The History of Love

The History of Love is a novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. Its chapters alternate between New York in the present and Poland before the Second World War.

Leo Gursky is a Polish Jewish man who fell in love with his neighbour Alma Mereminski when they were both children, and who wrote three books for her because she was the only person he cared about. Alma left for America ahead of him; the German invasion followed, and Leo spent years hiding in woods and farm cellars before reaching New York, where he learned that the life he had been counting on was no longer available. Sixty years later he is an old man living alone, doing small things to make strangers notice that he is still here. His story connects, without either of them knowing it, to Alma Singer, a girl of fourteen who is trying to cure her widowed mother's loneliness by tracking down the author of the book her mother is translating. The novel keeps the two of them apart and lets the reader see the joins: a book that survived a war had crossed an ocean and changed lives on the way.

Krauss tells the book through several first-person accounts, and the pleasure of it lies in watching a lost manuscript pass from one life to another while nobody holds the whole story.