Captivating Nazi tale

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt (translated by Adriana Hunter)

Atlantic Books,

£9.99

Review: Billy O’Callaghan

Though Noah’s Child is only now reaching English-speaking audiences, it has already enjoyed considerable global success, helping to establish critically acclaimed novelist and playwright Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt as the world’s most widely-read contemporary French writer.

For such a short novel, this one has a rare resonance. The fourth and final in a loose sequence intent on exploring the traumas and triumphs of childhood and religion, Noah’s Child tackles a particularly difficult subject, a first-person narrative recollection of a Jewish child surviving the 1942 Nazi invasion of Belgium. And it succeeds with stately aplomb.

The story is a captivating one: As the pogroms sweep Brussels, seven-year-old Joseph is torn for his own protection from a loving family life, given a new identity and hidden in a backwater orphanage, the Villa Jaune, under the safeguard of an heroic priest, Fr Pons. Inevitably traumatised, Joseph struggles to settle, but after being befriended by an older boy, Rudy, gradually adjusts to his new life and becomes, in a way, institutionalised.

The school has day students as well as boarders, and showers are arranged by carefully selected group, so that the Jewish children can be safely hidden among the flock. And soon it becomes clear that Father Pons has secrets of his own, hidden in the basement of the deconsecrated chapel towards the estate’s far end. Discovered one night by the inquisitive Joseph, he has little choice but to take the boy into his confidence.

Father Pons is a collector. In explanation, he offers the analogy of Noah’s ark, and the gathering of animals. Now that a different kind of flood has come, he has set himself two major tasks: to save the lives of as many Jewish children as possible from the relentless Nazi searches, and to preserve the artefacts of an entire ancient culture. Beneath the chapel is a secret synagogue, cluttered with a carefully hoarded treasure trove of Talmud and Torah scrolls, rabbinical commentaries, menorahs and recorded prayer music.

Mr Schmitt’s writing is fluid and carefully paced. Understanding unfolds naturally as themes of love, friendship, guilt, heroism and survival are weighed and measured, and as religion is stripped of title and considered at its core. The author’s apparent simplicity of style is skilful, as is his ability to create realistic, fully rounded characters. Most notable, though, is the careful manipulation of emotion. Scenes swing without warning, and minor details carry the real weight. The result is a book possessed of extraordinary humanity, a soulful offering that echoes long after reading.