From the Publisher
In the last months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, two children are left by their father and stepmother to find safety in a dense forest. Because their real names will reveal their Jewishness, they are renamed "Hansel" and "Gretel." They wander in the woods until they are taken in by Magda, an eccentric and stubborn old woman called "witch" by the nearby villagers. Magda is determined to save them, even as a German officer arrives in the village with his own plans for the children.
Combining classic themes of fairy tales and war literature, this haunting novel of journey and survival, of redemption and memory, powerfully depicts how war is experienced by families and especially by children, and tells a resonant, riveting story.
The New York Times
… one might expect a diminished sense of reality in Murphy's novel, but that is never the case. … Murphy also captures the polarity of good and evil in such times. As one character says (and one suspects that Auerbach might agree): ''Every Pole who isn't a devil is an angel.''
— Neil Gordon
Publishers Weekly
A provocative transformation of the classic fairy tale into a haunting survival story set in Poland during WWII, Murphy's second novel (after The Sea Within) is darkly enchanting. Two Jewish children, a girl of 11 and her seven-year-old brother, are left to wander the woods after their father and stepmother are forced to abandon them, frantically begging them never to say their Jewish names, but to identify themselves as Hansel and Gretel. In an imaginative reversal of the original tale, they encounter a small woman named Magda, known as a "witch" by villagers, who risks her life in harboring them. The story alternates between the children's nightmarish adventures, and their parents' struggle for survival and hope for a safe reunion. This mirror image of the fairy tale is deliberately disorienting, as Murphy describes the horrors of the outside world compared with the haven inside Magda's hut, and the fear and anguish of the other people who conspire to save the children and protect their own families, too. The na ve siblings are only half-conscious of much of this, though they are perfectly aware of their peril should they be discovered. The graphic details-the physical symptoms of near starvation, the infestations of lice, the effects of bitter cold-make it plain that this is the grimmest kind of fable. Eventually, the Nazis indulge in wholesale slaughter, and the children barely survive, hiding and on the run. No reader who picks up this inspiring novel will put it down until the final pages, in which redemption is not a fairy tale ending but a heartening message of hope. (Aug.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Nola Theiss
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KLIATT
Using the framework of the famous fairy tale, this novel set in Poland during WW II tells of a Jewish brother and sister set out in a forest by their father and stepmother who feel their best chance for survival is to be rescued by villagers. They are told to forget their real names and use the names Hansel and Gretel. They are taken in by Magda, an old woman who is called a witch by the villagers because she lives alone in the forest and knows herbal medicine. The father and stepmother join the partisans hiding in the woods. While elements of the simple fairy tale plot hold the story together, Murphy weaves many other layers together as well: the interaction of the SS officers with the villagers, the Russians and the Poles, the Jews and the Gentiles as well as the story of the relationship of the young brother and sister who alternately take charge but also take care of each other. Focusing on this microcosm of the war, Murphy brings its horrors to the reader in a personal and human way. KLIATT Codes: SA-Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2003, Penguin, 296p., Ages 15 to adult.
Library Journal
A post-Holocaust literature is emerging that differs from its antecedents in that its chroniclers have not directly lived through the Holocaust themselves but have appropriated it in attempts to deepen our understanding of this perhaps most heinous episode in human history. Through such fictionalized accounts, this universalization of the Holocaust experience is now making it a part of every human's heritage, like it or not. Poet and novelist Murphy (The Sea Within) contributes to that legacy with a gripping tale that takes as its point of departure the story of Hansel and Gretel and stays remarkably close to the original version, with significant twists. Murphy's Hansel and Gretel are Jewish children abandoned by their father and stepmother deep in the Polish forest in a desperate attempt to hide them from the Nazis after their escape from the Bialystok ghetto. The children, to whom they give fairy-tale names to conceal their Jewishness, encounter Magda the "witch," as the nearby villagers call her, who takes them into her hut not to destroy but to shield them. This harrowing portrayal of the daily ordeal of Poles caught up in the German occupation-Gentiles as well as Jews-makes this a page-turner as well as a moving testament to the human will to do good and survive despite all odds. Highly recommended.-Edward Cone, New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
A classic fairy tale is darkly reimagined in this brutally explicit Holocaust story by poet and second-novelist Murphy (The Sea Within, 1985). The eponymous protagonists are Polish Jews, the preadolescent daughter and seven-year-old son of a fugitive intellectual ironically nicknamed "the Mechanic," who survived by servicing German military vehicles. In the late stages of the war, the Mechanic and his second wife "rename" his children and send them into a forest, hoping they can elude both Nazi pursuers and advancing Russian troops. The children are taken in by an aged "witch," Magda, and reluctantly sheltered by the embattled residents of a nearby Polish village. At first juxtaposing the ordeals of the children and their father, Murphy gradually expands her novel’s scope, focusing in turn on an unwed pregnant woman (Nelka) and the redoubtable villager (Telek) who loves her; Magda’s brother, a sin-burdened priest who redeems himself by a heroic sacrifice; and German Major Frankel, a suave monster who "refreshes" himself with the transfused blood of Polish women and orchestrates the inspection of their children for the purposes of "assimilation into the German people." Murphy’s crisp prose renders the war’s terrors memorably, and she makes expert use of indigenous folklore and superstition—perhaps expressed most beautifully in "Gretel’s" declaration to "Hansel" that stars above them are "all the Jews that died . . . and went up in the air, and the stars are the stars that they wore on their coats." Comparisons to Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird are inevitable, but the relentlessly grim depiction of the children’s perilous odyssey, and especially the stalwart, mordant figure of Magda(whose eventual fate and transfiguration are stunningly described) link it even more closely with Davis Grubb’s Appalachian morality tale The Night of the Hunter. Only an unconvincing hopeful ending and elegiac coda dilute the power of Murphy’s unusually gripping fiction. Lyrical, haunting, unforgettable. Agent: Elizabeth Winick/McIntosh and Otis
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