When We Basked in the Warmth of the Sun (review)

This first novel by the Israeli author Alisa Harth is a captivating story that tugs at the reader's heartstrings from the first page, when the main protagonist Elisheva hears of her mother's death, to the end. The writing is intelligent and sensitive—the author has a good eye for detail and transmits it in the most able literary way.

Hitherto, reviewers have focused on the themes of divorce and abandonment, which are indeed powerful themes in this novel. However, I would like to review it as a literary response to the Holocaust. To date, discussion of literary responses to the Holocaust have concentrated on direct depiction of the war or its aftermath. However, I propose that these works ought to be neither a direct depiction of destruction nor catalogued and analyzed according to authorship, target readership, narratological themes, or method of description. I propose a method of analysis emphasizing the issue of time-frame.

I believe that this literature should be divided into four time zones. The first includes writing that took place during the Holocaust itself; the second is immediately after the end of the war, when the camps were liberated and survivors felt the urgency to record what had happened to them; the third time zone represents the era when the passage of time and an element of healing allowed authors a better perspective; and the fourth is our time, in which taboos are broken. The victims who were afforded pity and understanding before are now depicted in many current books as insane. The perpetrators, who previously were allowed no sympathy, now are depicted as full human beings, some of them described as good family men, and so forth; and the children of both the victims and the perpetrators are given voices. I propose that Alisa Harth's book When We Basked in the Warmth of the Sun should be read as a literary response to the Holocaust of the fourth time zone, in the category of children of victims.

Elisheva, the main protagonist in the book, is a child of Holocaust survivors whose families perished. In many ways these survivors are damaged souls. They were abandoned, lived in fear, and managed to survive while their loved ones perished—which may have set off guilt and shame. It is no wonder, therefore, that they cannot lead "normal lives" and they cannot provide their children with what is considered a normal upbringing.

There is not a chapter where one does not experience the impact of the Holocaust on the characters. We learn that their preferred language is German—after all it was their mother tongue (pp. 74–5, 97, 112, 168); many of them have poor mastery of Hebrew. They associate with people like them, from the "old-land," and enter into marriages that even verge on abuse—just because the prospective spouses can speak their mother-tongue and have an understanding of what was it like "over there." Their choice of food (pp. 102–3) and clothes has been determined by their childhood—yet after the Holocaust many of them are reluctant to go to Germany or use German products as it reminds them of their dead and of the havoc the war wreaked in their lives.For example, when Elisheva's mother Ruth wants to go to a fashion design institute in Berlin, in what she calls "the New Germany," her aunt Gertrud reprimands her, asking how she could go back to where her parents were murdered. For Gertrud, who escaped Germany before the war but later found that her family had been murdered there, Germany "did not exist anymore" (pp. 80–81) and she banned all German products.

Why should the reader be surprised that Elisheva's mother deposits her in other people homes as a cuckoo deposits her eggs in other nests? Could it be that because of the upheaval of the Holocaust the mother herself did not have role models to emulate...