Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice is a novel by William Styron published in 1979 about a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but non-Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. An immediate bestseller and the basis of a successful film of the same title, the novel is often considered both Styron's best work and a major novel of the twentieth century. The difficult decision that shapes the character Sophie is sometimes used as an idiom. A "Sophie's Choice" is a tragic choice between two unbearable options.

The 1982 American movie starring Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, and Peter MacNicol was directed by Alan J Pakula. It was Kevin Klein's movie debut. The film won the Academy Award for Best Actress (Meryl Streep) and was nominated for Best Cinematography, Costume Design, Best Music and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium. The film was also ranked #1 in the Roger Ebert's Top Ten List for 1982 and was listed on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies.

Sophie's Choice is narrated by Stingo, a young writer longing to begin/finish his first novel. While Stingo is working on his novel, he is slowly drawn into the lives of lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, the inhabitants of the apartment above him. Sophie is a beautiful Polish survivor of the concentration camps of World War II and Nathan is Jewish - and a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist, it is revealed later in the story that this is a fabrication. He is actually a paranoid schizophrenic, though almost no one knows, including Sophie and Stingo. This means that although most times he is fine and normal, there are some times that he is jealous, violent, and delusional.

As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past, of which she has never before spoken. She tells of her anti-Semitic father, her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas, her arrest for smuggling ham to her mother, who was on her deathbed, and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the personal home of Rudolph Höß, the commander of Auschwitz. She relates her attempts to seduce Höß to ensure that her blonde, blue-eyed, German speaking son be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed and never learned of her son's fate.

As Nathan's "outbreaks" become more and more violent and abusive, Stingo receives a summons from Nathan's brother Larry. Stingo learns that Nathan is schizophrenic and is not a cellular biologist although "he could have been fantastically brilliant at anything he might have tried out…But he never got his mind in order." Nathan's delusions have led him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie, and he threatens to kill them both.

Sophie and Stingo flee to Stingo's father's peanut farm in Virginia. While on the way there, Sophie reveals her deepest, darkest secret: the night she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor made her choose which child would die immediately by gassing, and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her seven year old daughter, Eva, in a heart-rending decision that has left her mourning and filled with a guilt that she has not, or rather cannot, overcome. Also on the journey to his father's peanut farm in Virginia, Stingo proposes marriage to Sophie. She refuses, but he persuades her to think it over. After sharing but a single night together, before they reach the farm, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note that says that she must return to Nathan.

Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo discovers that both Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide in their room by way of sodium cyanide. Although Stingo is devastated, the last sentence in the novel suggests maybe a shred of optimism:

This was not judgment day, only morning.
Morning: excellent and fair.