The Bitterest Age. - book reviews

Christian Century, June 29, 1994 by Trudy Bush

By Raymond Kennedy. Ticknor and Fields, 218 pp., $22.95.

MY MOTHER surprised me recently by saying that she liked to remember the time she spent as a refugee in Germany during and immediately after the final year of World War II. "We were hungry and afraid most of the time," she said. "But I remember how people tried to help each other and how close we felt to each other." She and my grandmother succeeded in getting two tiny children--one a six-week-old baby--safely from Yugoslavia to Bavaria, first by horse and wagon, then in box cars jammed with fellow refugees. Somehow they managed to find enough food and survive the bombings. instead of the horror, she remembers the kindnesses: the old woman who nursed my brother through pneumonia when my mother was too sick to care for him; the friends who shared their last bits of food with us; the strangers who sheltered us.

The same sense of danger and hardship heroically survived marks Raymond Kennedy's World War II novel. The story centers on a mother and two children who have left Berlin to escape the bombings and are waiting out the war in nearby Potsdam. The mother, Ursula, is uninterested in politics and immune to propaganda. She struggles to maintain a home for her children and to bring them safely through the war, as well as to do her part in caring for the sick and wounded. But the book's heroine is ten-year-old Ingeborg. Though everyone else loses hope, Ingeborg persists in believing that her father, reported missing in action, is alive and will return to them. She is determined to remain in Potsdam to wait for him.

Despite its considerable realistic detail, Kennedy's novel has something of the air of a legend or a fairy tale. Precocious, beautiful, naturally aristocratic and heroic, Ingeborg has the qualities. of a creature of myth while remaining convincingly a child. "In the hardest times," Ursula reflects, "God creates the most precious children. I think that all over the world the dearest children that God ever made are being made now, in our time." Thinking of how heroic her children have been, she believes that there must surely be "a grand new age to come. How could that not be true?"

The connection that Ingeborg feels with her father convinces her that she would know if he had died. She is sustained by her strong sense that he is alive and traveling toward her, and by her conviction that focusing her thoughts and imagination on him will help him reach his family. While keeping her inward vigil, Ingeborg also lives fully in the Potsdam of the final year of the war and the beginning of the Russian occupation. She lives through the bombings and the hunger, makes friends, flirts with a young soldier, and gets to know the lonely, middle-aged Nazi block warden, who promises to make her a garden when the war ends but who is hanged as soon as the Russians occupy the city.

Not all the characters are as apolitical as the chief protagonists: Ursula's friends are politically aware and cynical; a Russian officer talks about the concentration camps; and a countess's husband is tortured and killed for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. By focusing on the humanity and heroism of a small family, however, Kennedy has created a universal story of faithfulness and hope in the midst of great adversity. Though the grand new age Ursula hoped for did not come, stories like this remind us that heroism and self-less love often emerge out of suffering and chaos.