Unlike much of the powerful American writing about the Vietnam War, Leora Krygier’s “When She Sleeps” focuses on the Vietnamese as much as the American experience. We see particularly the Vietnamese who were left to the mercy of the Hanoi regime when the United States vacated Vietnam.
The novel is about Dr. Aaron Freedman, a U.S. Army surgeon, the Vietnamese woman he loves and the daughter they have together. Freedman leaves both of them behind when he returns to his wife and daughter in the United States.
Yet, what seems to be a “Madame Butterfly” scenario is not. For the Jewish doctor has not forgotten his love for Linh, the Vietnamese linguist, or their daughter, Mai. Nor has Freedman forgotten his promise to return for them.
Two years after the fall of Saigon, Freedman travels to refugee camps and then to Paris in order to rescue the Vietnamese family he left behind.
Krygier tells the story through the half-sisters Mai and Lucy — who in alternating chapters describe their lives in Ho Chi Minh City and Los Angeles. Both are teenagers whose sleep is disturbed, and who, in their broken dreams, enter telepathically the memories of Freedman and his Vietnamese lover. Both daughters suffer the tragedy of a situation that can have no happy resolution — Linh, though she sent Freedman away, loved him and literally dies in Paris of grief. Freedman is tortured by not doing enough for his wife or his lover or for his daughters who have suffered on his behalf.
Leora Krygier has many strengths as a writer. Her Aaron Freedman is a notable achievement in terms of characterization; a man who served in Vietnam because, as the son of Holocaust survivors, his instinct was to embrace suffering, to help save those who needed succor.
Freedman’s Judaism is defined not in terms of religion but in terms of morality and obligation. His survivor parents expected him to be their spokesman. “Moses couldn’t speak for himself,” said David, Freedman’s father. “It was Aaron, his brother, who spoke in his name.”
Freedman’s “speech” is in his dedication to the soldiers he saves in Vietnam; perhaps a way of making up for all those his parents could not save in the Shoah. Jewish readers will recognize Freedman as someone familiar — one of many sons and daughters of survivors — who tried to ameliorate the suffering not only of their parents but of the world.
The comfort Freedman finds with Linh breaks through all barriers of selfishness and is beautifully described. “It was when male is transformed into female, and the Goddess of compassion is born,” Krygier writes.
Yet compassion is not capable of solving Freedman’s dilemma, and he finds his daughter only after Linh’s disappearance and death. Though he brings Mai to Los Angeles, the conclusion resolves the plot without ending the suffering of the characters.
“When She Sleeps” is a powerful novel, a work concerned not with polemic but with character, not with politics but with the conflicts of the human heart and with our obligations to those we have loved but have left behind.
“When She Sleeps” by Leora Krygier (215 pages, Toby Press, $19.95).