*editor’s note: This post discusses plot details of the novel, including the titular choice that Sophie faces in the books conclusion
The cover of the book looks like a dime-store romance: a fair woman with red lips and a gauzy blouse is being kissed on the cheek by a mustachioed man with a mop of dark hair: Sophie’s Choice. (Later I learned it was the poster for the 1982 film, and that it’s actually Meryl Streep and Kevin Klein on the cover.) It was in one of many boxes of my husband’s books — books we were sorting into keep and give-away piles. He handed it to me, and said, “I’m pretty sure intro philosophy classes read this.” “Really? A novel?” I questioned. But I was intrigued and set it aside to crack later that evening. I had heard the title, but didn’t know anything about it. Nor didn’t know of Styron’s work.
Exactly one month later, as I finish the 620th page, I set it down just as Ben walked in the room. He asks, “So, how was it?” I sigh. “Devastating. Perfect. It couldn’t have ended any other way.”
The book opens with a narrator named Stingo who is telling about a story that took place 20 years prior. The year is 1967, but he writes of his life in 1947 – just two years after WWII had ended. In 1947, Stingo is 22-years-old. He is a recent transplant to New York (from the South), has just been fired from a publishing firm, and decides to move out to Brooklyn to become a writer. He rents a room in a house, and it is here he meets Sophie. Sophie is an Auschwitz survivor.
Stingo takes his time telling Sophie’s story. Or rather, Stingo allows Sophie time to tell her story. During many points during the unfolding, Stingo says something like “I must tell this part of her story fully, so that you’ll better understand the events that follow”, or “There’s more to this part of the story, but I must tell it later. I have to continue with this other part of the story first.” This technique — which in no way did I see as a cheap trick — created suspense. I trusted him to tell the story in the right way, perhaps because he is a writer. (Styron, you’re a genius.)
And so, the story of Sophie, unfolds ever so delicately throughout the book. How she, a Pole, is captured and sent to Auschwitz. How, because she is fluent in four languages (Polish, Russian, German, and French), becomes Hoss’ translator. (Rudolf Hoss, in fact, was the chief commandant of Auschwitz and who developed new techniques for extermination with the type of gas, and the architecture of the gas chambers.)
The lines between fact and fiction are blurred. From history, we know about Rudolf Hoss. But in the novel, we learn about Hoss through letters that Sophie is translating and transcribing for him. One afternoon while she taps out the words he is speaking, she is horrified to learn of his plans to build gas chambers. We also learn about this time that Sophie has a son who is at Auschwitz too, in a part of the camp just for children. She feels guilt at being part of this evil machine – for writing these letters for Hoss – but knows she might be able to get close to him and convince him to free her son.
I was astounded by the complexity of Sophie’s character, and the situation she’s in is both heartbreaking and a mark of genius by Styron. In order for Styron to get into Hoss’ office, he needed a character who could reveal Hoss’ plans. It couldn’t have been a Jew – a Jew would not have been allowed this “opportunity”.
And perhaps no other author has so successfully waited to reveal the book’s title only after reading 95% of the pages. Sophie’s choice is revealed on page 590 of a 620 page book. Sophie recounts her arriving at Auschwitz with her two children – her 10-year-old son, and her 7-year-old daughter. The SS officer she greets off the train says to her: “You make keep one of your children. The other one will have to go. Which one will you choose?” And her forced choice will haunt and grieve her for the rest of her life.
This book was very much alive for me during the month in which I read it (perhaps one of the greatest blessings a writer can offer), and after I read this scene, I had to set the book down and walk away. Mostly just to breathe and process. And at that moment, it made complete sense why the book not only had to be written by a 42-year-old man, but also from the perspective of a 22-year-old male, who basically just lusted after Sophie for the bulk of the book. His escapades, his fantasies needed to be there, to counteract the heft of Auschwitz.
At the beginning of the book, you know Stingo knows of Auschwitz, but you get the sense that he doesn’t know about it like we know about it today. He writes that he needs this time – these two decades — to process Sophie’s story. And maybe he chose to narrate it from 1967 because that was the year George Steiner wrote about the Holocaust and Styron wanted to criticize Steiner’s work. The fact that Styron wrote (or at least published) the book in 1979 suggests he could have picked any year between 1947 and 1979 to use as the narrator’s point of reference, but he choose 1967 – interestingly enough, a few years before the term “Holocaust” was used in popularity. I don’t mean to belabor this timeline, but the element of time in relation to understanding is the foundation of this work.
About half-way through the book, Stingo — the 42-year-old Stingo — reads George Steiner’s Language and Silence and he too becomes obsessed with time relation:
“On the first day of April, 1923…as Sophie first set foot on the railroad platform in Auschwitz, it was a lovely spring morning in Raleigh, North Carolina, where I was gorging myself on bananas. I was eating myself nearly sick with bananas, the reason being that in the coming hour I was to take a physical examination for entrance into the Marine Corps. At the age of seventeen, already over six feet tall but weighing only 122 pounds, I knew I had to put on three more pounds to satisfy the minimum weight requirement….On that day I had not heard of Auschwitz, nor of any concentration camp, nor of the mass destruction of the European Jews, nor even much about the Nazis. For me, the enemy in that global war was the Japanese.”
These pages gut-punched me. For most of us today, we learn about the Holocaust quite early. I was eleven in 1992, when the Holocaust museum opened in D.C. In 1993, Schindler’s List came out. In 1994, I was in a summer dramatics camp about WWII, and had the honor of meeting an Auschwitz survivor, Gerda Weissmann Klein. For the next few years, I read any novel about WWII I could get my hands on. You could say it was fashionable (grotesquely so) to know about the Holocaust. And then, in 2002, I went to Auschwitz as a tourist. This is absurd. It’s absurd that sixty years is the only thing that separated the days of genocide and tourism on that land.
At some point I learned that it’s not Sophie’s Choice that is read by philosophy classes, but Sophie’s World. If I had been told the book was about a Holocaust survivor, would I have still read it? Probably not; at least not as my summer read. But it’s not just about a Holocaust survivor. It’s about a man’s grasp at understanding the Holocaust.
The middle-aged Stingo/Styron writes:
“I cannot accept Steiner’s suggestion that silence is the answer, that it is best ‘not to add the trivia of literary, sociological debate to the unspeakable.’ Nor do I agree with the idea that ‘in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent.’ I find a touch of piety in this, especially inasmuch as Steiner has not remained silent. And surely, almost cosmic in its incomprehensibility as it may appear, the embodiment of evil which Auschwitz has become remains impenetrable only so long as we shrink from trying to penetrate it, however inadequately; and Steiner himself adds immediately that the next best is ‘to try and understand.’ I have thought that it might be possible to make a stab at understanding Auschwitz by trying to understand Sophie, who to say the least was a cluster of contradictions. Although she was not Jewish, she had suffered as much as any Jew who has survived the same afflictions, and — as I think will be made plain — had in certain profound ways had suffered more than most.”
I read that as a charge as I finished the book. That I might “try and understand.”
Ruth Rosengren is a novice gardener, a pretty good project manager, a decent pianist, and always a writer. Follow her @ruthstp for a bit of everything.
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