Summer Reading: We Were the Lucky Ones

The next selection on my summer reading list, We Were the Lucky Ones by Georgia Hunter, was actually recommended to me by one of my students so you can imagine how eager I was to read it! Hunter, while interviewing her grandmother for a school project about her family history, discovered a heretofore unknown story about how her grandfather's entire family survived the Holocaust in Poland. This led to a decade-long quest to find out the details of his story and these details became the basis of her novel. At the start of the war the Kurcs are a comfortably well off and loving Jewish family living in Radom, Poland. Sol and Nechuma preside over three generations of their family including five children, their spouses, and a granddaughter. They try to ignore the horrors overtaking Europe but soon they are all separated as they try to escape the Nazis and they go to extraordinary lengths to survive and be reunited at the end of the war. Any novel about the Holocaust is going to be incredibly poignant and I had an emotional response to much of it, especially when one of the siblings and his family end up in a gulag in Siberia and when another sibling is looking for her daughter after the bombing of Warsaw, but there was both too little and too much going on for me to truly connect with it. The narrative is very episodic, jumping from character to character and location to location spanning long periods of time. It seemed as if the focus was to catch the reader up on what had happened since the last time we were with each character and then there would be a small vignette about what was currently happening. I would have liked a more in-depth exploration rather than a chronicle of events. I never really had the chance to connect with the characters because there were so many of them. It was often very confusing and I felt like I needed to keep notes on who was married to whom (some spouses were separated) and to have a map of where everyone was currently located. Also, there was very little dramatic tension because, although characters go through some incredibly harrowing experiences, I knew going in that everyone survives (they were the lucky ones, after all). I know that this is a story that many people will enjoy (my student thought it was the best book she had ever read) so I recommend it even though it didn't particularly appeal to me.

Note:  Have you read We Were the Lucky Ones?  What did you think?  Once again, I am in the minority with my response.