The Polish Woman by Eva Mekler

The literature of the Holocaust understandably focuses on the loss of life on a scale that beggars comprehension. In The Polish Woman, Eva Mekler takes a less-traveled road and explores the loss of identity.

Today, we tend to think of identity theft as a crime that is an especially exasperating curse of modern life, but in The Polish Woman, a novel that gains much from its restraint and sparse style, Mekler restores the term to an older meaning. What happens when a stranger shows up in a community or family and claims to be a relative everyone presumed long dead?

The question and the rippling consequences made Princess Anastasia an endlessly beguiling figure in many retellings and enriched Natalie Zemon Davis’ The Return of Martin Guerre. In her variation on the theme, Mekler couches the dilemmas in the most wrenching circumstances when Karolina Staszek drops the bombshell on the Landau family, whose members include survivors of the camps still nursing their nightmare memories and seething rage in New York in 1967.

In a world where lives and livelihoods can be rebuilt more easily than shattered psyches, Mekler’s premise is rich in possibilities and ambitious in conception. But there are so many ramifications from this detonation and so many narrative paths to tempt the author, that some of them inevitably receive short shrift.

There is also a pronounced difference in the depth with which Mekler draws her two protagonists — Karolina and Philip Landau, the skeptical lawyer who has to weigh whether she is his cousin or a world-class and extremely glib fraud.

Mekler, who was born in Poland and spent her early years in a displaced persons camp after World War II, paints a haunting portrait of Karolina that manages to convey genuine sincerity while sustaining that air of ambiguity central to the narrative. Philip emerges more blandly and predictably as an archetype of the disillusioned Sixties idealist.

Despite the resulting imbalance, The Polish Woman offers a strongly evoked contrast between the Jewish survivors in New York and the bleakness of life in Communist Poland in the ’60s.

Karolina, a poor art student who comes to New York on a grant, is either the daughter of the late and rich Jake Landau, Philip’s uncle, or a clever crook after an inheritance. Or perhaps she is simply a deluded and lost soul seeking connection.

To the stunned Landau clan, Karolina announces that she is the daughter Jake paid a Polish farm family to hide before he was sent to the camps. She has memories that make her assertion at least possible, and the family is divided.

When Karolina and Philip arrive in Poland to find evidence one way or another, Mekler bars their conventional quest with walls of resistance that unsparingly show flagrant and reflexive anti-Semitism on every side two decades after the Holocaust. In the voices of the farmers, merchants and priests, you sense the complicity that made mass murder on an incomprehensible scale possible.

The Polish Woman takes us to the final revelation about Karolina and what really happened at a lonely farmhouse two decades before. It is an earned climax that may lack the heartbreaking power of William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, but suits the understated and moving story of a woman whose memories open so many old wounds.