Even in a perfect world, it is unlikely that Tom Hope, a thirty three year old, naïve, Australian farmer would ever meet Hungarian Holocaust survivor Hannah Babel. The world was hardly perfect for Tom, in 1968 when his wife Trudy left him. For the second time! Certainly the world wasn’t perfect for Hannah who lost her only child and husband in Auschwitz. And, yet they met.
In a compelling novel, The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted, author Robert Hillman provides the perfect melding of imperfect people, opposites, ions apart in every way yet drawn together by loneliness, united by grief and connected in love.
Socially backward, Tom Hope is a sheep farmer. He inherited the ranch from his Uncle Frank in Australia’s backwater, a “shire,” called Hometown. Tom is also a skilled welder, a “fixer” of everything except his own life. When his wife, Trudy, abandons Tom, to return a year later, pregnant with another man’s child Tom, meekly restores marital harmony. He takes her back. Furthermore, he bonds with baby Peter as if he were his own son. Continuously restless, wife, Trudy hears Jesus calling her. She takes off again. This time to a “Jesus Farm”, a cultic community while Tom lovingly cares for little Peter. When, after three years, Trudy returns, to claim her child, Tom is heartbroken, at the loss of his only happiness.
Looking for distractions to assuage his melancholy feelings, Tom often pops in to chat with gossipy butcher, Juicy Collins, nicknamed Hometown’s Casanova. On Tom’s lonely walks around the Hometown strip mall he notices a shop window being prepared for a new tenant. He tries to read the poster stuck inside the window of the shop but it’s written in lettering he cannot read. Juicy tells him the language on the paper is Hebrew. The new tenant “with a figure like Cleopatra” is Hannah Babel. She is Jewish. Juicy mentions Hannah is opening a new bookstore and could use Tom’s welding skills to help her. Shortly thereafter Tom receives a letter from Hannah, with a polite request to drop in at her shop. Maybe for a “cuppa” fruit tea.
Nothing in Tom’s past prepares him for meeting Hannah. Aside from Horry Green, the local bookie, there were no Jews in Hometown. A graduate of the Budapest Institute of Music, flamboyant, quirky, eccentric, Hannah is resolute to make her bookshop thrive in a community where books are as alien as a symphony by Mahler, where “not a half a dozen people had ever opened the cover of a book.” Tom read one book in his entire adult life. But when Tom looked into Hannah’s eyes he saw “sorrow.” Tom immediately understood that he could never leave her--- not even when Hannah demanded the end of Tom’s treasured relationship with his son Peter.
