33 Place Brugmann

Alice Austen is an award-winning filmmaker, human rights advocate, and playwright-whose plays include acclaimed local productions at Steppenwolf and Goodman theaters. 33 Place Brugmann is her first novel. In it, we meet the residents of one Brussels apartment building as they are tested by the 1939 Nazi regime’s invasion of Belgium.

Austen knows Place Brugmann well. She lived there while commuting to Prague to work for Vaclav Havel’s fledgling democracy. In a recent interview on Weekend Edition, she said, “I got to know residents in the building…who had lived there before and during the occupation, one of whom had a remarkable private art collection that inspired the art collection in the book. [They told] me stories of what had gone on. And the stories were funny. They were heartbreaking. And above all, they were suspenseful. And what struck me about them is that here was the story of this community within this fortress that told a story of a country and a continent in one of the darkest times in modern history.”

Like Austen’s real-life neighbors, the novel’s characters face dangerous, perilous times in ways that reflect their own experiences, ambitions, and views of the world. And like in a play, each member of the novel’s cast speaks to us in first person. Thus, the story becomes a kaleidoscope of the shifting ways that each of them understands their neighbors, their country, and themselves.

We meet art student Charlotte Sauvin, who was raised by her architect father Francois. Charlotte’s closest friends are siblings Julian and Esther Raphaël, who live across the hall with their mother Sophia and father Leo, an art dealer with clients across Europe and beyond.

Seamstress Masha Balhyayeva, in the former maid’s quarters upstairs, is a refugee who reveals nothing about her past. She drives building gossip when she’s seen with an inscrutable friend of the third floor’s Colonel Warlemont. Below him lives Dirk DeBaerre, an unsettling young man who plays dangerous games.

As the reality of German occupation nears, the Raphaëls disappear, leaving behind everything but their invaluable art collection, which has mysteriously vanished. Then a Nazi functionary moves into the building, and the residents must decide what to do and who to trust.

Betsy Gomberg reads (and sometimes writes about) Jewish books.