At one time a resident of the resplendent five-story Beaux Arts building in Brussels, Belgium, filmmaker and author, Alice Austen hands us keys to eight apartments at 33 Place Brugmann, now the title of her stunning debut novel. Austen enables us to eavesdrop on multiple, often contradictory voices of its registered occupants. We hear Belgian, Flemish, Jewish points of view from several tenants who grapple with the “never-knowing-what-will happen-next” political climate and uncertainty in 1939 amazed at their shifting loyalties, only one year later, after the Nazi occupation of Belgium, May 1940.
A world unto itself, 33 Place Brugmann houses a panoply of diverse characters who interact not only as neighbors but friends and some as family. Belgian born, Charlotte Sauvin a gifted art student, and her father, Francois, an architect occupy apartment 4L. They often socialize with Jewish neighbors, the Raphaels in 4R. Leo Raphael is an art dealer, his wife, Sophia, a mother surrogate to Charlotte who lost her biological mother in childbirth. Julian Raphael, a math student now away at Cambridge, Charlotte and Flemish Dirk DeBearre in 2R, have been playmates since they were young children. Dirk’s incessant saxophone playing irks everyone, though his secretive behavior is more annoying. No one knows how Dirk’s parents died but there is a sense of discomfiting furtiveness about him even with his close friends.
Every tenant is familiar with Agatha Hobert in 3R. A busybody and gossip, Agatha loves to pop over to visit Colonel Herman Warlemont in 3L a widower retired from the Belgian Armed forces. Renowned for gifting her delicious butter cakes Agatha may appear, unannounced, with a sudden knock on anyone’s door to further her yenta agenda. She is particularly suspicious of Masha the Jewish/Russian refugee, a seamstress living alone in the fifth-floor atelier. In 1939 heightened rumors about the encroaching war make everyone jittery but all in all the 14 residents at Place Brugmann take pride in their “fortress of security” that is until the Raphaels vanish, their priceless paintings disappear as well.
An atmosphere of vigilance and self-protection hovers over Brussels after the 1940 Nazi penetration of Belgium, “you can never predict who will do what”. Privations, prohibitions, shortages of food fracture the rhythm of life. Intrepid student, Julien Raphael, enlists in the Royal Air Force. Dirk joins the VNV, a Flemish, and nationalist, political party. Agatha proudly proclaims, “I know everything because I hear everything.” However, not even snoopy Agatha can account for the rotating “deaf mutes” Colonel Warlemont shelters, nor where the Raphaels have hidden their paintings when they cleared out. One thing is certain. Agatha will be preparing a fresh butter cake for the new tenant, a known Nazi administrator, who moved into apartment 2L.
The multi-themed novel imparts a powerful message: “When we stop trying to understand how others see the world, when we lose our compassion, our empathy, we become animals. Worse than animals” Truly a tour de force, a bright new light in historical fiction, Alice Austen brings the past into the present with a clarion call for tolerance and diversity in our polarized time.