Trigger warning for rape.
As she lies dying, Lena drifts through time. She sees her girlhood in Lublin, Poland; her early young adulthood as an officer’s wife in the Polish mountains; and the most terrifying time of her life in Siberia as a prisoner of the Soviets. Over and over in Paula Lichtarowicz’s affecting novel, The Snow Hare, Lena confronts the loss of choice as she is taken here and there across Europe, losing and gaining family with each roll of history’s dice. With Lena, we have to wonder whether not free will is an illusion or if we can exert any power over what happens to us.
As a teen, Lena studied hard to become a doctor. She reads medical encyclopedias along with her textbooks, preparing to enter medical school in Kraków. Perhaps the day her older sister Ala drags Lena to the Roma/Sinti fortune tellers (an older derogatory is used in the text) is where it all starts to go wrong for Lena. She reluctantly allows her sister to drag her into the tent of the least popular fortune teller, who gifts her (or curses her with) a large piece of Baltic amber. That day is also the day that a Polish army officer, Anton, first sees Lena and decides that she is the one for him. Their “courtship” involves Lena chattering about school and her ambitions while Anton tags along, until another fateful day changes the course of Lena’s life. Lena is run over by a tram while she tries to tell Anton that she’s been accepted to medical school at the same time as Anton is trying to propose to her. Before Lena knows what’s happening, she’s in hospital with a badly broken leg and a fiancé.
The day Lena is hit by the tram is the first of many turning points in her life. It’s also the first time that Lena’s will is tested. Will she fight to follow her dreams? Or will she follow the more conventional route of least resistance? More tests will follow when the Nazis and the Soviets invade Poland, when Lena meets another man in Siberia, and when the tide of war shifts and Lena and her family are finally released. None of these events are spoilers, by the way, given the way Lena’s narration lurches through her timeline. We know roughly the course of Lena’s life within the first few chapters of The Snow Hare, although it’s not until nearly the end that we learn more about Lena’s decisions and their effects.
I don’t know if, at the end of a long life, Lena believes that she’s made the right decisions. And I don’t know that this is the right question to ask her. After all, we’ve watched Lena make and regret and wonder about her decisions—but we also see her make peace with those decisions. Part of making peace with the momentous and disastrous and occasionally wonderful decisions, for Lena, seems to be finding the good in whatever the results of those decisions might be. Her mismatch with Anton brings her a child and protection, after all. Her decisions in Siberia bring her love. At the end of her life, Lena has a son and a granddaughter and many more years than many Polish people had when war came. The right question to ask at the end of The Snow Hare is, what comes next for Lena in the next life?
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.