Ackerman will appear at Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW
Broadway, 227-2583, Tues Nov 20, 7:30 pm, $10-26
In the introduction to her beautiful new book, Diane Ackerman
relates an old Polish folktale from her childhood: In a village “with a
little circus whose lion had suddenly died,” an old Jewish man was
offered the job of impersonating a lion for the show. He accepted, and
as the cage shut behind him, he realized there was another lion in
captivity with him. Trembling with fear, the man began to chant a
Hebrew prayer. Instantly, the other lion joined in and the two finished
the prayer together. “I could not have imagined,” Ackerman writes, “how
oddly relevant that folk story would be to this historical one.”
The Zookeeper’s Wife is an extraordinary account of human
compassion and (un)natural science in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Before the
war, Antonina and Jan Zabinski were Catholic zookeepers who tended to
their small universe of elephants, giraffes, foxes, and assorted fauna
as if it were an extension of their own family. In 1939, Nazis bombed
Warsaw, massacring the zoo animals and corralling over 400,000 Jews
into a ghetto the size of Central Park. Over the next six years, the
Zabinskis furtively hid hundreds of Jews in their empty zoo, despite
the certain death they would have faced if discovered. For the sake of
discretion, their “visitors” were named for the animals whose habitats
they occupied, creating a human bestiary of “crocodiles” and
“pheasants” in this covert zoo.
The story is incredible, but it’s Ackerman’s research and writing
that make The Zookeeper’s Wife unforgettable. Antonina was an
eloquent diarist, which provided immense insight not only into daily
life at the zoo, but into her private thoughts and fears as well.
Ackerman blends Antonina’s account with an enormous knowledge of Polish
wildlife, Nazism’s roots in the occult, zoological administration, life
in Jewish ghettoes, and seemingly every other facet that informs this
rich story. She then lays out her research with a novelist’s
sensibility, crafting a book every bit as literary as it is
informative, and unlike anything this writer has ever read.
Although Ackerman occasionally gets a little carried away with her
descriptive gifts and copious research, The Zookeeper’s Wife is
an unforgettable book of tremendous beauty that emerges from the
darkest shadows of evil.