Otto Cone–Alicja Cone relationship

Otto Cone and Alicja Cone share an immigrant life but make sharply different choices about what belonging requires. Otto pursues Englishness by suppressing signs of his Polish-Jewish past; Alicja accommodates that project during their marriage, then reverses it after his death, making their relationship a contest between self-erasure and cultural return.

A marriage shaped by incompatible histories

Both Otto and Alicja are Polish émigrés. Otto is also a survivor of a wartime prison camp, but its name is never spoken during their daughter Alleluia Cone’s childhood. Alicja later explains that Otto wanted to make it as if the camp had never been. His refusal to revisit that history is not presented as simple composure: it leaves a past that remains powerful precisely because it has been kept unspoken.

Otto’s conviction that the world cannot be made into a harmonious whole gives this silence a larger context. He warns Alleluia against the idea that everything is homogeneous or ultimately reconciles, insisting that ghosts, Nazis, and saints can coexist in the same world, and that happiness and inferno may lie close together. The belief sits uneasily beside his own effort to smooth over the histories that shaped him. His marriage to Alicja therefore holds together two incompatible impulses: an awareness that contradictions cannot be abolished and a personal wish to begin again without the past.

The performance of Englishness

Otto changes the family name from Cohen to Cone and declares himself English, retaining a thick East European accent as he performs the role of an English gentleman. He avoids Polish literature because, for him, the language has been irredeemably polluted by history. He also keeps the heavy curtains drawn, a domestic effort to preserve the familiar streetscape of Moscow Road against the possibility of seeing something alien or disturbing beyond it. His English identity is emphatic, but the guarded house and conspicuous accent expose its fragility.

Alicja understands the name change as an attempt to erase more than immigrant difference. She objects that London is not America and that they do not need to change their name; she also sees Otto as trying to wipe away his Jewishness. Their arguments with the Board of Deputies remain formally civil but, in her account, are bare-knuckle disputes. Otto’s declared melting-pot ideal thus costs something within the marriage: Alicja experiences his drive toward integration as a demand that their inherited identity be discarded.

Domestic life and its contradictions

Otto’s anti-communism also enters family life as theatrical provocation. At Christmas, despite being Jewish, he insists that the family celebrate what he calls an English rite to honor their host nation. He then bursts into the room dressed in pantomime-Chinese costume, with drooping moustaches, and announces that he is Mao and has killed Father Christmas. The episode makes his English performance at once earnest and grotesque: the ceremony meant to demonstrate respect for the host culture is disrupted by a caricature staged in the family home. Alicja remembers him as a good man, even the best she knew, while also recalling that he could be appalling and that she did not always manage to tolerate him during his life.

After Otto dies, Alicja abandons the elegant manner and dress she had cultivated in response to his desire for integration. She returns to the Cohen name, the synagogue, Chanukah, and Bloom’s; replaces the formal English garden he prescribed with vegetables; and exchanges cerebral dinners for heavy lunches where dissident Hungarian poets and Gurdjieffian mystics gather. The central garden tree Otto had insisted upon was a symbolic graft of laburnum and broom, but Alicja reshapes the garden and the household on her own terms. Alleluia withdraws from these Sunday gatherings until she is old enough to move out, while Alicja accepts her departure. The change after Otto’s death makes visible how much of Alicja’s former presentation had been an offering to his ideal of assimilation.

Death and the unresolved legacy

In his seventies, Otto jumps into an empty lift shaft and dies. Alicja refuses to discuss why a camp survivor lived for decades and then, in her daughter’s words, completed what the monsters had not. The novel leaves open whether great evil ultimately triumphs, whether the past survives as a sliver of ice, or whether a person’s death can be incompatible with his life. Those questions remain unresolved rather than being made into an explanation of Otto’s act.

Alleluia’s first response to her father’s death is fury, and she directs the unanswered questions at Alicja. Her mother answers that Alleluia has inherited Otto’s lack of restraint. The remark links father and daughter without resolving their differences: Alleluia turns away from the path he chose and toward action and mountain climbing, while Alicja, freed from his project of integration, returns to the identity he had tried to leave behind. Their marriage continues to matter through these divergent legacies, each shaped by what Otto sought to erase and what Alicja chose to restore.