Train to Warsaw, The: A Novel
Edelman’s first novel, War Story (2001), made a splash. The title of this postwar tale refers to the trains that left the Warsaw ghetto for the camps. Jascha Kroll, né Krasniewski, and his wife, Lilka, return to Warsaw, a city they never expected to see again, happy as they were to escape it. Kroll, famous for his novel about the ghetto, has been invited to give a reading. On the long ride there and during two long nights in Warsaw, Jascha and Lilka remember and relive their harrowing internment and narrow escape. Jascha was a swaggering smuggler, Lilka a nurse. Their visit prompts revelations. The past is still present, pressing relentlessly on their sense of themselves as Jews, as Poles, as Polish Jews and on their life together as the love of each other’s lives. “Can it be, he asked, that you’ve forgotten what fear is?,” is a rhetorical query. The most compelling part of this war story is how Jascha and Lilka inhabit such different answers to that crucial question. --Michael Autrey