In The Things We Cannot Say, Kelly Rimmer threads two timelines—Nazi-occupied Poland and contemporary America—to examine how what we speak and what we suppress shape entire lives. Secrets, love, and war reverberate across generations, binding the stories of Alina Dziak and her granddaughter, Alice Michaels. At its heart, the novel asks how truth finds a voice—and how families carry, conceal, and finally confront what once could not be said.
Major Themes
Communication and Silence
Communication and Silence drives the novel’s central tensions—literal muteness, self-protective quiet, and the painful work of finally speaking. Alice’s son, Eddie Michaels, is nonverbal and prone to meltdowns, such as the grocery-store crisis in Chapter 1-5 Summary, while Babcia’s stroke renders her voiceless in the present, echoing the decades-long silence she kept about the war. Tools and texts—the AAC app, hidden letters, and hard conversations—become bridges across the unsayable, transforming isolation into connection.
Love, Sacrifice, and Loyalty
Love in this novel is not sentiment but commitment—loyalty tested by danger and defined by sacrifice. Alina and Tomasz Slaski move from idyllic young love to impossible choices, including the “lie” of a wedding that conceals a deeper act of devotion. Across generations, characters surrender safety, reputation, and dreams to protect one another, suggesting that true love is measured by what it’s willing to bear.
War, Trauma, and Survival
War dismantles a community and remakes the self, and the novel refuses to romanticize the cost. Occupation strips Alina’s village of rights and leaders, while the cellar bombings, moral compromises, and the haunted persistence of memory convey enduring psychological injury. Through figures like Saul Weiss and Alina’s vow in the Prologue to be “generous and brave,” the narrative insists that survival is both an act of will and a testament to human solidarity.
Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection
The past is not past; it lives in bodies, names, and unasked questions. Alice’s journey to Poland reanimates a buried history, while inherited traits and temperaments signal a living chain of kinship and consequence. As secrets surface—through Babcia’s final request and the family’s return in the Epilogue—the legacy of silence becomes an opportunity for repair, with Julita Slaski-Davis bridging a generation that tried to move on by not looking back.
Supporting Themes
Motherhood and Family Dynamics
Motherhood appears in contrasting forms: Alice’s relentless advocacy amid isolation, Julita’s career-first pragmatism, and Alina’s wartime caretaking of Emilia Slaski. These dynamics refract the major themes—silence in marriages, love as labor, and the inherited pressure to protect—showing how family roles both confine and sustain.
Hope vs. Despair
Hope is a stubborn flame against historical darkness: Alina’s love as “beacon,” a refugee-camp wedding as defiance, Alice’s faith that uncovering truth can heal. Despair is real—but never final—because acts of care and memory keep meaning alive.
Identity and Finding One’s Voice
Alina’s assumed identity (Hanna Wisniewski) and Alice’s selfhood beyond “Eddie’s mom” trace parallel quests for agency. As the AAC app and long-suppressed stories surface, voice becomes identity’s foundation—naming the past to claim the present.
Courage and Resilience
Ordinary bravery—hiding, feeding, crossing borders, choosing right under threat—defines both timelines. The dreidel gifted to Eddie, inscribed with “a great miracle happened there,” encapsulates the novel’s ethic: resilience is built from small mercies that add up to survival.
Theme Interactions
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Communication and Silence ↔ Love, Sacrifice, and Loyalty: Silence often functions as protection—Alina’s secrecy shields those she loves—yet love ultimately demands truth. Devotion breaks secrecy’s grip when Alice insists on naming the past.
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War, Trauma, and Survival → Communication and Silence: Traumatic experience enforces muteness (Babcia’s decades of quiet), while tools of expression—letters, the AAC app—counter trauma’s isolating force.
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War, Trauma, and Survival → Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection: What was endured becomes inheritance. Alice’s investigation turns private pain into shared memory, converting legacy from burden into bond.
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Love, Sacrifice, and Loyalty ↔ Family Legacy and Intergenerational Connection: Sacrificial choices reverberate across time, shaping identities and obligations; in turn, descendants’ loyalty redeems those earlier costs by witnessing them.
Hope threads through all: it tests silence, fortifies love under siege, and reframes legacy as a pathway to healing rather than a prison of memory.
Character Embodiment
Alina Dziak
Alina embodies silence turned into testimony: a young woman remade by war, she carries trauma, love, and loyalty through an assumed identity and years of guarded quiet. Her choices—protecting others, preserving letters, and finally prompting Alice’s search—anchor the novel’s movement from secrecy to story.
Alice Michaels
Alice stands for advocacy, maternal endurance, and the audacity to ask hard questions. By learning new languages of care (the AAC app) and traveling to uncover Babcia’s history, she transforms familial silence into a shared narrative that heals.
Tomasz Slaski
Tomasz personifies love under duress—loyalty tested by moral compromise and wartime coercion. His decisions, including service under the occupiers to shield family and later acts of resistance, spotlight sacrifice as both necessity and burden.
Saul Weiss
Saul embodies the war’s deepest wounds: loss beyond words, survival without consolation. His presence confronts characters with the costs of history and invites compassion as an ethical response to trauma.
Eddie Michaels
Eddie makes literal the theme of voice found: nonverbal yet communicative through technology, he reframes what it means to “speak.” His resilience—and the small miracles surrounding him—reorients the family toward hope.
Emilia Slaski
Emilia crystallizes chosen family and protective love; Alina’s caretaking becomes an apprenticeship in courage. Through Emilia, the story shows how responsibility can mature youthful love into steadfast loyalty.
Julita Slaski-Davis
Julita, the bridge generation, embodies the paradox of moving on by not looking back. Her competence and emotional reserve reflect a legacy of survival that Alice must reinterpret through truth-telling.