The Zookeeper’s Wife, a war story, by Diane Ackerman

This regarded non-fiction work focuses on Antonina Zabinski, the wife of Jan Zabinski, keeper of the Warsaw Zoo in the years leading up to World War II. Although they were not Jewish, after the zoo was bombed and the animals dispersed to German zoos as part of Hitler’s plan to breed “Ayran” animals, they sympathized with those in the Ghetto and sheltered over 300, often in ruined zoo habitats and cages, from certain death during the years leading up to the Warsaw Uprising. In addition to the reader worrying about the fate of the people involved, it was heartrending to become attached to their zoo animals and their son Rys’s exotic pets only to have most of them meet a fate similar to humans who were persecuted under the Nazis. It is an unsentimental account of her life, and she was a remarkable person, as was her husband. However, even though I enjoy “literary” fiction, which tends towards fine writing, I thought that the poet in Ackerman occasionally got out of control and I sometimes longed for a simple prose sentence containing neither an unusual choice of words nor a poetic metaphor. 368 pp.