BOOK REVIEW--THE POSTMISTRESS by Sarah Blake

Reviewed by Bill Breakstone, January 24, 2011

A real estate colleague of mine recommended The Postmistress by Sarah Blake to me several weeks ago. This novel never appeared on the bestseller lists, for reasons I can’t understand. It was a terrific read! Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help, offered this compliment which appears on the dust jacket of the book: “Great books give you a feeling that you miss all day, until you finally get to crawl back inside those pages again. The Postmistress is one of those rare books. When I wasn’t reading it, I was thinking about it. It made me homesick for a time before I was even born. What’s remarkable, however, is how relevant the story is to our present-day times. A beautifully written, thought-provoking novel that I’m telling everyone I know to read.”

The relevancy of the story to today’s world I’ll address later.

This novel is about a world that I too had not yet been born into. The setting is in Cape Cod and the Europe of 1940 and 1941, before the United States entered World War II. London was enduring The Blitz; the Nazis in Germany, France, Poland and the Balkans were rounding up Jews. Hundreds of thousands of them were attempting to escape to the West, but Americans paid little attention to what Winston Churchill named “The Gathering Storm.” President Roosevelt had pledged that our boys would not be sent overseas to fight yet another war.

In the fictional Massachusetts town of Franklin on Cape Cod, in reality Provincetown at Lands End, Iris James is the postmaster of the local post office. Will Fitch is a recent graduate of Harvard Medical School and has assumed the responsibility of town doctor. He recently married young Emma Trask, and they listen on the radio to journalist Frankie Bard, an associate of Edward Murrow at CBS, broadcasting the horrors of The Blitz in London. Frankie’s roommate, Harriet, is a journalistic colleague who is focused on telling the story of the plight of European Jews that are being detained in “camps” in France. When Harriet is killed in one of the nightly bombings, Frankie takes up the task of bringing America’s attention to the oncoming holocaust.

Murrow dispatches Bard to Germany, France, Spain and Portugal, with a recorder to capture in words the story of what these European refugees are enduring. Before leaving London, Frankie meets Will in a bomb shelter, and when the all clear sounds the two emerge onto the London streets, where Will is struck down by a taxi, leaving a letter with Frankie to deliver back to his wife in the States.

The novel goes on to tell the story of all these people, and, more importantly, of the refusal of Americans to come to grips with the unfolding tragedy that is overtaking events in Europe.

As I read this beautifully written novel, I kept thinking about Kathryn Stockett’s compliments and what indeed she had in mind about the relevancy of the story to today’s times. What did she mean? Before Pearl Harbor, Americans were going about their daily lives, ignoring the world about them. What are we ignoring today? We are involved in two wars on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Is that what Stockett is referring to? She doesn’t say, but I have my own personal view.

The people of today’s world are facing another Armageddon, but it is not one involving soldiers, guns, bullets and bombs. It is economic in nature, and consists of nation upon nation mired in debt, and a joblessness resulting from a financial catastrophe of epic proportions. Political constraints have thus far paralyzed world leaders from addressing what may become a crisis that will equal or exceed what the world endured during the Great Depression. There are voices out there, like Frankie’s, urging people to understand the consequences of inaction. Two New York Times journalists, one a Nobel Prize Winner, have continuously writing of their concerns about these two issues. Numerous books have also been written by award-winning authors. But is anyone listening, beyond his or her own parochial concerns?

Setting these political and economic thoughts aside, The Postmistress is a terrific story that grabs you and won’t let go!