Jay’s prose moves with a confident ease, never difficult, resonating with meaning while avoiding turgidity. These three characters alternate chapters, creating a rich tapestry of emotion and action. Finally, on the domestic front, Herbert Muller is a German immigrate, naturalized, living in Pennsylvania enduring the bigoted hatred excessive patriotism and nationalism unleashes during times of war. We watch as a Dutch, half-Jewish boy, Izaak Tauber, is swept up and taken to concentration camps while always hoping to find his father somewhere in the horror. There is a Nazi SS officer, Wilhelm Falk, whose experience with the death camps causes him to abandon his home, family, and nation to get the word out about the crimes against humanity happening behind enemy lines. Readers are presented three points of view throughout the novel. Such a maneuver is what the best historical fiction does. Jay is one such writer, and her When We Were Brave is an exceptional historical novel giving readers deep emotional and pragmatic insight into the lives of characters whose being was shaped and who shaped our understanding of the time. Writing within such a space requires a deft and empathetic writer. For clear moral reasons, historical fiction cedes ground to memoir when it comes to something as visceral and existentially horrific as the Holocaust, yet there is space. Within the genre of historical fiction, World War II novels tend to take up quite a bit of space.
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