The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Border of Truth, by Victoria Redel
reviewed by Stefanie Sobelle

 

Sara Leader passes her summer days between the New York Society Library, where she is translating the philosophic writings of Walter Benjamin, and group counseling sessions for soon-to-be parents adopting refugee children. These seemingly divergent projects lead Sara to investigate the secret history of her father, a Holocaust survivor. Compound the now familiar subject of writers tracking ancestors lost to the Nazis with the cliché metaphor of a game of chess and the treatment of memory as fragments, and Victoria Redel’s second novel, The Border of Truth, just shouldn’t work. Yet as Redel illuminates the dark corners of ordinary familial relationships, The Border of Truth becomes both seductive and unique. The novel consists of alternating narratives: the third-person account of Sara’s summer and the first-person letters to Eleanor Roosevelt of Itzak Rejdel (a.k.a. Richard Leader, Sara’s father), a teenager stranded on the Quanza, an actual ship of Jewish refugees denied entry into the United States, whose passengers the first lady lobbied to free. Sara’s own survival is less a matter of checkmate and more one of kindness from strangers, while memory’s truths are better analogized to her densely woven caned chair. When initially addressing Roosevelt, Itzak speaks “as if she were a cigarette girl on Tin Pan Alley,” but as the novel progresses, his letters often turn to the brooding quandaries of a desperate young man ashamed of the sacrifices he is forced to make: “We are given many chances, Mrs. Roosevelt. Chances for truth and chances for freedom.” By placing Itzak’s story of survival in parallel with those of a contemporary Salvadorian housekeeper and a Lebanese hairdresser who also fled war-torn countries, Redel reminds us that we are a country of refugees. Though Benjamin’s Angel of History “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed,” Sara inevitably realizes she needs not to reconstruct the brutality of the past, but rather to forgive the betrayals that are its consequences.