Berlin, 1939
People say the word Nazi and immediately everybody’s mind goes to the exhibitions of the final stages of the Third Reich. Nazi Germany didn’t start out as a full-blown assault on humanity by the most depraved humans imaginable. By 1939, Jewish citizens doubtlessly thought things had gotten as bad as they could get just as much as those few still remaining in 1944. When the author describes how her mother would “pace the whole apartment—her fortress at the heart of a sinking city; the only space she’d known for more than four months." The metaphor is referencing Germany in 1939 when Auschwitz was still a year away from existing, but the regime had been psychologically preparing its future residents for almost a decade.
The Master Ogres
Those Germans who considered themselves racially pure and stationed far above the Jewish population had a metaphorical name for themselves: the Master Race. A character in the story looks elsewhere for metaphorical inspiration to describe the very same people. “The Ogres attacked us, shouted insults; we were supposed to remain silent, mute, while they kicked us.” This engages metaphor which harkens back to the world of fairytales and the monsters of ancient myths to arrive at a far more appropriate term situated the Master Race as hideously deformed creatures feeding on the flesh of humans.
Voyage of the Damned
Half the book is devoted to one of the most shameful chapters in history. Leaders of several democratic nations viewed themselves clearly as the forces of good locked in a battle against pure evil. However, they collectively exhibited an atrocity of inhumanity every bit as depraved as their enemy. The governments of these countries refused to allow a ship filled with Jewish exiles safe harbor and sanctuary from fascist genocide. The narrator’s description of one particular family aboard this voyage of the damned is moved to observe with great pity “What a shame the Adlers were living in darkness. They had converted their stateroom into a funeral parlor: curtains drawn, everything gloomy, the atmosphere filled with the mentholated oil and alcohol.” This characterization begins with darkness in the metaphorical sense, but the metaphor gains it power by the immediate descriptive prose which expands that symbolic darkness into a willful literal representation of that sense of doomed hopelessness.
A Room of a Different Color
A much different type of metaphorical image is used to portray a room filled with hope rather than the sick stink of inevitable death. “The room enveloped us, and the bronze ceiling light with its three rows of snowy bulbs looked like a dazzling upside-down wedding cake competing with the sun’s rays.” This example is especially useful for revealing the various ways metaphor can be used to present two oppositional perceptions. Two cabins aboard a ship which most likely were almost identical to each other in design are made completely dissimilar through judicious use of the power of metaphor.
Havana, 2014
The other storyline in the novel takes place in the more recent past than the World War II storyline. The second narrator is in New York in 2014 as her family is considering a trip to Cuba despite warnings that “the heat in Havana is unbearable and … the sun is scorching, it assaults you, leaves you feeling weak at all hours of the day.” Because the timeline situates this storyline as taking place more than a decade into the 21st century, the intensity of the metaphorical warnings about the heat in the Caribbean inevitably brings with it undertones of another global menace threatening the safety and security of the world. The Nazis were still not seen as an immediate threat to entire planet in 1939, but there had been plenty of victims. Climate change may not have been seen by the public as an immediate threat to the planet in 2014, but it was also a menace that had already begun claiming victims.
