When Nazi forces occupy the beautiful coastal city of Yalta, everything changes. Eighteen-year-old Filip has few options; he is a prime candidate for forced labor in Germany. His hurried marriage to Galina might grant him reprieve, but the rules keep changing. Galina’s parents, branded as traitors for innocently doing business with the enemy, decide to volunteer in hopes of better placement. The … The work turns out to be horrific, but at least the family stays together. By winter 1945, Allied air raids destroy strategic sites, but Dresden, a city of no military consequence, seems safe. The world knows Dresden’s fate. Roads is the story of one family lucky enough to escape with their lives as Dresden burns behind them. But as the war ends, they are separated and their trials continue. Looking for safety in an alien land, they move toward one another with the help of refugee networks and pure chance. Along the way, they find new ways to live in a changed world–new meanings for fidelity, grief, and love.Â
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Marina Antropow Cramer’s debut novel, Roads, begins with a family in the beautiful coastal city of Yalta, Crimea in the early 1940s. It is well researched, the characters are unforgettable and the plot takes so many twists that the readers is tied in knots at times trying to imagine how anyone survived at all.
Before long, the Nazis arrive. At first the occupation’s only effect on their idyllic life by the sea is shortages of basic supplies. The Yalta citizens adjust to the changes the best they can. Then a few people start disappearing, followed by whole families, and finally the public hangings of their neighbors and friends who were deemed Nazi traitors. The suffering of ordinary Russians during WWII was portrayed with empathy and skill through Galina, her father, Ilya, and her mother, Ksenia. Beautiful sixteen year old Galina offers to marry her seventeen year old childhood friend, Filip, to save him from being sent away to a German work camp, or worse. Despite the atrocities on the streets of Yalta, he and his Communist parents share an arrogant sense of entitlement, often common to those in politics. Galina’s parents share a rare devotion to each other and their family. This is the love Galina expects when she hastily marries Filip.
The author’s skill at threading themes through the story with her multi layered characters has a spellbinding affect. Galina and her parent’s sense of hope and survival are inspiring. In desperation Galina, Filip and her parents volunteer to go to Germany to work in the factories and farms; they wear German uniforms with Russian badges sewn on their sleeves. Their choices make sense to them as they make them, though each decision proves worse than the one before. When they decide to go to Dresden to avoid the bombings, I wanted to whisper to them on the pages, “No, no, anywhere but Dresden!” But of course that is not how the reading process works.
The men and women are soon sent to separate camps and survival becomes a daily struggle. Self-centered Filip continues to work the least and gain the most from his efforts. Galina and Ksenia use the fragmented organization of the church as well as refugee networks to eventually find Ilya and Filip in 1945. By then Galina has lost her naivety, and realizes she will never have the kind of love with Filip that her parents share. She has learned first -hand the true meanings of fidelity, trust, grief and family.
They discover a new world after the war, and the tranquility and joy of their home in Yalta before the war is nothing but a sweet memory – seemingly from another life. They adjust to their ever changing world, a world where the complacent answers of their youth to life’s dilemmas would never again be appropriate.
I have read many WWII novels over the years, stories of civilians of German, French, Italian, Japanese, Philippine, Dutch, Norwegian, Russians in the Siege of St. Petersburg, and Holocaust victims but this one has a totally different angle. The author was born in postwar Germany to Russian refugees. She said this novel started as she was growing up among Russian expatriates and listening to their stories, totally unaware that someday she might creatively combine them into a novel. Readers of this wonderful novel will be forever grateful she did. She does a good service to her Russian ancestry shedding a far different light on everyday Russians than the news media does on daily basis.
While this review is not about me, anyone weighing my words should know from the outset that I am a horrible reader, easily distracted and, all too often, I am ashamed to admit, I struggle to finish novels. Set against this contextual backdrop, I positively devoured Roads, not just once but twice, a year or so ago and, again, just this week, to refresh and validate my preliminary observations. There are multiple reasons for the felicitous reading experience that Cramer provides, to wit (1) A well-judged balance between descriptive passages and dialog; (2) Her disarmingly easy way with narrative, offering up keenly observed details which, far from overburdening the reader, develop and sustain the ambience permeating the work, while also helping to ensure a consistent pace by providing a gentle nudge as needed to aid plot advancement; (3) Speaking of the plot, it is reassuringly linear and there is no wasteful expense of gray matter to comprehend some unnecessary, complex chronology; (4) Cramer’s narrative style tends to the intrusive. While I recognize that this may not be to everyone’s taste, I welcome the resultant clarity afforded by authorial explanation of an event that is about to unfold or an exchange that has just transpired (often conveyed via italicized text), as unresolved or protracted ambiguity can be draining on mental bandwidth when there is no apparent, literary justification for having sown it initially.
In terms of the characters, certain reviewers have commented about the lack of a strong, male personage, with some going so far as to identify this as a structural deficiency of the novel. I totally reject this analysis. While Cramer undoubtedly displays an impressive adeptness in the way she presents us with the rounded characters of Galina and Ksenia, to look for a dominant male is, to my mind, to miss the point. The protagonists are trapped between Stalin’s and Hitler’s respective manifestations of tyranny. Each is horrifically bleak and, by 1945, no Allied government has the economic might or, frankly, the appetite to provide overnight solutions for the mass of displaced persons. There is a tremendous – yet wholly realistic – focus on the quotidian quest for food. Survival is dependent on a combination of ingenuity, bravery, strength, both physical and mental, and tenacity, along with occasional picaresque relief thrown in for good measure. Neither Filip nor Maksim is equipped to prevail in this most Darwinian of environments.
That being said, a more pertinent question, perhaps, is whether the novel suffers for the lack of a more romantically drawn male character. Again, I would emphatically refute this assertion. Roads is not some Hollywood-inspired wartime tragedy, where two lovers are ripped from each other by some senseless act of brutality. No, there is no Hollywood glamor here; on the contrary, the work is firmly anchored in the grim reality of WW2 and the daily struggle to stay alive. There is no time for romantic love. Indeed, Galina’s and Filip’s decision to marry was motivated by the naïve hope that it would enable the latter to remain in Yalta. In the final chapter, we learn of her realization that her love for Filip is not as deep or as powerful as that which her parents share. They are not true soulmates and will never become so. Accordingly, it makes sense that Cramer’s narrative provides frequent reminders of Filip’s egocentric, self-indulgent, superior personality.
No review of Roads would be complete without discussion of the work’s ending. I am somewhat bemused by the lukewarm reception it has received. As I have noted, Roads is not a ‘happily ever after’ love story, nor is it a fully blown tragedy. It is about the domestic battle for survival of a family during the war years and their efforts to reunite in the immediate aftermath. Life offers no guarantees and the future remains uncertain. However, the next phase of Galina’s and Filip’s life in Belgium, the search for Filip’s parents, Katya’s childhood, these are matters for another day, a sequel, maybe:-).