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3.78 AVERAGE
3.78 AVERAGE
The basic plot is simple: Becca promises her dying grandmother to find out why she called herself the real Sleeping Beauty. A scant handful of photographs and documents lead her to a town in upstate New York that had a Polish refugee camp in the 1940s, and then to Poland in search of Kulmhof--better known today as Chelmno. There, Becca meets a man who knew her grandmother, who shares his perspective of the awful story of the rise of the Third Reich, the labor and death camps, and the smallest pockets of resistance.
Reading it now, I'm not sure how I got my hands on Briar Rose when I did, in seventh grade. It's billed as young adult, so maybe I picked it up at a book fair, but the protagonist is 23, fully employed, and seems to have been quite responsible about her grandmother's end of life care. And, of course, it's the Holocaust, and not a version that's been sanitized. I don't think I had read or seen anything like the descriptions of Chelmno that Yolen gives before reading this, and they stuck with me.
Which takes me to my main point: everything I remembered about this book was from Josef Potocki's story, which is essentially its own novella (novelette?) that makes up the last quarter+ of the book. Yolen sets up Becca's family and situation decently, but the plot just moseys along. Her grandmother left very few clues about her former life, but what might have been a hunt through archives and libraries and individuals' stories ends up being handed out all too easily and conveniently without false starts or dead ends or personal histories. It's not like I was flipping the pages impatiently...it's just that there isn't much here worth remembering. (Except, apparently, a couple sentences in which Becca pays a Polish cab driver in American dollars and he thinks it's the best thing ever. Why the heck did that stick with me?) Becca is a character I sympathize with because I'm interested in history and fairy tales and I love a good story...but she isn't very interesting, and neither is her easy search.
Josef Potocki, on the other hand, is a fascinating and nuanced character. I'm sure when I mentioned the resistance your first thought was of heroic deeds, but Josef makes clear that he doesn't see himself as a hero, and not in a shucks-I'm-so-modest way. He doesn't start down that road to fight injustice; it's just that the road finds him, and it's the only way he can see going forward. Not that there weren't other options, but that he just goes along with it at first to go along with something other than just waiting to die. He's ancestrally noble, wealthy, not Jewish, gay, into the arts, aware that people are disappearing without concerning himself too much until the Nazis come for him...none of what you usually read about when you read stories about the Holocaust. He lives for the moment until living for the moment becomes literal, and then he does things that authors of other novels might imply are cowardly or weak. Josef is, in short, human.
Which is why the most disappointing moment of my reread was realizing that we weren't going to get more of his story. Look, I get that the book is about Becca and her grandmother and that we've found the end of this version of Sleeping Beauty...but wouldn't it be a basic courtesy for Becca to ask Josef how he got through the war? Why he ended up staying in Poland? What he did after the war? Whether he ever had another partner? Instead, at the end of his powerful story, which was the whole reason this book has its staying power for me, Becca in one short chapter goes back to the States and her significantly older insta-boyfriend. Ugh. Becca's grandmother made a point of saying that happily ever after doesn't always include a prince--how could it, when hers hadn't been in most of her life?--but for some reason Becca's story needs to, even though it would not be hard to take Mr. Obligatory Love Interest out entirely. It feels trite and almost disrespectful to move so quickly from some of the darkest days of history to shoehorned romance.
The actual retelling succeeds--so well that it sparked my passion for fairy tale reimaginings that persists to this day. It is remarkable how many elements of the traditional story fit neatly into the terrors of the Holocaust, and vice versa, without it feeling like Yolen is manipulating already awful facts to fit her story. She's up front in her preface and afterword about the things that she does change.
It didn't take many more novels about the Holocaust before I started to feel that they were unnecessarily emotionally exploitive--trauma porn, it's called now--and started avoiding them in favor of just confronting the history. It could very well be that I only found Josef so compelling even the second time around because I don't read these kinds of novels often. Still, I'm grateful that I did read this one and that Josef Potocki was the first gay character I met in fiction. The characters I encountered in the next few years were largely sexless GBFs, sex-crazed stereotypes, or noble sacrifices/"buried gays", all defined by their queerness before any other qualities. Josef, on the other hand, is the most three-dimensional character in Briar Rose and he is the last one of Becca's grandmother's generation standing.
Given the slowness of the majority of the book, I won't rush to recommend this to everyone...but if you like fairy tale retellings, I encourage you to learn about Becca's grandmother and meet Josef Potocki.
Quote Roundup
97) "I judge people by how well they read maps."
Ha! That hasn't aged well. Or maybe it aged especially well...
202) Why did he stay in Germany? Why did anyone stay?
A mist still lay all about the walls and floors, hovering like a last breath on the lips of all the sleepers. As he walked through the castle, he marveled at how many lay asleep: the good people, the not-so-good, the young people and the not-so-young, and not one of them stirring. Not one.
There is a constant argument going on in the world of historians and artists - to what extent is it acceptable to create art about the Holocaust? Is it heinous to create beauty out of something so deeply horrific? Or is it a natural response to a collective trauma that the world, even almost a century later, hasn't really processed?(and let's pray we never do. To understand and accept an act of such pure evil is something that I hope we as human beings aren't capable of.)
I don't have an answer to these questions. But Jane Yolen certainly has her own fascinating perspective.
Briar Rose is the story of a young woman named Becca who grew up entranced by her grandmother's dark, unsettling, odd version of the Sleeping Beauty myth - a myth made only more complex by her grandmother's repeated insistence that she is Briar Rose. When her grandmother uses her last breaths to make Becca swear that she will find "the castle" and "the prince" and solve the mystery, Becca's whole family dismisses it as the addled ramblings of a feeble old mind. But Becca knows there is more there. She believes it. She believes that there is a metaphorical curse on her family history that she must break. And as she delves deeper and deeper into the mist that was her grandmother's previous life, she uncovers horrors beyond anyone's imagining.
Becca is a journalist - a storyteller for the modern era, one who doesn't break curses through true love and kisses, but through facts and whistleblowing and investigation. She tells her stories by making everything as clear as possible. Gemma was a storyteller who told her stories by obscuring everything in layers of metaphor and symbolism, because the real truth was too terrifying to even think about. With Gemma's stories, fairy tales and history became one and the same. Fairy tales are an oral tradition; they are passed down from generation to generation. Family history, and in this case first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, operate the same way.
Storytelling is the central theme of this book - and more importantly, the question of why and how we tell stories. We oftentimes don't know what to do with stories about the Holocaust; we simply don't know how to process them, how to think about them. We have to know them, to talk about them, but as the years go on and on, they start to seem more like myth. Like legend, like something that could only have happened once upon a time. Like fairytales.
But we can not and should not be satisfied by viewing these stories through the lens of unreality. We have to dig. We have to find the truth. Like Becca, it is the responsibility of storytellers everywhere to keep stories alive. To pass them down. To not let them fade away and be forgotten, as so many folk tales and oral legends do.
Becca is the prince in this story; the one who traverses walls of barbed wire thorns and streets of corpses sleeping folk to break the spell. And she succeeds. But in the end, she can not undo what has been done. She sees the horrible truth with the fairytale stripped away, and there is nothing she can do but try to come to terms with such horrifying, all-encompassing destruction. And that is the nature of art and stories about the Holocaust. We must make them, because we seek to understand, and to know, and to lift some burden - but in the end it changes nothing. We can never know or understand. All we can do is put it out into the world, and hope that this one more voice, this one more story, will be remembered, and not left to rot in some impenetrable, forgotten, death-like sleep.
The story was definitely fascinating - the family knew pretty much nothing of the grandmother's experiences before she came to America, including her involvement with a death camp and the resistance against the Nazis in World War II. Those aspects of the story were absolutely the most intriguing to me.
The fairy tale part just seemed to be there to add some light to the subject. And the granddaughter that is actually involved has a random love interest that literally makes no sense in the scheme of the actual plot. I also didn't care to know anything about her bratty sisters as they didn't care at all about the grandmother's past anyway and came off as just total filler material.
Essentially, the entirety of the interesting plot took place in about 1/4 of the novel, which is saying something since the whole book is less than 200 pages. I wasn't super impressed with this one.
