The History of Love

Elephants appear several times in the text as symbols of truth that characters try to ignore or reframe. With this symbol, Nicole Krauss plays with the phrase “the elephant in the room,” which generally refers to some fact everyone willfully ignores. It’s also commonly said that elephants never forget, alluding to the power of memory. Finally, elephants live in strongly bonded, multigenerational herds, evoking the idea of community and paralleling the intergenerational narratives in The History of Love. Working this popular, multifaceted symbol into the novel supports themes of language and communication and comments on the role of language as a connective thread.

When Leo is a boy, he sees an elephant in the town square of Slonim. He knows the elephant’s presence is impossible, but he believes in it so strongly that he makes it real. The elephant becomes a symbol of Leo’s intentional reframing of reality to make it possible to live with all he’s lost. Zvi Litvinoff employs a similar strategy to cope with the loss of his family. He describes how living with the truth was like “living with an elephant” (156), something he is forced to ignore and fit himself around at every moment.