The German Girl By Armando Lucas Correa

On 13 May 1939, the transatlantic liner, St Louis, set off from the north German port of Hamburg, its destination Havana, Cuba. The majority of its 900 passengers were German-Jewish refugees, forced out of their homeland by the anti-Semite policies of the ascendant Nazi regime, in search of new lives in the New World. Already in possession of American visas, Havana was intended to be nothing more than a transit port: the refugees would simply have to wait there until being permitted to continue their journey to the US. However, a week before the St Louis had even left Germany the president of Cuba underwent a change of heart and published a decree invalidating the landing permits — permits which had cost the passengers $150 each (not to mention a $500 deposit as guarantee the refugees would not seek work in Cuba). Given that the US work visas alone had cost a small fortune that each passenger had been made to buy a return ticket (thus lining the pockets of the Nazis even further) and had been permitted to carry with them no more than ten Reichsmarks, this meant that the St Louis had effectively become nothing less than a luxurious floating prison.

Ultimately only a very few, very fortunate refugees were allowed to disembark at Cuba, despite much wrangling between legal representatives of the refugees and the Cuban government, the St Louis was forced to admit defeat and leave Cuba for Miami — only to be denied entry by President Roosevelt a pattern repeated by the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King. Finally the liner had no choice but to return to Europe — thus sealing the fate for many of the remaining refugees.

This shameful chapter of American, Cuban and Canadian history has now been fictionalised by the award-winning Cuban/US journalist Armando Lucas Correa in this, his debut novel, The German Girl. The eponymous heroine and narrator is twelve-year-old Hannah Rosenthal, a middle-class Jewish girl who, along with her parents and best friend Leo, flees Berlin aboard the ill-fated St Louis. Running alongside Hannah’s war-time narrative is that of a modern-day New Yorker, Anna Rosen. Anna, it transpires, is the great-niece of Hannah, and has just received a parcel from Cuba for her twelfth birthday. The parcel is from Great Aunt Hannah, and contains postcards and memorabilia pertaining to Hannah’s war-time experiences as a young girl. Curiosity duly piqued, Anna and her mother decide to travel to Cuba to pay a visit to the now elderly Hannah Rosenthal.

As these twin narratives slowly converge, more facts are gradually revealed: Anna’s father (Hannah’s nephew) died in the Twin Towers on 9/11 while Anna’s grandfather (and Hannah’s brother) was a Cuban revolutionary on the side of Castro in 1959. And so parallels are drawn up between acts of extreme terrorism, diasporas, closed borders, religious and political persecution, extreme left- and right-wing governments, family and national loyalty. This would be a tricky juggling act for even an experienced novelist to pull off without making clumsy comparisons or bamboozling the reader with reams of exposition. How successful is first-time novelist Correa?

Initial signs are promising. Not only are the actual historical cases of grim fascination, but they remain horribly pertinent to the troubles facing today’s world. Hopes are further raised by the opening sentence, which is suitably arresting:

‘I was almost twelve years old when I decided to kill my parents.’

However, the reputation of a book cannot rest upon its opening line alone. And one cannot help but feel a little cheated that the remainder of The German Girl largely fails to rise to the promise of this bravura opening.

Exposition is often clumsily – and exhaustingly – handled (‘you mustn’t touch anything [says the ship’s captain] that might endanger the two hundred and thirty-one crew members and the eight hundred ninety-nine passengers we have on board’) metaphors grow brow-furrowing appendages (‘the Ogres [Hannah’s derogatory term for Nazis] had long tentacles, and who knew if they stretch as far as the Caribbean’) despite variances in tenses (Anna, past Hannah, present), the two narrative voices are virtually indistinguishable and while first-person narratives cannot avoid usage of the first person singular, in the case of The German Girl, one often finds oneself trudging wearily through whole forests of ‘I’s: ‘I feel more exhausted than ever. I can’t keep my eyes open. I find it impossible to go on talking or to switch the light off. I’m dozing off when I hear Mom come into the room … ’

It is tempting to be charitable and hope that Correa is merely replicating the monotonous cadences of children à la James Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or James Kelman in Kieron Smith, Boy. However, careless writing seems the more likely reason when the same voice suddenly slips free of its twelve-year-old tethers in order to deliver an expositional nugget: ‘Mama stared straight ahead, observing the traffic in a city that had once been the most vibrant in Europe.’

More unfortunately still, the characters never really come alive, acting more as ciphers for the historical facts than fully realised individuals.

But – and this is a fairly biggish but – the historical facts are undeniably important and deserve to be heard the story itself just about surviving the deficiencies of its prose to keep one reading to the end. But, given that Correa is an award-winning journalist, one wonders if the story of the St Louis may not have been better served as a work of non-fiction. Indeed, Correa’s Author’s Note at the end of the novel is eminently readable and moving, coming as it does, with an extensive bibliography and page after page of photographs of the real-life refugees, snapped in happy repose, either ignorant of the fate that awaited them or putting on brave faces, still daring to hope for a better future. That said, Correa has spoken of this novel as the first in a planned trilogy of novels documenting the travails of different passengers aboard the St Louis. Hopefully, then, Corea will relax into his fiction and The German Girl will turn out to be but the first faltering step in what has all the potential of being a fascinating series of books.