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The History of Love

  With: Muthoni Ismail.

 Approximately 70 years before the present, the 10-year-old Polish-Jewish Leopold (Leo) Gursky falls in love with his neighbor Alma Mereminski. The two begin a relationship that develops over the course of 10 years. In this time, Leo writes three books that he gives to Alma since she is the only person whom he deeply cares about. The first book is too realistic and boring, the second one is entirely fiction and unconvincing, and the last book is dedicated to his love: "The History of Love." Leo promises he will never love anyone but Alma.
Alma, now 20, is sent to the United States by her father, who feared the alarming news concerning fascist Germany. Leo does not know that Alma is pregnant and dreams of going to America to meet her. A short time after, the Germans invade Poland and Leo takes cover in the woods, living on roots, small animals, bugs and what he can steal from farmers' cellars. After two years of hiding he goes to America and finds Alma but is shocked to hear she thought he had died in the war and had married the son of the manager of the factory she works at. He is devastated when he finds she has had another child with her husband. He asks her to come with him, but she refuses. She tells him, however, about his son Isaac who is now five years old. Heartbroken, Leo leaves and becomes a locksmith. Leo regularly watches Isaac from a distance, wishing to be part of the boy’s life but scared to come in contact with him.
In the present day, Leo is a lonely old man who waits for his death, along with his recently found (most probably in his imagination) childhood friend, Bruno Shultz especially since Alma has been dead for five years. Leo still keeps track of his son, who has become a famous writer, much to Leo’s enjoyment since he believes Isaac inherited the talent from his father. Leo's depression deepens when he reads in a newspaper that his son has died at the age of 60, and Leo develops an obsession with finding his place in his son's world, to the extent that he breaks into Isaac’s house to see if he had read "The History of Love". Leo wants to reread "The History of Love", so he tries to obtain a copy of the book that he gave to his friend Zvi Litvinoff, who had immigrated to Chile. Their friendship dates from when Leo fell gravely ill in Poland and wrote his own obituary, after which Lev stole it in the hope that it would keep his friend alive. Leo writes a letter to Zvi, but his wife informs him that the book was destroyed in a flood, conspiring to hide that her husband did not write "The History of Love".
Unknown to Leo is that the book had been published in a small printing of two thousand copies (and re-published upon the supposed author's death) in Spanish, but under the name of Zvi Litvinoff, who copied the book thinking Leo was killed in Poland. Zvi felt so guilty for copying his book that he added his friend’s stolen obituary as the last chapter, telling the publisher that including the obituary was conditional to printing the book, although doing so did not make sense with the plot. When Leo called to recover the book, Zvi's wife, Rosa, fearing her husband would lose his fame if the world found out his well-regarded book was   plagiarized, lied by saying the manuscript had been destroyed in a flood, and then manufactured a flood in her house to realize the lie. Zvi died later without telling the world about the real author of "The History of Love".
In a parallel story, a 15-year-old Jewish girl, Alma Singer, named after the Alma in "The History of Love", her parents’ favorite book, is struggling to cope with the loss of her father due to cancer. Her mother becomes distant and lonely, escaping into her work of book translation. Her younger brother Bird, so called for jumping from the second story of a building hoping he could fly, seeks refuge in religion and believes himself to be one of God’s chosen people, thus distancing himself from reality. Alma finds refuge in one of her father’s hobbies: surviving in the wild. Alma also bears a crush on her Russian pen friend Misha, who has moved to New York. The two become a couple but they break up because of Alma’s incertitude.
One day, her mother receives a letter from a mysterious man named Jacob Marcus who requests that she translate "The History of Love" from Spanish to English for $100,000 dollars, to be paid in increments of $25,000 as the work progresses. Alma’s mother finds the sum suspicious, but the stranger confesses that his mother used to read the book to him when he was a child, so it has a great sentimental value. Alma sees this as an opportunity to help her mother recover from her depression and changes her mother’s straight-forward letters to Jacob Marcus into more romantic versions. When the letters stop before her mother completes the translation of the book, Alma decides to find the mysterious client.
She starts by noting down what she knows about Jacob Marcus in her diary, and concludes that the Alma in the book was real and proceeds to find her. She struggles in her search for Alma Mereminski, but succeeds when she realizes that Alma could have married and finds her under the name of Moritz. She is disappointed to hear that Alma has been dead for five years. However, she finds out that Isaac Moritz is the first of Alma's sons and a famous writer. When she starts reading his bestselling book, she finds that the main character's name is Jacob Marcus and realizes that Isaac Moritz had hired her mother to translate the book. Isaac is dead, however, which explains why his letters had stopped coming to their home. To be sure about her suspicions, Alma leaves a note on Isaac’s door asking who the writer of the novel is.
In the meanwhile, Bird finds Alma’s diary and misinterprets the names Alma Mereminski and Alma Moritz as being his sister’s real names, and believes they had different fathers. Isaac’s brother calls Alma, after reading the note and the original manuscript of the book, to tell her that Gursky is the real author, but Bird answers the telephone and it confuses him even further. He now suspects that Leopold Gursky is Alma's real father. To cleanse his sin of bragging and to regain the status as one of the chosen ones, he decides to set up a meeting with Alma and Gursky, thus doing a good deed without anybody knowing except God.
When the two receive the letter regarding their meeting, both are confused: Alma tries to discover which of the people she met during her searches could have sent her the note, while Leo comes to believe it was Alma who sent him the note, despite her being dead.
The two meet and are both a bit confused. Leo mentions some of his life's secrets in an effort to make conversation, while Alma pieces the puzzle pieces together. When Alma confronts him about his past asking him if ever loved a girl named Alma Mereminski or if he wrote "The History of Love", the old man finally feels a sense of recognition he was lacking during most of his life, has a heart attack and dies.
The last chapter is entitled "The Death of Leopold Gursky" and is identical with the last chapter of the book inside a book "The History of Love", both being the self written obituary of Leopold Gursky.

Literary allusions in the History of Love

There are many thematically significant literary allusions in The History of Love. The writer Isaac Babel (1894–1940), as eulogized by Leo Gursky, has unmistakable affinities with Zvi Litvinoff's description of Leo's own writing style, and the description of Rosa Litvinoff's writing style in the early chapter "Forgive Me". The Polish writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) and his classic The Street of Crocodiles are mentioned several times in the novel, as is Nicanor Parra (1914-), whose 1954 book of antipoems is translated by Charlotte Singer and read by the mysterious Jacob Marcus. A passing reference to "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) is also significant because Don Quixote is a novel that contains stand-alone stories within it, much in the same way that The History of Love contains excerpts of a mysterious book called "The History of Love." Other important literary allusions in the novel include references to James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Leo Tolstoy, Ruben Dario, and Pablo Neruda.