With his finger always on the human pulse of historical events, Correa opens his third novel with the impossible decision a free-spirited poet must make to protect her mixed-race daughter from Hitler’s racial laws. He then follows the heartache that her grown daughter endures, having to send her own daughter away to save her life during the Castro revolution. As the story slips forward and backward through eighty-six years, from Germany, to Cuba, to New York, and back to Germany in 2015, the family recovers pieces of their matriarchs’ stories, with revelations about the husbands, lovers, friends, and betrayers in their lives.
Correa gives his most lyrically memorable scenes to the first woman, the poet whose writings are posthumously collected and disseminated. Fragments from her diaries and poetry surface throughout the book. “The night you were born,” she writes, “Berlin was at its darkest.” Her most famous poem, which includes the line “By night, we’re all the same color,” touches on a moral theme that runs through Correa’s own writings and personal life. A Cuban American journalist who left Castro’s Cuba to live a life of his own choosing, Correa decries intolerant totalitarian regimes who label people to restrict their freedoms and make them miserable.
Neither the author nor his main characters are Jewish. However, the Holocaust setting is meticulously researched. Correa features the voyage of the St. Louis liner from Hamburg to Havanna, which carried 937 mostly Jewish refugees; the graphic horror of medical “experimentation” by Nazi physicians at the Sachsenhausen internment camp outside of Berlin; and the war crime trial of a former Nazi nurse married to an American serviceman.
Some may question the positive light in which Correa casts Batista’s regime, but in fact the fictional German Jewish refugee family thrives there until Castro takes hold. Interested in how people behave in light of events going on where they happen to live, Correa raises issues of moral culpability. Yet he does not totally resolve his own question about one of Batista’s pilots, who was accused of indiscriminately bombing villagers alongside rebel guerillas — not in the same way he firmly condemns the Nazi nurse’s excessive cruelty against Jewish children as a crime against humanity.
There is such fullness in The Night Travelers, and the reader comes to care about all four generations of women — the youngest of whom exhibits literary prowess of her own.
Sharon Elswit, author of The Jewish Story Finder, now resides in San Francisco, where she has been helping students visiting 826 Valencia locations around the city to write stories and poems and getting adults up and retelling Jewish folktales to share with their own spin.
