Sophie's Choice: Plot Overview is a summary of the novel.
Stingo, a successful novelist, reminisces about events that took place more than twenty years ago in the summer of 1947.Stingo was twenty-two that summer.He moved to New York City to pursue his dream of being a writer.He lost his job in the publishing industry and spent the next several months living off of a family inheritance to focus on his writing.He made friends with two of the other tenants when he rented a cheap room in a boarding house in Brooklyn.Nathan andSophie were both Polish and Catholic.After being imprisoned in a concentration camp during World War II,Sophie moved to the United States, where she found work and learned English.Nathan seemed to be physically and emotionally abusive towards Sophie during their volatile relationship, which included both intense sexual passion and violent arguments.
Stingo spent most of his time with the couple.He was writing a novel about the tragic life and death of a beautiful young woman, and his hopes of finding a woman willing to sleep with him.Stingo wasgrudgingly admired Nathan, even though he felt uneasy due to Nathan's sudden moods.Stingo began to learn more about the past of the woman he nursed a crush on.Stingo explains thatSophie sometimes left out important information that she only revealed later in her past.
He was well educated and well off in Poland.Her father was a professor and her mother was an academic.When she first claimed that her father was a liberal, she admitted that he was anti-Semitic.The pamphlets advocated for the elimination of Jewish people.Many Polish teachers and intellectuals were imprisoned when Germany invaded Poland in 1939.The men died in a prison camp.
Sophie and her mother lived in Warsaw for three years after these deaths.Wanda, a woman who was active in the Polish Resistance, became friends with the man while he worked in a factory.Sophie was taken to a concentration camp after being arrested for trying to smuggle a ham.Jan and Eva were seized and jailed as well as Wanda.When she talked about her past with Stingo, she did not mention the existence of these two children.The group was sent to a work camp.Eva was sent to die immediately.