-life story of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who taught art to children in the Nazi transport camp of Terezín and died in Auschwitz, Aaron’s Leap is framed by the lens of a 21st-century Israeli film crew that unknowingly unleashes the haunting force of buried history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Czech author Platzov makes her English-language debut with a historical novel of prewar Weimar and the Bauhaus school, which also manages to be about the disparity between memory and history. Berta Altmann grows up in Vienna, a devoted diarist who records the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the birth of the Austrian Communist Party. She goes with her occasional lover, Max, to Germany, where they study with Czerny, the famous architect, painting light and weaving abstraction as the shadows of the Nazi party gather around them. On the verge of a remarkable career, Berta is instead interred in a concentration camp, condemned by the company she keeps. Among those intimates is Krist na Hl dkov , a minor artist living in present-day Prague who recalls Berta for a documentary helmed by Aaron, a Czech Jew from Israel. But the premiere of Berta Altmann: Artist and Teacher will have unintended consequences for all involved, as Krist na's secrets begin to fill in the blanks in Berta's diary, revealing the emotional truths that the camera overlooks. Platzov 's prose is as sharp and effective as the angles of an expressionist monument. Still, many of the framing characters and subplots, especially a distracting flirtation between Aaron and Krist na's granddaughter, Milena, are given too little room to connect and feel like clutter in this otherwise powerfully elegiac novel.
