Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. Harcourt, 2002.

Elegantly set up and eloquently told, the life of an Indian teen changes catastrophically when the freigher moving him and his family and some zoo animals suddenly sinks in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Having grown up as the son of a zookeeper in India, and having the freedom to explore the three major religions (Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam), he brings all this experience to bear while learning to survive in 40' lifeboat with a zebra, hyena, orang-utan, and Mr. Parker, a tiger.

What I found fascinating is his application in the lifeboat of everything he had learned from his father as an animal keeper: the habits, the natures, of the animals in the boat, and the psychology required to remain the alpha male in charge of the menagerie. He made mistakes and learned from them. He faced illness and despair and surmounted them by calling on what he learned from his religious education as well as the responsibility learned as a keeper of animals.

The story is compelling and the zinger at the end made me want to go back and try to figure out what I missed!

Margot, by Jillian Cantor. Riverhead Books, 2013. 

So, what would have happened if Anne Frank's sister had survived the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and come to America?

This first-person tale explores this outcome. The premise is that in the Annex, a romantic relationship grew between Margot Frank and Peter. They conspired to take new names and meet in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love, after the war,  marry, and raise a family. Margot is now Margie Franklin.  She is passing as a Gentile legal secretary, hiding her identity and her prison camp tattoo under a cardigan sweater, and calling directory assistance regularly to search for any sign of Peter.

Like Life of Pi, Before I Go To Sleep, and The Double Bind, the borders between fantasy and reality blur and shift. In this case, layers of the Holocaust experience are revealed little by little, as the author probes the feelings, memories (repressed and not,) attitudes of Philadelphians towards Jews, and attitudes of American Jews towards European Jews. The relationship between Margie and Anne is brought into sharp focus when the film Diary of Anne Frank is released, triggering guilty memories surrounding Margo's escape from the prison camp.

It's clear from the outset that this is pure fiction, but it provides Cantor an opportunity to understand her culture, and brings attention to the motivation of some Jewish people to put that part of their lives behind them in America, the Land of the Free.