Empathic acts by several peripheral characters - a surveyor who offers the forced laborers food, a Nazi who aids one of Andras’s old friends by giving him false identity papers - make life-or-death differences.Ĭycling in and out of forced-labor situations and potential death by exposure, execution, illness or other factors, Andras understands that for years, “he’d had to cultivate the habit of blind hope. One of them is a self- described “wastrel and a libertine” who enjoyed a silver-spoon upbringing, and yet now his companion “is aware of him as a kind of fine tether, a monofilament connecting him, against his will, to what was left of the world.” A reasonable assumption is that Orringer is posing that empathic feeling, weightless yet part of the superstructure of the human condition, as the invisible bridge as well, spanning the distances between her people.Īfter all, most of “The Invisible Bridge” involves characters struggling to stay united or longing be reunited with family or friends, increasingly fearful of their loved ones’ safety (“that elusive ghost”) as anti-Semitism flowers lethally and the war churns on, security in all too many cases vanishing before their eyes. The two characters are related through marriage but have been antagonists through the war years, and were socially wary of each other when they first met in pre-war Paris.
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