With ‘Tears of Amber,’ Sofía Segovia returns to her U.S. audience with a story of World War II resilience | Book review

Tears of Amber

By Sofía Segovia; translated by Simon Bruni

Amazon Crossing. 493 pp. $14.95

Reviewed by Manuel Roig-Franzia

There's a burden readers can place on novelists who write really good books.

It's not fair or even realistic. But it's human nature.

You read a book you love, then you expect all the author's other works to live up to the one you enjoyed so much.

Even though I fought that inclination, it was with this mind-set that I came to Tears of Amber, the latest book translated into English by the Mexican writer Sofía Segovia.

Readers in the United States were introduced to Segovia’s lyrical writing and fresh, inventive storytelling in 2019 when her enchanting novel The Murmur of the Bees was published by Amazon Crossing in an English translation. The book, set in Mexico during the 1918 influenza pandemic, brought to life an unforgettable character named Simonopio, a boy born with no upper lip, gums or palate who is forever followed by a swarm of bees and is graced with mystical powers of premonition.

Simonopio is a tough act to follow, so it’s no knock on Ilse and Arno, the children at the center of Tears of Amber, that they suffer a bit by comparison when it comes to implanting themselves in our minds for all time. That’s not to say that Tears of Amber — like Murmur of the Bees, ably translated by Simon Bruni — is a bad book or that Ilse and Arno are subpar characters.

On the contrary, Tears of Amber — though overlong and lacking the magical delights of Segovia’s previous book — is a skillfully rendered tale, at once heartbreaking and heartwarming. The book, a fictionalized account of actual events, is set in the years before, during and after World War II in the region then known as East Prussia, which would be carved up by Poland and the Soviet Union after the war.

The parallel stories of Ilse and Arno begin on East Prussian farms that they are later forced to flee as Soviet forces push into the region late in the war. Arno's first memory is attending a Hitler rally in 1938 at the age of 3 on the shoulders of his father, who'd become entranced with the Nazi leader's promises of a glorious future.

The little boy joins the crowd in saluting Hitler "without wondering and without asking what it was that they were repeating with such fervor."

“For the rest of his life, that day remained a painful and almost forbidden subject.”

Ilse’s parents, her mother in particular, are not duped by Hitler’s mad vision, but they are forced by the Nazis to work their land to produce food for German soldiers. They’re assisted on the farm by Polish captives who have been conscripted as Zivilarbeiters, or civilian workers, though in reality they are slave laborers. Little Ilse forms an enduring friendship with one of the Poles, Janusz, who “without uttering a single word” is somehow able to tell her “stories born from a cabin in the depths of a Polish forest — his forest — where all there would’ve been, were it not for these tales, was silence, hunger, cold and tears.”

Segovia toggles between the stories of Ilse and Arno as they encounter tragedy, hunger, and life-threatening cold while trying to outrun the advancing Soviet forces.

"To survive one must move," a kindly man tells Arno.

What's remarkable and inspiring is that the hardships do not strip them of their humanity.

When someone dies, Janusz asks Ilse's mother why she brings their urgent flight to a halt. Ilse replies: "To give him a Christian burial."

Both Ilse and Arno are forced to make adjustments no child should endure as they mark each birthday during the war until they're 9 and 10. The moment her mother informs her that they must leave the farm, "Ilse was no longer a child," Segovia writes.

But she manages to be a source of strength to her family while remaining what she is: a little girl.

"Ilse saw her childhood so vividly that it was like something she could pick up or put down as needed." So she insists on bringing her doll as they race away from their farm. For Ilse, it is the "tool" she can use to reclaim her childhood along the way, and a "shield" against her childhood being stripped away altogether.

For Arno — whose father has been forced to join Hitler’s army, even as his fervor for the Nazi cause wanes — there are moral imperatives. When he takes a butcher’s cleaver from one home, he wonders, “Did it count as stolen?” He decides “God would understand.”

Crawling through ruins, Arno thinks of himself as navigating a labyrinth, where he realizes the pressure that has been building inside him is "pent-up tears. He didn't want to let them out inside his labyrinth; they would be so fierce, he thought, they'd shake the foundationless structure and bring it down."

These children of war are intent on surviving, but, like all who encounter man's atrocities, they accumulate scars that can endure.

At one point, Ilse finds herself “alone in the confusion. That was her bloodless, invisible wound.”