Joyce Carol Oates’ novel appears to be based in part on the history of her grandmother, daughter of a German math teacher and printer (Lutheran, not Jewish) who with his music loving but emotionally fragile wife and two sons manages to buy their passage out of Germany to escape the Nazis’ persecution of teachers. The daughter, here called Rebecca Schwart (the misnomer given Joseph at Ellis Island), was born on the cattleboat in New York Harbor in the filthy conditions they somehow survived
The upstate New York town hires Joseph as gravedigger but does not give him enough to live on and the squalid cottage with contaminated water in which they struggle to live is a disgrace, but we see that in their eyes this educated couple seem like ignorant peasants speaking broken English.
Joseph becomes trapped and broken, finally suicidally manic with delusions of Nazi troopers among the graveyard visitors. His sons are not able to rise above day labor work.
It is a harsh story which loses some of its forcefulness as the angry. sturdy bodied Rebecca transforms herself into delicate, sexy, fastidious and impeccably dressed Hazel Jones (a name she adopts with its own murderous history), mother of a child music prodigy.
But in the final chapters, as she struggles to reconnect with her origins, we see the real Rebecca emerge again.
The American reader must feel a load of guilt, similar to that experienced in Snow Falling on Cedars, at how callously we have treated not only Nazi=fleeing German immigrants and native born Japanese citizens but also at how we still look down on and resist the influx of present day immigrants.
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