Any book whose main characters are Jewish and living in Paris in 1937 for sure is going to be ominous. And yet, The Invisible Bridge, above all else, is a love story between Klara Morgenstern, a ballet instructor with a 16-year old daughter to whom she gave birth under mysterious circumstances as a teenager herself, and Andras Levi, a 19-year old architecture student. Both are Hungarian which makes their plight slightly more complex than it was for Jews in other countries. Anti-semitism grows year-by-year in Hungary, but as a German ally, Jews like Andras and his brothers are put to work as laborers in the munkaszgolat, Hungary’s labor service for people too unreliable to be given guns and sent to the front.
What the book does exceptionally well is describe how anti-semitic laws and practices arrive inch by inexorable inch. Likewise, survival (or disposal) of Andras and his two brothers, like that of Klara and her family, as the war ensues and Germany begins to lose its dominance in its ill-fated invasion of Russia, is a function of chance encounters for better and ill. While Nazi atrocities are fiercely and accurately portrayed, so too is love and compassion, anger and goodwill. Orringer won many awards in 2010 for a book that is less gut-wrenching than it might have been.