Anya by Susan Fromberg Schaeffer

First published: 1974

Type of work: Historical fiction; young adult literature

Principal characters:

• Anya Savikin, a beautiful, studious young woman who is one of the first women and one of the first Jews to study medicine at her university
• Boris Savikin, Anya’s vegetarian and atheist father, a businessman who prefers scholarly activities
• Rebecca Savikin, Anya’s mother, a strong woman who is proud that her daughter is studying medicine
• Verushka Savikin, Anya’s younger sister, who is a gifted pianist and more of a romantic than Anya
• Stajoe Lavinsky, Anya’s first husband and the father of Ninushka
• Ninushka Lavinsky, Anya’s daughter
• Rutkauskus Vishinskaya, a Catholic Lithuanian who gives Ninushka a home during the war
• Onucia Vishinskaya, Rutkauskus’s wife, who Ninushka, for a while, thinks is her mother
• Max Meyers, Anya’s second husband, an Auschwitz survivor
• Erdmann, a Jew disguised as a German soldier, who helps Anya escape from a concentration camp to find her daughter

Overview

The horror of World War II and Nazi persecution changes Anya Savikin’s life and causes her to contemplate God’s existence and why she survived when so many did not. Until the war, Anya lives an idyllic, family-oriented life in Vilno, Poland, with her Jewish parents, sister, and two brothers. Her family observes some Jewish traditions, more because of a love for the custom than because of strong religious beliefs.

To her parents’ delight, Anya becomes a medical student. A telephone call in which her father warns her that some students are attacking and disfiguring the faces of Jewish girls makes Anya ponder about God: She decides it was fate and not an accident that allowed her father to hear about the incident and call to save her. She begins to believe in a supernatural power, although not necessarily the God about whom she has been taught. While in medical school, Anya marries Stajoe Lavinsky, a Polish Jew and engineer. They move to Warsaw, where Anya plans to continue school but never does. She has one miscarriage and then bears a daughter, Ninushka.

When the Germans invade Warsaw, Anya, Stajoe, and the baby leave for Vilno, but the situation is no better there. From her parents’ house, Anya watches as her father is taken from the street and put in a truck to be sent to a concentration camp. She remembers that her father always said that justice does not exist in the world. Eventually, the Germans take the rest of the family to a concentration camp. Soon Anya is numbed by the murdering of her family: her sister, brothers, husband, and earlier her father. Only mothers and daughters are left: Rebecca, Anya, and Ninushka. Later Anya learns that young children are to be killed, so she manages to have her daughter taken from the camp and left on church steps. She finds out that a childless, Catholic Lithuanian couple, Rutkauskus and Onucia Vishinskaya, have her daughter and call her Luisa Vishinskaya.

Shortly after giving up Ninushka, Anya and her mother are forced from the concentration camp and separated. Recognizing that her mother is in the line of those too old or disabled to work and therefore most likely to be killed, Anya tries to join her but is stopped by a soldier. Rebecca shouts to remind Anya that she must live for her daughter, Ninushka. Anya is sent to another camp but escapes and makes contact with the man who has Ninushka. He takes her to her daughter, but Ninushka, young when taken from Anya, does not recognize her mother. After the Lithuanian Gestapo search for Jews in the Vishinskayas’ house, Anya decides she must leave without Ninushka. Anya, again thinking of all the times she has escaped and survived, decides that a supernatural power that wants her to live must exist. She apologizes to her dead father, who was an atheist.

When the Soviets arrive to liberate the Poles from the Germans, Anya tries to make contact with the Vishinskayas to reclaim her daughter. She learns, however, that the Vishinskayas were shot for hiding Jews and that Ninushka is in an orphanage somewhere. When Anya finds Ninushka, she discovers that her daughter still does not know who she is. Eventually, however, Ninushka accepts that Anya is her mother, but Anya is aware that Ninushka is very different from what she might have been if the Jewish Anya had reared her without war instead of the Catholic Vishinskayas during the war. After learning that her husband’s family was also killed, Anya decides to leave Europe and move to the United States. She and Ninushka settle in New York City, where Anya marries Max Meyers, a Jewish Auschwitz survivor.

Four important themes in Anya are the senselessness and horror of bigotry and war, the confirmation of the existence of a supernatural power, the special relationship between mothers and daughters, and women’s need for work outside the family. The brutality of war is shown not only by the book’s numerous details of atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews but also by changes in Anya’s psyche: The trusting, optimistic young Anya becomes a suspicious, pessimistic older woman. Ultimately the changes in Anya convey that the survivors of war are victims as much as the dead; the war is never over for Anya, for she constantly relives the past.

Yet, ironically, this nightmare is what makes her believe in God. Anya thinks that her own survival is a miracle that only a supernatural power could have performed. Still, the war raises questions Anya cannot answer; she longs to find a purpose, a reason, for the war but cannot. The war also illuminates the importance of constancy and nurturance in the relationship between mother and daughter. Anya’s relationship with her mother is compared with Ninushka’s relationship with Anya. The former relationship, which was nurtured and bloomed before the war, is a warm and trusting one, but the latter, disrupted and distorted by war, is, at times, explosive and distant. Even so, Ninushka was Anya’s motive for surviving, and, even after the war, Ninushka is the one Anya loves most.

Although family and child are most important to Anya, she also has a strong need for meaningful work. The necessity of work for women and the questioning of the female traditional role are highlighted by Anya’s two marriages. The first marriage occurs when Anya is young and before the war; the girlish Anya unwittingly gives up the role of doctor for the roles of wife and mother. After the war and one marriage, Anya makes it clear to her prospective second husband that she is going back to school and must work. Her second husband, moreover, serving as a foil to her first husband, is supportive of Anya’s desire for a career, and, therefore, Anya’s second marriage is, in a sense, more successful than her first. The war, however, ruins Anya’s chances to be a doctor, for courses taken in Europe cannot transfer to American schools. When Anya then chooses to be a nurse, she cannot, for she associates the pain she sees in the sick with the afflictions she saw during the war. The effect of the war on Anya is all-consuming.

Anya is poet and novelist Susan Fromberg Schaeffer’s second novel. Schaeffer’s novels often focus on women who are undergoing crises. Her first novel, Falling (1973), is about Elizabeth Kamen, a Jewish woman who attempts suicide; therapy reveals Kamen’s traumatic childhood and unstable family relationships. Elizabeth, then, like Anya, must relive her past and try to make some sense of it.

Agnes Dempster, the heroine of Schaeffer’s fifth novel, The Madness of a Seduced Woman (1983), is committed to an asylum after being convicted for murder and being found insane. The book reveals that, like Anya and Elizabeth, the protagonist Agnes is a complex person whose life has been a disturbing one and consequently has a severe psychological effect on the heroine. While Anya is historical fiction, it is also, like The Madness of a Seduced Woman and Falling, psychologically realistic.

Critics have noted that, unlike many novelists who have written about the Holocaust, Schaeffer, in Anya, does not rely on allegory and mythology. Instead, with its numerous details about the concentration camps and ghettos and with Anya’s inability to find any meaning in suffering, the book abounds in realism. The critic Alan Mintz, moreover, believes that the lack of Jewish symbols makes Schaeffer’s work more appealing to non-Jews as it seems more about universal suffering. The critic William Novak, however, believes that Schaeffer joins other Jewish American writers, such as Cynthia Ozick and Arthur Cohen, in a move away from literature dealing with identity and assimilation problems to literature that shows a greater consciousness about being Jewish.

For young adult readers, Anya, having a universal appeal while being about the Holocaust, is important because it vividly portrays the nightmare of the Nazi persecution of the Jews and makes readers more aware of the evils of bigotry. In addition, Anya is important because it personalizes history: Unlike textbooks filled with facts, the novel brings history to life by showing the effect of a specific period of time on an individual. Yet Anya also deals with significant contemporary issues that young adults must face, such as career and marriage, which allows young readers to empathize and identify with the protagonist.

Sources for Further Study

Aarons, Victoria. “Responding to an Old Story: Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Leslea Newman, and Francine Prose.” In Daughters of Valor: Contemporary Jewish American Women Writers, edited by Jay L. Halio and Ben Siegel. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

Bloom, Harold, ed. Caribbean Women Writers. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 1997.

Kremer, S. Lillian. Women’s Holocaust Writing: Memory and Imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Pearlman, Mickey, and Katherine Usher Henderson. Inter/View: Talks with America’s Writing Women. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1990.

Sicher, Efraim, ed. Holocaust Novelists. Vol. 299 in Dictionary of Literary Biography. Detroit: Gale Research, 2004.