The Zookeeper's Wife

Loyal 42nd Page reader Eliza Challis sends us the forty-second page of “The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story” where author Diane Ackerman wrote (most emphasis added):

Rzadza. And there's his enchanting game of cowboys and Indians when he shoots pinecones with ow and arrow...but the other possibility, of a real war, that he doesn't understand yet, thank heavens."

The older boys believed, as Antonina did, that war belonged to the world of adults, not children. She sensed that Rys yearned to grill them with questions, though he didn't want to look stupid, or worse, like a little kid, so he kept quiet about the invisible hand grenade lying at his feet that everyone feared might explode.

"What a subject to be broached by the innocent lips of children," Antonina reflected, glancing at the sun-bronzed faces of the three boys, glistening in the light cast by a large oil lamp. "Grazed by sadness" about their safety, she wondered yet again: "What will become of them, if war begins?" It was a question she'd been denying, sidestepping, and rewording for months. "Our animal republic," she finally admited to herself, "exists in the busiest and most buzzing Polish city, as a small autonomous state defended by the capital. Living behind its gates, as if on an island cut off from the rest of the world, it seems impossible the waves of evil spilling across Europe could overwhelm our little island as well." As darkness began seeping into everything, erasing edges, a free-floating anxiety plagued her; eager as she was to mend the fabric of her son's life the instant holes formed, she could only await the unraveling.

She meant the last idylls of summer to be well spent, so the next morning she organized a mushroom-hunting brigade, with prizes and honors for whoever bagged the most saffron milk-cap, boletus, and button mushrooms, which she planned to jar. If war did erupt, spreading mushroom marinade on

More information about “The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story” (and the book itself) is available from:

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(W. W. Norton & Company, September 2007. Hardcover, 368 pages. ISBN: 0393061728; EAN: 9780393061727.)