Meanwhile, he had a lifelong friendship with his neighbors in Canada, a Jewish family who were also fighting the demons of their past. He couldn't commit to a relationship until he came to understand his dreams about Bella. His marriage to his first wife, the upbeat, outgoing Alex, failed because he couldn't shake the somberness of his past. Jakob's reflections, especially the emotions stemming from his thoughts, led to him authoring a successful book.

Jakob constantly dreamed of Bella, especially her piano-playing, but never knew her ultimate fate. A few years later, Athos and Jakob moved to Canada where Athos began work as a teacher. He ran away and was found by Athos Roussos, a Greek national working on an archaeological project in Poland Athos managed to smuggle Jakob out of Poland and into Greece. When he was an adolescent during World War II, Nazis shot his parents dead and hauled away his sister Bella he witnessed these events from a hideout in their home. The quet elation Ben senses in the older man, and Ben's own connection to the wounding legacies of the war, kindle a fascination with Jakob and his writing, upsetting and then opening that part of himself long since shut down against his knowledge of the past.Middle-aged Polish Jew Jakob Beer reflects on his entire life.

And in this layered process of reentering life, Jakob learns the power of language - to destroy, to omit, and to obliterate but also to witness and tell, conjure and restore.Īnd it is in Toronto as well that, late in his life, Jakob will cross paths with Ben: a young professor, expert in the dramas of weather and biography but naive in the drama of his own life. It is also possible to rent 'Fugitive Pieces' on Apple TV, Amazon Video online and to download it on Apple TV, Amazon Video. Yet this is also the time when he meets the woman who will become his first wife, and begins his life-long work as a translator and poet. Fugitive Pieces streaming: where to watch online Currently you are able to watch 'Fugitive Pieces' streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Hoopla or for free with ads on VUDU Free, Tubi TV, Pluto TV. At its center is poet Jakob Beer: traumatically orphaned as a young boy during the Second World war, rescued from the mud of a buried Polish city and secreted to a Greek island by Athos Roussos, scientist, scholar, and, above all, humanist.Īfter the war, in Toronto, where Athos has accepted a teaching post at the University, Jakob is faced with the tangible, insistent nature of the recent past: his own surfacing in all its darkness and profundity, the question of his beloved sister's fate its harrowing focus. Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1997Īnne Michaels's fiercely beautiful debut novel tells the interlocking stories of three men of different generations whose lives are transformed by the events and shifting effects of the same war. Fugitive pieces / Anne Michaels Book Bib ID