Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City)
June 27, 2004 Sunday
‘The Last Day’ subtle and elegant
by Susan Whitney
THE LAST DAY OF THE WAR, by Judith Claire Mitchell; Pantheon Books;
366 pages; $24.95.
She’s Jewish. He’s Armenian-American-Christian. They meet by chance
and spend a half an hour together in a library in St. Louis, where he
is supposed to receive a bag full of guns to be used for an
assassination.
She finds the bag by mistake. She makes him explain himself before
she will give him the guns.
Then he’s off to France, guns in hand, forgetting all about her. He’s
a soldier, and he has not only war but revenge on his mind. She,
however, cannot forget him.
“The Last Day of the War” is magnificent historical fiction. In this,
her first book, Judith Claire Mitchell has not only re-created 1918,
she gives the reader intriguing characters. She also gives us a
beautifully nuanced love story.
Mitchell’s Jewish character, Yael, is not a perfect human being. (In
the opening paragraph, for example, she is stealing a dress.) Still,
she is so lively and so brave that the reader comes to care about her
and, through her we see how unfairly Jews were treated in the United
States in the early days of the century.
We not only see the wrong, we feel deeply sad about the lies people
felt forced to tell.
It seems that Yael’s parents named her Yael because it was a family
name. Mitchell doesn’t beat us over the head with this or any other
social issue — but when Yael changes the spelling of her name and
begins to hide the truth of who she is, the reader feels the loss
that Yael, herself, doesn’t feel.
On the other hand, Dub, the soldier in the U.S. Army, is trying to
carry on the values of a culture he can barely remember. His plight
is complicated, satisfyingly complicated. His best friend is jealous
of Dub’s place in an Armenian revenge organization. Dub finds his
best friend annoying, but he sticks by him.
Because Dub is a good and loyal man, he has become engaged to a young
woman who has only recently emigrated. His fiancZe was a child in
Armenia, while Dub was a child in America. She witnessed the murder
of her people, including the murder of her sister. She will never be
whole. Dub wants to protect her.
Underlying this novel are two events of immense importance, one of
which has been pretty much overlooked in modern-day history classes.
It is this: In 1915, in Armenia, the Turks killed about 1 million
Christians. Women were raped and forced to bear children to
repopulate the country with Turkish offspring.
Then, in 1919, in France, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Turkey
promised to punish the leaders responsible for the massacres in
Armenia — but never did.
Subtly and elegantly, Mitchell lays out the plot of her novel. It
rests on these two pieces of history, on the Armenian atrocities and
the end of the first World War. Along the way, Mitchell forecasts a
future for both Dub and Yael. (Will it include each other? The reader
has no idea and really doesn’t know if they are right for each other
anyway.)
Mitchell also forecasts a future for the world. In her end notes, she
includes a timetable so that the reader can understand the truth of
the fiction she has written. She describes what really happened after
1915 between the Turkish leaders and the Armenian avengers.
Mitchell’s timetable ends like this:
August 1939: The night before the invasion of Poland, Adolf Hitler
assures his generals that the world will not long object should they
treat the Polish citizenry brutally. “After all,” Hitler says, “who
today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
1944: The United Nations coins and defines the word genocide. E-mail: susan@desnews.com