One Person’s Loss
Young and newly married, Erich and Petra have been sent to New York to escape the worsening conditions for Jews in Nazi Germany. Their parents are reluctant to leave the life they have known and are sure that matters won’t come to the unthinkable, but Erich and Petra are their hedge against that bet, the children who will carry the line of two separate families into the future.
When their first hope is dashed by a miscarriage, Petra lets her already precise and slightly obsessive nature take over, convinced that maintaining order down to the placement of shoes on the mat is the only way to keep her world from tilting further. Erich becomes convinced that they should not have children at all in that tilting world. As matters worsen in Germany, they begin a frantic effort to get their parents and siblings out. Throughout, bedeviled by the twin demons of survivor guilt and what would come to be known as PTSD, Erich and Petra struggle to keep their marriage intact through the arrival of one and then a second child.
In sections alternating between their points of view, Epstein paints a skillful picture of the tragedy of the Holocaust mirrored in miniature within each person. The use of a present-tense narrative voice in close third person for each of them gives an immediate sense of the looming and unstoppable horror of the war as each suspected loss is confirmed. The ending is hopeful if somewhat ambiguous, a reminder that nothing is certain but there is always promise for the future somewhere.
