The Star on the Grave
Based on the author’s own family history, this novel features a little-known aspect of World War II.
It’s 1968 in Sydney, Australia. Rachel Margol, a nurse, is set to marry Yanni Poulos, a doctor of Greek heritage. Raised a Catholic and already facing issues with Yanni’s Orthodox family, Rachel is devastated when her Polish grandmother, Felka, reveals that she is Jewish, a fact deliberately kept from her by both Felka and Michael, Rachel’s father. Their reasons being that they wanted her to: ‘… grow up free. Without fear. Without having to run and hide …[and] of being judged.’ Felka also says: ‘People hate us without reason. It is just how it is. How it has always been.’
Rachel’s life is irrevocably changed. Her engagement to Yanni on hold, she accompanies Felka to a reunion of Jewish refugees in Japan, where she discovers more about her family origins and learns about Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat in Lithuania who defied orders and was instrumental in saving the lives of numerous Jews in the 1930s-40s. (Although allies of the Nazis, the Japanese did not align with their anti-Semitic practices.)
Life in the Polish refugee circle in Sydney is well-described, and the exuberant Felka and surly Michael feel authentic, whereas Rachel’s character seems uneven. Sugihara’s own narrative is related in short parallel extracts, but there is little about his equally important associate, Dutch businessman Jan Zwartendijk, who facilitated the Jews’ journeys beyond Europe. The significance of the novel is diminished by an irrelevant intimate relationship in Japan and its contrived sentimental conclusion.
The author’s notes detail aspects of her family’s experiences that have been fictionalised for dramatic purposes, and it may be that this historically important and powerful story would have been better served in a more accurate non-fiction format.
