The Light at the End of the Day by Eleanor Wasserberg (4th Estate, £14.99)
They say a picture tells a thousand words, but Eleanor Wasserberg’s second novel, centred on a real child’s portrait, offers many more in speaking volumes about war-torn Poland, the grief of displacement, the loss of family love and of faith in material wealth to ward off Nazi horrors.
Jewish businessman Adam Oderfeldt commissions a birthday portrait of his precocious and pampered favourite daughter, Alicia. It is a gift that reflects the opulent lifestyle of Adam and his wife Anna on Bernardynska Street, Krakow, and the painterly skill of the artist, “Jozef”, reluctantly driven by financial need to overcome his disapproval of capturing this precocious princess on canvas. Alicia herself would have preferred a white fur like her Mama’s, or perhaps some riding lessons.
Who could have guessed how inordinately important this painting would prove in Wasserberg’s true-life-based drama of shattered lives and hair’s-breadth survival?
The portrait at the heart of The Light at the End of the Day is indeed real — the likeness of Wasserberg’s great-aunt Josepha, exhibited to this day along with other family portraits — and symbolises for the author “a whole lost world” as well as sowing the seeds of this evocative and harrowing fiction. Far from her 21st-century home in Norwich, Wasserberg and her father retraced their Polish heritage to flesh out “vague ghosts” — the apartment, synagogue, cemetery memorials of her great-grandparents, and the Museum Narodowe where the portrait of Girl in a Red Dress now hangs.
Wasserberg seems drawn to the divide between darkness and light in the world, and the deceptive tales people tell in order to survive through illusion. Her debut novel, Foxlowe, told of a closed, rural commune maintained on the myth that the outside world was “The Bad”, a society suffused with violence. Yet the children of Foxlowe had their own disturbing rituals. The Light at the End of the Day, so much more ambitious in scale and history, sees similar dissonance between Nazi encroachment on Jewish Krakow, and what the Oderfeldts’ minds — so certain of their safety — allow them to absorb. This family, like Foxlowe’s, has its own unspoken threats within: Adam’s second family in France and a wholly unsuitable tendresse developing between the artist and the older daughter, Karolina.
This is a novel in several parts, a deft depiction of pre-war Jewish affluence followed by a devastating account of the family’s fragmentation, with the women hiding out with relatives in Lvov, then Anna and Alicia deported by Russians to the frozen fear of Chelyabinsk.
Where once they enjoyed servant retainers and silk, canopied beds, mother and daughter endure bedbugs, killings and the cult of Stalin.
All vision of ease and affluence implodes. But Wasserberg raises readers’ spirits with a hint of reunion and redemption, ending her novel with a fast-forward 1977 rendezvous and a glimpse of girlish red.
Madeleine Kingsley is a freelance reviewer
