While Maurice’s English dictionary does not play as central a role in the story as the title suggests, this story is still a fascinating tale of perseverance based on a true story. As they make their tumultuous journey through wartime Europe before finally securing passage on a ship to a relocation camp on the island of Jamaica, they are guided by Maurice’s father’s mantra: “Solve one problem, and then the next, and then the next.” Even in hiding and in limbo, Maurice’s parents support his education, and Maurice problem-solves wave upon wave of setbacks before finally graduating from high school while still in the camp and embarking on university studies in Canada to realize his dream. They flee city after city, depending on a combination of their own resourcefulness and the kindness of strangers. With its innovative structure, masterful prose, and intelligently crafted characters, this book illustrates how we are shaped by - and can eventually overcome - the constraints of the times we occupy.A little bit of luck, the kindness of strangers, and a teenage boy’s perseverance drive this elegant story set during the Holocaust.Īll Belgian 14-year-old Maurice Fajgenbaum wants is to become a lawyer, but the Nazi invasion makes him and his family refugees. The Student is a compassionate and compelling work of fiction that brings together two pivotal times in history. It is familiar and strange, embarrassing and exhilarating, and she wonders what the young person who had written all these words almost half a century ago had to do with the old woman who read them now. She reads the marginalia written in her young, minuscule handwriting. She climbs the stairs to her study to look at a book she had carried with her on a bus to Detroit. When the young man abandons her to join the movement back home, Miriam gets on a bus to follow him, no longer sure of anything in her life.įorty-eight years later, Miriam is the about to witness her son's wedding (a newly-legal, same-sex marriage). Unsure of how to break a path for herself, she begins a reckless affair with an American student obsessed with the civil rights clashes in the south. But then, in a single moment, her dreams crumble around her.

She is a serious and passionate student of literature who studies hard, dates a young Jewish man with a good job, and is the apple of her father's eye and the worry of her mother's. It's 1957 and Miriam Moscowitz is starting her final year of university with unwavering ambition. The Student is a portrait of a life in two snapshots.

The Student by Cary Fagan