Based on personal family research, STUMBLING STONES imagines the life of Alice Heppenheimert, a German Jew who moved to Nuremberg in 1917 to pursue a career as a designer and tailor. In envisioning the life of a Jew living under the Nazi regime, the novel acts as a literary form of “stumbling stone”—one of the plaques embedded in the streets of German cities to memorialize the Jewish residents who once lived there.

Alice’s story is moving and important. More than anything else, STUMBLING STONES succeeds on two levels: first, it humanizes an individual who otherwise blends into the statistical enormity of the Holocaust; second, it reminds a modern audience of the slippery slope by which a policy of inconvenient harassment and demonization can become one of deliberate harm and outright evil. However, it takes a careful, reserved approach—the text outright acknowledges the challenge “that no one knew anything about Alice the person” aside from various legal documents and a small handful of letters—which ultimately fails to create a narrative as compelling as the source material itself.

Leery of imposing too much fiction onto history, STUMBLING STONES deploys a very distant limited 3rd-person narration. As a result, the characters feel remote; the reader is watching as an outsider, never intimately inhabiting the characters (not even Alice herself). This is combined with an unusual aversion to drama. In one instance, Alice finds a note on her chair at work that reads, “Jew, go back to Poland.” This shocking example of explicit anti-Semitism in the protagonist’s daily life is oddly muted; it doesn’t even warrant a paragraph break. When two characters later divorce, it’s a polite rehearsal of fact—not an emotional event in the lives of human beings. Conversely, the text sometimes falls more plainly into the “telling, not showing” problem. It offers broad pronouncements about habitual behavior (ex: “His mother often asked Ludwig why he was such a failure at business when his father was such a success”) without establishing that pattern of behavior in actual scenes. The result is chilly: the reader understands that things are happening, but they rarely appear to actually happen, and the characters’ words and actions reflect this.

At the same time, STUMBLING STONES seems to miss opportunities to connect with its historical setting, enrich its thematic material, and humanize its narrative. Multiple characters get divorced (an understandable outcome as Nazi harassment puts intense pressure on the Jewish community), but there’s little discussion of this phenomenon as a pattern; and the day-to-day emotional realities of failing marriages are rarely seen. Alice is a designer, and she’s keyed into developments in art and culture, but there’s no thematic engagement with how the Nazis promoted their fascist aesthetic and vilified others: an approach that could sustain an entire novel in itself.

These kinds of failings are understandable, especially given the text’s outright admission that it wants to avoid overly embellishing the historical record. But this is essentially the purpose of historical fiction: to imaginatively create a human connection between the past and present which supports a form of understanding that the bare historical facts could not. STUMBLING STONES draws on rich source material, and there remains potent historical value in memorializing and individualizing victims of the Holocaust, but the text still needs to meet the basic criteria of success as a novel.

Though a valuable story and a labor of love, Bonnie Suchman’s STUMBLING STONES doesn’t quite overcome the challenges of transmuting historical fact into compelling historical fiction.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader