A THREAD OF GRACE
By Mary Doria Russell. Random House. 430 pp. $25.95
Mary Doria Russell is a talented writer of large ambition. To juggle some two dozen principal characters, and as many more minor ones, is daring; so is her willingness to combine them in transactions that are truly bizarre. Imagine that during World War II, a German military doctor, Werner Schramm, crushed by remorse, confesses to an Italian priest that he has murdered 91,867 people. Imagine that the ailing Schramm, having deserted, is nursed in hiding by a rabbi's wife, and that he argues with her about euthanasia for "defective children," when she is still mourning a beloved Mongoloid daughter. And finally imagine that when the priest to whom he confessed, Don Osvaldo Tomitz, is horribly tortured by the Gestapo for not giving up the Jews he is hiding, it is Schramm who brings him peace.
Russell's powerful writing makes such improbable connections not merely dramatic but plausible.
In the folklore of World War II, compared with other combatants, Italy has conspicuously lacked heroes, its fighting qualities widely derided. "What do Italians call half a million men with their hands in the air? The army!" That is a joke told here by Germans bitter after Italy withdrew from the war in 1943. This novel -- based on the historical record -- challenges that impression, at least for the mountainous northwest corner of Italy from 1943-45. The story is thickly populated with Italian heroes -- Jews, Catholics, Communists and partisans. They include priests, nuns, peasants and border guards willing to risk, and forfeit, their lives to save Jews from deportation to Nazi death camps. Deportations had accelerated when the Germans occupied Italy to stop the advancing Allied forces.
Until Mussolini caved in to Hitler in 1938 and began persecuting Jews himself, Italian Jews had better reason than their German co-religionists to feel secure from fascist racism. Jews had been planted in Italian soil since the dawn of Christianity, when 10 percent of the population of the Roman Empire was Jewish, their earliest synagogues predating the Vatican. For their courageous fighting in World War I, Jews were declared full citizens by King Victor Emanuel III. In heavy irony, we learn this from an SS officer instructing his subordinates on the difficulty of rooting out Jews for deportation, given the loyalty of non-Jewish Italians.
If this sounds like too much history lesson and too little novel, that is far from the case. One can excuse a few strands of dialogue heavy with exposition because Russell has an astonishing story to tell -- full of action, paced like a rapid-fire thriller, in tense, vivid scenes that move with cinematic verve. At times I felt there was an overabundance of characters to keep track of (the cast list at the beginning is essential), but they are worth our attention. There is Claudette, a sulky, self-centered Jewish teenager fleeing from Belgium, transformed into wife, mother, partisan fighter. There is Santino, the Sicilian infantryman and border guard who falls in love as he guides her family across the mountains and ultimately demonstrates heart-breaking nobility. There is Lidia, a sardonic, aristocratic Jewish woman, full of irony and love for her son, Renzo, an alcoholic former fighter pilot riven with guilt for his role in Mussolini's slaughter of Abyssinians. Renzo is a witty chameleon, masquerading in several guises to outwit the Germans. In one of many deeply affecting scenes, he flirts with a sweet novice nun, Sister Corniglia, while distracting two frightened Jewish children with a brilliant story.
The use of the present tense in much of the narration accelerates the pace, and sometimes I felt hustled a little too quickly past these memorable events and characters, perhaps because A Thread of Grace lacks the singular hero and heroine of novelistic convention. A screenwriter would have to pump up the young lovers, Claudette and Santino, to make leading roles worthy of star power. This is a book of ensemble heroism, extraordinarily rich in details of how the people -- city dwellers and mountain peasants -- live: their houses, their clothing, their food and how they prepare it, the landscape they live in.
Knowing so much about their material lives, we enter too little into the interior selves of these striking characters, leaving them merely sketched, given to act in situations of unbearable power that are strangely under-inhabited. As in the movies, we know them by what they do and the actions they take, often precipitously, unpremeditatedly; we do not fully know these people, and this being a rich novel, not a movie, we want to. Though lightly drawn and delineated by action, they invite deeper scrutiny.
I sense a tension in this writer, who seems torn between a desire to linger and explore her interesting creations more fully and a need to keep the action racing forward. The action wins. An addictive page-turner, A Thread of Grace satisfies our need to be reminded of how warmly inspiring humanity can be when it is moved to be generous, tolerant and forgiving. •
Robert MacNeil is the author of three novels and several nonfiction books. The latest is "Do You Speak American?," the companion to the PBS series of the same name.
