Here is a true story – of human empathy and its opposite – that is simultaneously grave and exuberant, wise and playful. Ackerman has a wonderful tale to tell, and she tells it wonderfully … A story like this could easily devolve into Dr. Doolittle-like sentimentality. Ackerman avoids mawkishness in two ways. First, the horrors of the Holocaust seep into almost every page, just as they should. The Zabinski household may have maintained a determined joie de vivre, but we never forget that the Guests' time in the ghetto has transformed them from accomplished, vibrant people into broken, hunted prey...Equally important, Ackerman refuses to romanticize nature. She knows that the animal world is full of – in fact, depends upon – deception and violence, and that a person's immersion in the natural world is no guarantee of goodness.
Cool-headed, with nerves of steel, Jan undertakes missions as suspenseful as the plot of any top-notch thriller. Antonina, exhibiting equal grace under pressure, and even more vulnerable after the birth of their daughter, survives more than her share of terrifying encounters with Nazis … It is no stretch to say that this is the book Ackerman was meant to write...Every rapturous hour she has spent communing with plants and animals, every insight gleaned into human nature, every moment under the spell of language is a steppingstone that led her to Poland, the home of her maternal grandparents, and to the incomparable heroes Jan and Antonina Zabinski. The result of her tenacious research, keen interpretation and her own ‘transmigration of sensibility’ is a shining book beyond category.
With its biblical allusions, cuddly characters and well-covered historical subject matter, The Zookeeper's Wife might have been a gamble, had anyone else but Diane Ackerman tackled it. Not surprisingly, the writer who brought us A Natural History of the Senses succeeds not only in averting these pitfalls but also in using them to her advantage, crafting a fresh and compelling addition to Holocaust literature … Ackerman is known for her love of digression, sometimes slipping in anecdotes of questionable relevance, but here she succeeds in dovetailing research on a number of seemingly dissimilar topics, keeping readers equally hungry for more on the fauna-smitten Zabinski family, the quirks of their animal charges and the clandestine inner workings of German-occupied Warsaw.
In her poignant new book, Diane Ackerman, the noted nature writer, focuses on Antonina, the ‘zookeeper’s wife’ of the title. But her husband, Jan, lived the more dramatic life. He was a lieutenant in the clandestine Polish Army and a professor in Warsaw’s secret university. He smuggled Jews out of the Warsaw Ghetto to the zoo. But once there it was up to Antonina to safeguard them: to find them room and food, to keep their spirits up, and most of all to hide them from the Nazis … To fend off cuteness — Herriot’s Heroes — Ackerman returns often to the carnage outside the zoo’s gates: the routine murder of children, Himmler’s determination to destroy every stone in the ghetto as a birthday present for the Führer, the firebombing of entire cities … For me, the more interesting story is Antonina’s. She was not, as her husband once called her, ‘a housewife,’ but the alpha female in a unique menagerie.
The story of the Zabinskis' heroics is as uplifting as it is tragic. The zoo's more exotic animals were shipped to German zoos, and bombing raids killed or injured many others. Then the SS and their friends staged a drunken hunting party, shooting the remaining helpless animals in their cages … There's a reason the book is called The Zookeeper's Wife. It is really the story of Antonina, who protected her family from marauding soldiers, fed and hid her secret guests and preserved what she could of the property while her husband was a POW … Ackerman's story is a treatise on nobility — a word that applies to some humans and all of the animals in The Zookeeper's Wife.
It would have been tempting in a tale like this to reach for the obvious metaphor of Jews animalized, hiding in cages from Nazi persecutors. The truth is far more complex than that: Antonina, who eyed two terrified lynx kits and understood how to coax them into security, emerges as the opposite of all the Nazis bring with them to Warsaw. Throughout the war she remains empathic, intuitive, able to allow the natural and human world to proceed as it will — able to give, apparently with little discussion, her own lebensraum to allow others to survive. Ackerman, with her profound understanding of nature, tells Antonina’s story in a way that makes it clear her roles as the zookeeper’s wife and heroine of the Resistance are inextricably connected, both in what the natural world has taught her, and taught her to accept.
Through Ackerman's eyes, Antonina is the more fascinating of the duo, an intelligent, gracious woman with an unusual ability to understand and communicate with animals. She is respected by zoo workers (and her hardheaded scientist husband) for her ability to calm the most agitated and potentially dangerous animals … For all her scholarship and protean knack for seeing through her subjects' eyes, Ackerman is at her best when she writes about the many animals vital to the story. She relies neither on saccharine anthropomorphism or clinical zoology but manages instead to capture the nature and role of each animal — the badger, pig and hamster of the household emerge with particular clarity. In short, she devotes the same care she gives to the human characters.
Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife tells the inspiring story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, a Christian married couple who ran the Warsaw Zoo during the war and managed to provide shelter and safe passage for 300 Jews on the zoo's grounds … But The Zookeeper's Wife proves to be an uneven, fitfully paced work that seems to thwart expectations in many ways … Ackerman too often allows her narrative focus to divert from the Zabinskis and their dramatic lives. She instead provides big-picture re-creations of the well-known horrors of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw as well as narrative side trips on subjects that interest her, such as Nazi attempts to ‘re-create’ several species of extinct animals through a process of ‘back-breeding.’
Ackerman tells the remarkable WWII story of Jan Zabinski, the director of the Warsaw Zoo, and his wife, Antonina … Ackerman's writing is viscerally evocative, as in her description of the effects of the German bombing of the zoo area: ‘...the sky broke open and whistling fire hurtled down, cages exploded, moats rained upward, iron bars squealed as they wrenched apart.’ This suspenseful beautifully crafted story deserves a wide readership.
