The World That We Knew

Among the story’s most powerful heroes is the heron. As in many of Alice Hoffman’s novels, she taps the cultural-psychology discipline of studying spirit animals and nature’s totems in The World That We Knew. The heron lives and thrives in a variety of challenging environments, from swamps to treetops, and symbolizes the spirit of survival.

The heron thus reflects the ability of the three women to adapt to conditions, their uncanny resourcefulness, and their collective determination to respond to uncertain conditions. The heron bonds with Ava early on, responding to her mystical abilities to communicate. Ava’s morning revelry with the heron, their joyous and impromptu dancing, gives Ava her first intimations about the wonders of a world she understands that, as a golem, she’s not meant to enjoy. The heron follows Ava through the French countryside, loyal even to the point of denying its natural inclinations to migrate to warmer climates. The heron therefore represents a principle of life. In becoming the vehicle of communication between Lea and Julien, the heron shows the determination that love will—even must—survive the cruelty of distance and the anxiety of uncertainty that Nazi heartlessness inflicts.

The heron’s bloody death signals a dramatic moment in the narrative of Ava’s redemption. Indeed, in a novel that recounts with disturbing immediacy the brutalities that the Jews in Berlin and then in occupied France endured, the novel’s most disturbing shock may be when a Nazi officer shoots the heron, gratuitously—not because he is desperate for something to eat. He sees it as a “miserable thing…not worth eating” (359) and kills it because he takes joy in watching things suffer. For Ava, the loss is “immeasurable” (359). Seeing the bird hanging by a stick, its wound seeping, the helpless look in its eyes, moves Ava to act attack the soldier, an act motivated not by any sense of threat to her or to Lea but entirely by her sorrow and outrage—emotions that a golem shouldn’t have. Burying the heron is a gut-wrenching experience. Ava cannot explain how the heron’s death has made her what she is: a “woman in tears” (362). Even in death the heron symbolizes survival: It triggers Lea to save Ava’s life and in turn moves Ava toward her redemption, her chance at last to be alive. 

Surely, introducing the world of angels and demons into a novel about the horrors of the Holocaust is a risk. However, the Holocaust targeted a Jewish culture that for millennia defined the cosmos as a realm of just such supernatural beings and found in that superstructure a source of consolation and serenity. Angels and demons, more than articles of faith, are strategies for making sense out of the world that too regularly spins out of control and into dark places of violence and hate. Azriel, a forbidding figure from Jewish folklore, symbolizes the novel’s determination for the brutal and senseless wholesale killings that the Third Reich sanctioned to reverberate with cosmic consequences. The world cannot bear to be simply what it is.

No angel is more feared than Azriel. In a novel in which the “world beyond men’s eyes” (62) is dominated by a “canopy” (62) of angels, perhaps none is more feared by the women in flight from Nazi persecution than the dark figure of Azriel, “the angel that could be seen by human eyes in the final instants of a life” (63). When Ava, who can see the world of angels, spies Azriel in his black coat—as she does before the shooting of Marta, before the Nazi raid of the convent, before the death of Marianne’s father, and before the shooting of Ettie—she understands death is approaching. Azriel brings to the novel that sense of predestination, imposing a kind of causality, even logic, a reassuring sense that these deaths are not the manifestations of the random inclinations of sadomasochistic Nazis but are in fact part of some cosmic plan, the details of which the Jews in Nazi Germany cannot entirely grasp.

However, the figure of Azriel in the novel is hardly terrifying. When Azriel appears, reading from his book of names, he is a calming presence, hanging in the distance, darkly handsome and anything but threatening. After all, Azriel does not kill. Within Jewish tradition, the Angel of Death ushers the soul of the soon-to-be dead into the afterlife, the reward of Paradise itself. He’s ready “to take you in his embrace” (312). Without the luminous presence of Azriel, the cruelties and gratuitous, brutal mass murdering the Nazis perpetrated occur without cosmic implications. Death is brutal, absolute, and oppressive. Azriel’s presence is thus less terrifying than it is calming. As Lea acknowledges when she glimpses Azriel shortly before the bee attack, “He was so beautiful, he was a light before her eyes” (314). In his appearance, Azriel assures the Jewish girls that despite the feeling that the world has collapsed into unfathomable horror and unaccountable evil—a greater, higher plane of reality, a benign supra-reality that humanity’s amoral behavior cannot destroy—exists above, around, and through such a horror show.