Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Immortalists, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Fate vs. Choice
Family and Shared History
Obsession
Death, Meaning, and Legacy
Surviving vs. Living
Magic, Religion, Dance, and Possibility
Summary
Analysis
In June 1988, Klara and Raj perform at Teatro ZinZanni—the nicest theater she’s ever played in. On a monitor, Klara watches Raj as he performs, explaining that life isn’t about defying death, but about transforming. As long as a person can transform, they cannot die. In the act, Second Sight is a success, as is the Vanishing Birdcage. She and Raj are booked for ten more shows.
Raj’s speech ties into the idea of legacy: that rather than defying death, one can outlive death through a legacy. However, Raj’s speech also foreshadows Klara’s own thoughts on her death—that she doesn’t want to try to avoid the fortune teller’s prediction, because the point of life is not to defy death.
Themes
Three months later, Klara flies to New York for the High Holidays once again. She tells Varya gleefully that she thinks she and Raj might get married. Secretly, Klara knows that they plan to go to City Hall when she returns from New York—and that Klara is also going to have a baby. It’s a surprise, but she’s excited to have a baby with the man she loves, which she describes as “turning one scarf into two.”
The metaphor Klara uses for having a baby—of turning one scarf into two—suggests that having a child with someone she loves fills her world with as much wonder and meaning as magic does.
Themes
Klara stops drinking. By the third trimester, her mind is clear, but there’s too much time for Klara to sit and think. She imagines the baby, sure that it’s a boy and that they’ll name him Simon. But when Klara gives birth in May, the baby is a girl. She and Raj name the baby Rubina and call her Ruby.
Benjamin hints at the disruptive nature of obsessive thoughts here. Having too much time to think makes Klara anxious, and it is one of the things that spurs her to drink after Ruby is born.
Themes
Varya, Daniel, and Gertie visit in June. Klara shows them the Castro and the ballet. Daniel tells Klara about his new girlfriend, Mira. Gertie adores Ruby, and Varya has lots of advice. She and Gertie are surprised to find that Raj and Klara don’t have basic things like a binky or childproofing equipment for their apartment. Raj assures them that they have everything that they need. Klara is annoyed at her family, but when they leave the next day, she misses them. With them in San Francisco, she was able to ignore that Simon and Saul were missing.
Each time Klara’s family visits, Klara finds ways in which they are exasperating. Yet at the same time, she values that they continue to return to each other, particularly because she can’t reconnect with Saul and Simon, so connecting with family is the next best thing.
Themes
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In October, Klara continues to hear Simon knocking. Ruby is startled by the knocks, but Raj doesn’t hear them and gets frustrated at Klara’s insistence that they are there. One day, Raj suggests that they go to Vegas and expand their show. Klara is hesitant, thinking that Vegas is too gaudy. She says she’d rather travel around together. Raj agrees to this plan, simply insisting that they leave behind the ghosts of San Francisco.
Klara’s obsession with the knocking continues to the point where she believes that Ruby can hear them, too. At the same time, her belief in the knocks sows division between her and Raj. His reference to the ghosts of San Francisco—meaning Simon in particular—foreshadows how her obsession with remaining connected to Simon will drive a wedge in their relationship.
Themes
That night, Klara wakes and drinks while practicing her smaller magic tricks. She remembers practicing late at night as a teenager, too. She often found Saul sitting in the living room in the middle of the night. Klara recalls that he would read the Talmud again and again, sometimes staring at a single page for days. While he read, she practiced, and Saul enjoyed watching her tricks. Klara felt that they shared a sensibility. She thinks that it was Judaism that taught her it was possible to turn rock into water and water into blood.
Here Klara references two other stories in Judaism. “Rock into water” refers to when Moses led the Jews through the desert for 40 years after fleeing enslavement in Egypt. God instructed Moses to strike a rock so that water would flow from it and they could drink. “Water into blood” refers the ten plagues, which God set upon Egypt so that the Pharaoh would free the Jews. In the first plague, God turned all of the water in Egypt to blood. Each reference thus entails a miracle and illustrates the connection between magic and religion as a source of wonder.
Themes
Klara thinks of one of Saul’s stories: when he was a young boy, the state of Israel had just formed, and his father Lev told him that this meant he would always have a home. Klara realizes that their culture was their home, not the two-bedroom apartment in New York. Klara thinks the same now—that home isn’t a physical place, but instead it’s wherever Ruby and Raj are.
Klara recognizes that a “home” is an extension of the bonds of family. Homes are built not out of physical places or objects, but instead out of shared history like a common culture, or the common experience of touring around the country together as Raj, Ruby, and Klara are about to do.
Themes
