The war now over, Athos is offered a post at a Canadian university, and, bringing Jakob with him, they make a life for themselves, next door to a family of Jewish refugees. The familiarity of language, custom, and shared experience draws young Jakob into their embrace, providing him with connection and family he has only in his memories. But nothing can heal within Jakob the sense that he should not have fled; should not have allowed himself to be rescued. “What if she had come back for me and I was not there?” he asks years later. “What if I could have done something?” He is haunted, even into adulthood, by the image of his sister at the piano, his mother cooking a Sabbath meal.
Obsessed with memory that will not loose its grip — will not fade — the adult Jakob (now played by the fabulous Stephen Dillane), a novelist and professor, pours out his grief into his writing, but is unable to move past it. Marrying the beautiful Alex (Rosamund Pike), Jakob is unable to allow himself to love her, to appreciate her or enjoy her. He journals his anger with her seeming frivolity for having the audacity to enjoy life, wear stylish clothing — her very happiness is trivial and out of place and out of context within his intractable grief, stuck in a time long past in most people’s memory. She neither understands his obsession with his memories of the Holocaust, nor his inability to move past his pain. Eventually, however, now divorced, Jakob returns to Greece, where he writes his story and meets Michaela — someone who can embrace his pain, and can help him heal by simply being there. At last Jakob can obtain closure and allow the ghosts of his past find their own peace.
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1 - Lisa McKay
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