Summary/Reactions

My blogs might have been a little hard to follow because it's hard to tell how all of the characters are connected, so I'm going to briefly summarize that aspect of the story as best as I can.

The story starts off in Leo Gursky's point of view in the first person.  He reveals that he is an old man living alone in Brooklyn, where he escaped during WWII.  He came to Brooklyn because he was trying to find his childhood sweetheart, only to find that she had birthed their child but married another man.  As an old man, Leo still loves her and his son, Isaac, although she is dead and Leo never really talked to Isaac.  He decides to send a copy of one of his stories to his son.
The story transitions into Alma's point of view.  Alma is a teenage girl living in NYC named after Leo's sweetheart. This is because her parents read The History of Love, the book that Leo wrote for Alma  after she left Poland for America.  Alma lives in an apartment with her brother and her mother.  Her father died of cancer, but she still thinks about him all the time and inherited his love for nature and surviving in the wild.  Her mother gets contacted by Leo's son, Isaac, who signs his letters to Alma's mother as Jacob Marcus.  He asks her to translate a Spanish copy of The History of Love.
The book then goes into Zvi Litvinoff's point of view.  His POV is different from Leo's and Alma's because it is in the third person, whereas their's is in the first.  Zvi's character is not all that important except for the fact that he was the one who published Leo's The History of Love.  Before Leo left for Brooklyn, he gave his manuscript of The History of Love to Zvi for safe-keeping, expecting that it would be returned.  Zvi leaves Poland (for Chile or somewhere similar?) and assumes that Leo was killed in the war.  Zvi's wife convinces him to publish it, thinking that he was the writer.  The book is not very successful, but it is revealed that Alma's dad picked up an old copy at a second-hand shop.  (that's how Alma got connected to the book and named after Leo's Alma).
The book switches back and forth between Zvi's, Alma's and Leo's point of view for the rest of the story.  Alma becomes determined to find out the real Alma from Leo's story, which she thinks was written by Zvi.  She gets really confused because Isaac (aka Jacob Marcus) dies and she's trying to find Zvi, when she really needs to find Leo.  She eventually meets Leo and realizes that he was the one who loved another woman named Alma and wrote The History of Love for her.  I hope that this helps to clarify how each point of view was important piece of a single story.

Overall, I liked the story.  I got a little annoyed by the characters at times because none of them would speak their minds and go for what they wanted, which is what caused most of the story's conflict.  However, the ending was satisfying because Leo found some closure when he realized that Isaac had figured out that he was his father before he died, Zvi pretty much admits to his wife that he did not write The History of Love, and because Alma achieves her goal of finding out more about the history of The History of Love.  Also, this whole blogging thing made the experience more fun.