The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010. 603 pages
By David Strom
SAN DIEGO–All of us have faced and crossed some invisible bridges in our lives. Did you notice the bridge you crossed from childhood into adulthood? Did you feel it? We often feel the “rocky and sometimes stormy bridge” from the world of a single person to the “magical” world of marriage. In our existing society and culture, this is such a huge bridge that we cannot mistake it as invisible. When did I cross the bridge to old age? When did I lose my Jewishness on forms where I am asked to check a box regarding my ethnicity and become “white”? Did I have to cross a bridge to accomplish it or did it happen because American society rapidly changed? How many more bridges do I still have to cross in my life? Most of the bridges in life are invisible and the crossing is gentle, imperceptible and generally unknown.
Julie Orringer’s The Invisible Bridge is a long and somewhat complicated American novel. Orringer, the author writes her story about bridges from the perspective of a Jewish Hungarian family that survived the horrors of the Holocaust, the Stalinist era and eventually settled in the United States.
It is 1937 in Eastern Europe. Hungary exists and is seemingly free. But is it? Many parts of the world are still in an economic depression. Hungary is ensnared by the deep economic depression. Nazism conquered the German people. Anti-Semitism, which existed prior to the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany, grows rapidly in other parts of Europe, including Hungary. Most Hungarians are poor, including many Jewish Hungarians. All are doing their best to survive, but anti-Semitism makes it harder for Jews to economically survive.
Orringer describes the plight of the Levi family trying to cope with the economic depression. They were observant Jews with three young boys/men eligible for the army. They moved from a small town in Hungary to Budapest, hoping for a better education for their children and to find work. Along with these typical problems, they tried to figure out what was happening politically in Europe. As the noose was tightening around the neck of Jews, how long would it be safe to remain in their homeland? Where could they go even if they had exit visas and money to leave? Not many legal doors were open to them.
A few of their relatives and friends escaped to Palestine, illegally of course. But they seemed safer there than in Europe. And now, Andras, the middle son, who was selected through a competitive contest for a few number of openings, was going off to study architecture at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris. The schools, in 1937 Hungary restricted the number of Jewish students to six percent of the student body. France, on the other hand, did not have a written numerus clausus. Tibor, Andras’s older brother, hoped to attend a medical school in Italy. For three years, Tibor had been working and saving as much money as he could to pay the tuition to the medical school.
The day before Andras and Tibor said their sorrowful goodbyes at the Budapest train station, another Hungarian Jewish family learned Andras was going to Paris. This well-off family urged Andras to take a gift and a letter to Paris. Of course, he replied, he would take them. So Andras crossed a few invisible bridges going from Hungary to France. These were not his first invisible bridge crossings, nor would they be his last. Andras Levi went off to new adventures as an architectural student in the wonderful cosmopolitan Paris.
Andras delivered the gift from the rich Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest to Jozef Hasz, a student who “partied” most of the time. But he forgot to immediately deliver the letter. A few days later, when he remembered that he had not delivered the letter, Andras decided to hand-deliver it.
The letter addressed to Klara Morgenstern, took Andras to a Parisian neighborhood that he was not familiar with (not that he was knowledgeable with many of the city streets). Klara Morgenstern’s home was also her dance studio. She taught aspiring youngsters the art of ballet and other dance forms.
Andras delivered the letter and observed that Klara was a bit older than he. She was petite, beautiful and full of life. She welcomed him and was glad he delivered the letter from her mother in Hungary-she had not seen her mother in over 16 years. Klara had left 16 years earlier and made a life of her own in Paris. Her husband was dead and she was raising a difficult and turbulent teenage daughter.
Andras was nine years younger than Klara. Immediately smitten by her beauty, he wanted to see her again. He wanted to be her friend-but there was that invisible bridge “the age gap”. Could he cross it? Could she? Andras was going to give it a try. Eventually they became lovers and finally married.
At the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture, Andras made fast friends with some other Jewish students. Though he felt freer in France, Andras learned that anti-Semitism existed even in schools of higher learning. Most of the students did not bother the Jewish students but those who did were hoping and working for the time when the Jewish students would be expelled. The anti-Semitic students often became violent. Polaner, one of Andras good friends, was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized and almost didn’t live.
The administration of the school did not display any anti-Semitism. When Polaner was beaten and told who had beaten him, that student along with his accomplices was expelled by the administration. By 1939 because of the continuing depression, Andras’s scholarship money no longer existed. He was forced to cross another invisible bridge. Should he stay or should he return to Hungary?
Klara, as Klara Levi, hoped that her return would not raise the eyebrows of any Hungarian authorities. Why? Why had Klara waited sixteen years before returning to the land of her birth? Andras did not finish his schooling. Klara closed her school after she learned she was pregnant. Thus in 1939, Klara and Andras Levi returned to Hungary.
The war in Europe finally arrived in Hungary. All of the usual Nazi laws were passed like: no Jews could work as professionals. Businesses were confiscated, well-qualified students were not allowed into universities and Jews were “recruited” for six months to work for labor battalions. Andras, Tibor, and Matyas were placed in work camps. Matyas’s battalion was sent to the eastern front in the Soviet Union. Andras and Tibor were assigned closer to home-so many unexpected and invisible bridges they were now forced to cross.
Over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were murdered during the Holocaust in less than two years. Andras Levi’s family, like so many other Jewish families, suffered their share of losses. Klara’s oldest daughter, the one she raised by herself in Paris married an American. She got to the United States prior to America’s entry into the ordeal. After the war ended, she sponsored and welcomed the rest of the living Levis to the safe haven of America.
The author, Julie Orringer, gave us a historically accurate view of Hungary during and after the Holocaust. Each of the main characters was believable and understandable. Most are people like us. The reader feels that we know them and what they would do in difficult situations. Those “invisible” bridges they faced are often bridges all of us face sometime in our lives. They are good and bad, heroic and cowardly, sensitive and insensitive, kind and mean, hopeless and hopeful, secretive and open, but mainly they are humane human beings. One of the important bridges I crossed was from a minute bit of knowledge of the Holocaust in Hungary to a better understanding of the tragic role played by Hungarians in their bridge crossings. The book is worthwhile reading even if a bit long.
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Strom is professor emeritus of education at San Diego State University