"Clara Mondschein's Melancholia"

“Clara Mondschein’s Melancholia” (MacAdam/Cage, 2002), by Anne Raeff, is a beautifully written book, dense with reading pleasures. This may sound like an odd thing to say about a novel about Holocaust survivors and their descendants. But the emphasis in this novel is on the living, and on the pure force of life. The title character, Clara, was miraculously born in, and survived, a German concentration camp in World War II, and has ever after experienced bouts of melancholy, or as doctors would call it now, depression, by which she is often immobilized. Although she is the title character, Clara is not the main character. The two main characters are Clara’s mother, Ruth, and daughter, Deborah. Their two voices alternate as they tell the stories of the three generations of women. Clara, in the middle generation, tends to be indistinct and somewhat mysterious, although we understand that she suffers from the well-known syndrome of lifelong psychological effects of being a Holocaust survivor, or the child of survivors. It seems that Clara’s indistinctness is intentional on the part of the author, because the true stories here are those vividly told in the distinct, original, and -- in different ways -- very appealing voices of Ruth and Deborah, characters who practically jump off the page. These two also love, feel comfortable with, and learn from each other. Each of the two has a deep inner strength and resilience that allows her to overcome hardship and to dive into life and savor it. I want to repeat that the writing is beautiful. The author shows complete control of her material; readers immediately know they are in good hands, and continue to feel that sensation throughout the novel. Highly recommended.