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A review by books_n_pickles
Briar Rose: A Novel of the Holocaust by Jane Yolen
3.0
This book has the distinction of being one of the first fairy tale retellings I ever read, one of the first books I read about the Holocaust/Shoa (after [b:The Secret Cave|2272878|The Secret Cave|Claire Huchet Bishop|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1461532004l/2272878._SX50_.jpg|1917997], which doesn't really count), and the first book I read with a gay character.
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?
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?