ESSAY CEMETERY

Leopold Gursky is old. He lives in New York but he is originally from Poland/Russia. In the third person we learn that the woman he loved left for America before the war, had his child and married another man when he didn't return her letters because of the war. The child grew up not knowing the protagonist and to be a writer. In America he had a locksmith business with his cousin which he inherited when the cousin died. He goes to nude model for a drawing class. Some time later, a man calls him in the middle of the night to unlock his door. My Mother's Sadness Alma is the narrator (speaker?) here. It changes abruptly. This section is organized in brief chapters. Her younger brother Bird is a very unique individual, prone to fantasizing and depressed and practices his own unique brand of Jewish mysticism. Her father is dead and Israeli and her English mother met him at a kibbutz. He gave Alma's mother a book called The History of Love . Alma is fifteen. She...

A Spoon Full of Fiction: Imagination as Mitigator in The History(s) of Love Nicole Krauss's novel The History of Love is filled with grave themes of societal and personal trauma. Its protagonists have experienced varieties of losses: Leopold Gursky is a holocaust survivor who has lost his mother and siblings, the love of his life, and his child to the Holocaust; Alma and Bird Singer have lost their father to cancer and their mother to grief. Despite these sober subjects, The History of Love is written with whimsy, wonder, and imagination. Through the original Alma, Gursky's lover, Nicole Krauss proposes her own literary aesthetic. Her ideas of literature are reflected both in the History of Love as well as the book-within-a-book of the same title. Writing is central to Leo's life. Alma, his beloved, is central in shaping his literary style. His first attempt at a novel results in a heavily realistic work, too realistic for Alma's taste. When he showed it to he...