Just Enough to Start Over
Sara Gothelf Bloom’s sophisticated novel-in-vignettes Just Enough to Start Over is about an artistic German Jewish family in exile from the Nazis.
There are three Dubrovsky sisters: Bertha, a talented musician; Annelene, a gifted student of New Objectivity Expressionist artist Max Beckmann; and Hilde, a poet. They live in a world of beauty with danger and ugliness at its edges. When their lives are threatened by the Nazis, they pack up their most treasured belongings, including three significant paintings that appear as a leitmotif throughout the story, and depart for Shanghai. There, having brought “just enough to start over,” they resume their creative pursuits and await the papers that will allow them to emigrate.
Bertha marries a doctor who is also in love with Annelene. They have a daughter, Hanna, whose search for identity carries the story into the next generation. Annelene eschews domestic life and establishes herself as an artist, while Hilde falls in love with a communist poet, complicating her prospects for immigration, though she and her husband do manage to get permission to leave China in time. Meanwhile, the paintings are plundered, lost, and rediscovered.
Although slender, this novel’s scope is broad, spanning decades and continents. Its chapters dip into various characters’ lives, depicting intimate scenes contained within world events. The horror of war is conveyed via minutiae, such as in a Russian officer’s description of the Berlin Zoo: “I can smell the blood in the pool where the lone hippopotamus swims among the dead.” The paragraphs are packed with key details and place names, as rich and dense as the Black Forest chocolate cake craved by the exiles.
A gorgeous novel, Just Enough to Start Over is a feat of imagination based on meticulous research.
Reviewed by
Suzanne Kamata
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