Lilac Girls

“‘Honestly, David may be my brother, but he has his faults, God knows. You’re better off without him, but don’t rebound with some Frenchman just to spite him. Every man has a silhouette, you know, of the woman he’ll end up with. We just need to find a suitable man with yours in mind.’”

Caroline’s best friend, Betty, worries for her reputation. The phrase above speaks to the heteronormative and gendered expectations of the time. Caroline is considered abnormal for not marrying or having children. Betty’s character imparts the societal pressure for woman of child-bearing age to marry onto Caroline.

“After that, we were like flies stuck in honey, alive but not really living.” 

The quote above speaks to a struggle that most of the characters in the novel will have to contend with. Time becomes something that all the women battle. Kasia struggles to relinquish her anger at her mother’s death, Caroline wishes to relive her time with Paul in New York, and Herta wants to bury her atrocities in the dirt. All the women have to accept and take responsibilities for their actions as the book and time continues on. 

“One day to keep warm I sat on my bed wrapped in a quilt and took a quiz in an old Photoplay magazine, my favorite indoor sport. A student in Pietrik’s clandestine economics class had paid him in American magazines and I memorized every word in them. The quiz said you would feel a click like the sound of a compact closing if you were in love, and I felt that click every time I saw Pietrik. Our interests matched perfectly (a rare thing according to the quiz).” 

The compact is a recurring motif in the novel. Kasia is complete with Pietrik, whole again like two sides of a compact coming back together. She does not feel the same way with Pietrik after the war, even after they marry. Kasia is unable to be intimate with Pietrik, unable to sleep in the same bed with him, and unwilling to be vulnerable with him. Kasia does not feel whole again until she is able to accept her mother’s death, let go of the deep well of rage inside her, and let other people in.