Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer (2010)

Amazing book, one of my books of the year for 2010. Heavy, but always with a ray of hope. The book begins in 1938 (I think), just at the bring of World War II, when Andras Levi from Hungary, gets the opportunity to study architecture in Paris. (Since I am leaving for Paris in a few days, this just seemed more than a coincidence.) He meets a wonderful woman - Klara, a ballet instructor from Hungary - and falls in love. Luckily the first half of the book is about this fairly pleasant time in Paris, the trials of studying architecture, the friendships of Andres with three other Jewish men, the love story.  We slowly see the growth of antisemitism, and when the war breaks out, Andras and Klara are forced to return to Hungary, where the Jewish men are forced to work in work brigades. We keep seeing the evolution of the Nazi war against the Jews - taking away one privilege after another, executing them, hoarding them into ghettos, sending them off to concentration camps. This was very hard to listen to, and there were times when I just had to stop the book. I even listened to another book in between, this got too heavy for me. I kept trying to remember the exact dates of various parts of the war, and kept hoping the calendar would speed up, so that Germany would be defeated and our heroes be OK. But time kept dragging - not the book itself, it just took its time showing us the various aspects of the Jewish and the general population's suffering in Hungary, how some tried to escape to Palestine, a bit about German officers and some of their proclivities, the corruption. The work in the woods and elsewhere was difficult, the food meager. My parents did not suffer to that extent, but my mother did work in the woods of Germany after the war, and they all suffered major food shortages. I wonder if anyone has written a novel about the Jews in Latvia. I was glad to learn a bit more about Hungary and Budpest and some of the surrounding areas, but it would also be interesting to hear a novelized version of the same time frame in Latvia from a Jewish perspective. I am sure there would be many similarities.