What if the innocent dead of the Holocaust had gone on to live alternate lives? And what if each survivor didn’t know that others in their family existed elsewhere in the universe? That’s the central premise of Rooms for Vanishing, Stuart Nadler’s poignant, ornate tapestry of a novel.
At the center of this grief-soaked, nonlinear narrative are the Altermans, a Jewish family originally from Vienna. In 1979 London, Sonja Alterman is looking for her missing husband, Franz, an orchestra conductor “successful enough that he occasionally appeared on television looking appropriately bewildered.” Before he departed, Franz left behind a curious artifact, “a photograph of a woman standing in the center of a church.”
That woman, who appears to be about 18 years old, may or may not be Anya, their daughter. But Anya died a decade earlier at age 9 from a misdiagnosed illness. Adding to the mystery is another wrinkle: Sonja herself died years earlier after her father, Arnold, put her on a Kindertransport to London and warned her, “Do not under any circumstances say anything in Yiddish.” After Sonja’s departure, the Nazis killed her father, her mother, Fania, and her 6-month-old brother, Moses.
Nadler shifts among the family members’ perspectives throughout this intricate novel. Readers meet Fania, who works as a masseuse in a Montreal hotel in 1966, where she suspects that one of her clients may be her doppelganger; Moses, who meets a man who says he was shot dead at the Prague train station years earlier; and Arnold, who celebrates his 99th birthday and receives a letter from a woman who claims to be Sonja.
Ghosts and doubles abound in Rooms for Vanishing. Like many stories involving alternate realities, Nadler’s novel can get needlessly complex, but it compensates with exceptionally powerful moments, as when Moses notes, regarding the young boys who were Nazi soldiers, “the face of mid-century evil, I discovered, was a cleanly shaven face.” One can’t erase the travesties of the past, but one can imagine a different future, as Nadler does in this emotionally resonant work.
