[USF]≫ [PDF] The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer Arthur Morey Books

The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer Arthur Morey Books

Download As PDF : The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer Arthur Morey Books

The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer Arthur Morey Books

Excellent book about the lives of people that are the sole survivors of their large extended familes during the holocaust. We follow their experiences across Europe and learn about what is happening to their loved ones along the way. The character development is rich and thorough. I felt attached to many characters and I was completely taken aback by the outcome of several situations that the author describes with an incredible sense of realness. I am very impressed with her research and her literary skills. This is a book for people who want to read an extremely literary take on several families from Hungary that are ultimately ravaged by the Holocaust. This is an important read and will stay with you long after you finish


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The Invisible Bridge Julie Orringer Arthur Morey Books Reviews

This is a long book -- more than 700 pages -- but every word is pitch perfect. The author builds the story carefully, allowing us to get to know the characters intimately. Amidst the rise of Hitler, we meet Andras Levi, a Hungarian student sent to France on scholarship to study architecture, his brothers, and parents. Andras has a remarkable optimism in spite of the growing tensions that affected all European Jews at the time. As with all young people, he doesn't always succeed in his efforts in school, friendship, or love. There's something so "normal" about his life in spite of the changing politics. As his circumstances change and his existence becomes far less normal, I experienced the horrible irony of rooting for the characters...because even if they survive, we know many did not. Reading it, I longed for a different reality, a different ending for all the victims, one that could never be. The writing is remarkable, thoughtful, and engaging. Powerful stuff.
I just returned from a 2+ week tour of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia which was absolutely fabulous. When we were in Budapest we toured the Jewish ghetto, went to a museum which was once a synagogue ,walked the streets and got a sense of the history all the while our guide told many stories about the daily lives of the residents before Arrow Cross and the Nazi's. We then moved to the area on the Danube where families were shot and thrown into the river. The Sixty Six Shoes memorial was extremely moving in conjunction w/our local guide narration of what her family experienced. She told harrowing stories about some of the atrocities that took place in early 1944. She recommended The Invisible Bridge. This was uncanny...when I boarded the flight from Budapest to Frankfurt my seat mate had The Invisible Bridge in his lap. I told him about my tour and that the book was highly recommended as the most accurate to date on Hungary pre and post WW2. He said he was trying not to cry in front of me. Turns out he's a neuroscience professor in Philadelphia. This book is one of the most compelling I've read. I've been reading a book a month for 40 years. Can't say enough good about the book.
Although the writing of this absorbing story is excellent throughout, I gave it only 4 stars because the author goes so deeply into every facet of the characters and events, explores every single thought so thoroughly that it is sometimes simply too long. No doubt the author meant to drive home the absolute hell those people had to endure, and that is as it should be. The characters have been well defined in the first part of the book, needing minimal "updating" as they grow and events take over, but the reader gets to know them quite well early on and their emotions and reactions can often be foreseen without that long explanation. Nonetheless, it is a wonderful, heart wrenching and "true" story - one which was experienced by so many thousands of good, but so unfortunate, people. I can highly recommend it.
The ambitious novel which begins in 1937, and ends decades after the war, encompasses the story of the Jewish, Levi family who reside in Debrecen, a town which lies 120 miles east of Budapest, Hungary. The plot focuses primarily on the two elder sons, Tibor, a student in medical school, and Andras, a student of architecture, when WW II erupts in Europe and drastically changes their lives. The book proves highly informative of Hungarian history and WW II in general with a mix of both real personages and fictitious characters. In spite of overly dramatic metaphors, the author builds realistic characters and describes realistic events, of particular interest, the slave labor camps. Orringer, often backtracks and details events of which the reader is already informed which may dull the story and slow the pace. Even though, whatever flaws the novel contains the image of the brothers, and their love for each other, long remains.
“The Invisible Bridge” is Julie Orringer’s remarkably powerful first novel. The book’s central character, Andras Levi, is a young Jewish man who leaves his native Hungary in 1937 to study architecture in Paris. Before long, he meets and falls in love with a ballet teacher, Klara Morgenstern. Their seemingly bright future is fractured when his student visa is revoked. He is forced to return to Hungary, where he is conscripted into the Hungarian labor service. As one might expect, the ordeals he, his wife and their extended families face only grow worse with time as anti-Semitism grows. In sweeping, epic fashion, “The Invisible Bridge” provides a literary glimpse into the horrors of that time.

“The Invisible Bridge” is an intricately layered historical novel. At 758 pages, the book may seem long, but really shouldn’t be shortened, although it might require some patience. The first 300 pages are an indispensable foundation for the rest of the book. The book has several key strengths. First, Orringer avoids the pitfalls evident in so much of modern literature. She makes brilliant use of a deliberately old-fashioned realism. The second strength lies in the author’s ability to make us care so deeply about the people of her fictional world.
Excellent book about the lives of people that are the sole survivors of their large extended familes during the holocaust. We follow their experiences across Europe and learn about what is happening to their loved ones along the way. The character development is rich and thorough. I felt attached to many characters and I was completely taken aback by the outcome of several situations that the author describes with an incredible sense of realness. I am very impressed with her research and her literary skills. This is a book for people who want to read an extremely literary take on several families from Hungary that are ultimately ravaged by the Holocaust. This is an important read and will stay with you long after you finish