'Love & Treasure': Stolen pendant links Holocaust tales
For the Jews of Eastern Europe during World War II, the loss of their lives in the Holocaust was often presaged by the loss of their property. In countries such as Hungary, where in the late 19th and early 20th centuries many Jewish families had become prosperous — and, they might reasonably have believed, safe from harm — they were forced to surrender their wealth, including household goods, artworks, jewels and currency, much of it in the form of gold.
A precious object from one such real-life seizure — a mysterious pendant featuring a peacock design — dangles at the heart of three interlocking stories in different time frames in Love and Treasure, Ayelet Waldman's generally absorbing though not fully integrated new novel.
Waldman, whose other books include Red Hook Road and Daughter's Keeper, tries to transmute the lost gold of the Jews into a compelling meditation on love, missed connections and the pull of history on the present. And for the first two-thirds of Love and Treasure, she succeeds.
Here we meet Jack Wiseman, a young Jewish lieutenant in the U.S. Army in Salzburg just after the war, to whom it falls to guard — and, later, to reluctantly disperse to a pack of greedy American generals — a load of treasure (including the pendant) originally taken from the Jews of Budapest. Jack's inability to preserve this patrimony becomes connected in his mind to his botched romance with Ilona, the beautiful Hungarian Holocaust survivor and Zionist he loves, and leads him to an act of theft that haunts him for the rest of his life.
Seventy years later, the terminally ill Jack bequeaths the pendant to his recently divorced granddaughter, Natalie, who undertakes an increasingly obsessive search for its origins. Her quest — aided by a Jewish art historian with good looks and a tragic past — leads her to Budapest, to Israel and, finally, to a document that reveals the real story behind the pendant and its long-ago owner.
It's that document, a Freudian psychoanalyst's account of his treatment of (and infatuation with) a feisty young Hungarian woman named Nina S. in Budapest in 1913, that is this otherwise compelling novel's downfall. Not that it's poorly executed; on its own, this section of the book is as fully realized as the rest. But while Jack's narrative is a tragic love story and Natalie's is a gripping thriller, Nina's, as told by the besotted and finally ridiculous Dr. Zobel, is slight and even a bit silly, which renders it out of sync with the rest of the book, tonally and otherwise.
In this third and concluding section of Love and Treasure, the analyst's treatment of Nina for "hysteria" (actually pre-menstrual cramps) ensnares him in her ongoing dramas. These include her refusal to marry the young Jewish lawyer her father has selected for her and her involvement with the women's suffrage movement and revolutionary politics embodied in the diminutive person of Gizella Weisz, a beautiful dwarf. It's all a bit of a caper, albeit one with an unsatisfactory outcome, and it feels anticlimactic after such an impressively somber buildup.
The book is still worth reading, mainly because it's well-written and entertaining throughout. But its flawed architecture keeps it from holding together as a complete and satisfying work of art. A quiet coda, in which the author tries to recover some of the emotional heft of the earlier sections, is too little, too late.
Love and Treasure
By Ayelet Waldman
Knopf, 334 pp.
2 1/2 stars out of four