Kid in day camp; working from home; weather more than tolerable for Little Rock summer: June was a pretty big reading month. Some work stuff, but a few other things too, including a satisfying run of Esther Freud novels.

Dorothy Sayers, Have his Carcase (1932) The opening line kills, and I loved seeing the development of Wimsey and Vane’s relationship, but I do find Sayers a bit frivolous. That’s the point, I get it, I’m just starting to think I’m not the right reader for these books. All the code-breaking stuff went right over my head. I guess I am more for suspense than puzzles. Better as a romance than a crime novel. Rohan’s review is unimprovable.

Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (1998) I owe this recommendation to Alok (@alokranj): a while ago, he wrote up a great thread on memoirs by German historians. Very glad I read this, even if I did find it a bit oh I don’t know withholding maybe. Born Peter Fröhlich in Berlin to assimilated Jewish parents, Gay (the name he took after emigrating to America: frölich means happy or cheerful) went on to become a prominent historian of 19^th Century Europe and, in particular, psychoanalysis. I like psychoanalysis much more than the average person, but I wished Gay’s interpretations of his own behaviour wasn’t quite so orthodox. He’s much less interesting than Freud himself (which makes me wonder about his biography of Freud, generally, I believe, considered his masterpiece). Anyway, Gay’s is a fascinating story, and his eventual escape from Germany is hair-raising (the family made it out very late, in 1939, first to Cuba and then to America, thanks to the support of a paternal uncle who lived in Florida). They were booked on the infamous St. Louis (the ship that was not allowed to dock in Havana, that FDR refused to give sanctuary to, and that had to return to Europe), but his father had something like a premonition and found a way to get on an earlier ship. Gay spends a lot of time combating the accusation that German Jews of his milieu should have known better and left earlier (a ridiculous contention, and one that’s largely abated, but hasn’t completely vanished). Anyway, I’m not sure I’m in love with Gay as he presents himself (a little pompous), but I’d have enjoyed this even if I hadn’t been reading it for work.

Esther Freud, Summer at Gaglow (1997) The UK edition is called simply Gaglow, a weirder, better title. Gaglow is a house in Germany  . The first of Freud’s novels with a dual narrative, Gaglow switches between two generations of a family, one around the time of WWI and the other in contemporary London. The protagonist in the present is having her first baby; ostensibly she’s an actress, but she’s not especially committed to it. To make ends meet she sits for her father, a famous painter clearly modelled on Freud’s own father, Lucian. (Freud sat for him in her younger days.) Gaglow is the Bellgards beloved summer home. Or it was: as they are Jewish it was eventually taken from them; in the post-unification present, the house may return to the family. Freud’s themes of belonging and transience are evident here, explored on her widest canvas yet. Very satisfying.

Anthony Horowitz, The Sentence is Death (2018) Clever and amusing, but not as clever and amusing as The Word is Murder.

Esther Freud, The Wild (2000) We’re back in Hideous Kinky/Peerless Flats territory, with more children caught between absent fathers and overwhelmed mothers, with the added interest of complicated blended family dynamics and an amusing portrait of a 1970s Steiner school, where the only subject seems to be Norse mythology. Freud’s up to her classic “this is funny but also you will have your heart in your mouth because surely something terrible is about to happen” shtick. (That’s a compliment.) I don’t think this was ever published in the US, and that’s a damn shame.

David E. Fishman, The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (2017) A study of the so-called Paper Brigade, a Jewish work commando tasked by the Nazis to sort through the precious manuscripts of Vilna, Lithuania, once known as “the Jerusalem of the North.” The Nazis wanted material for their planned museum of murdered Jewry; they pulped the rest. At great personal risk, members of the Brigade smuggled documents into hiding in the hopes they would survive the war; surprisingly, some did. One of the remarkable people conscripted into this heartbreaking work was Avrom Sutzkever, probably the greatest Yiddish poet of the 20^th Century. Although Fishman’s style sometimes grates, the material is fascinating, and gave me some ideas about the comparison of people to written documents that I’ll try to work out in a future post.

María Gainza, Optic Nerve (2014) Trans. Thomas Bunstead (2019) What a pleasant surprise! I’ve wanted for some time to become better versed in the recent tidal wave of Spanish-language writing, especially from Central and South America, but haven’t really known where to start. I’ve no idea what Spanish-language literary traditions Gainza fits into, if any (she reminded me of Sebald/Berger/Bernard—autofiction-y writers who are smart about art), but I was completely taken with these quasi essayistic quasi fictional pieces, each of which centers on a painting or sculpture that the Gainza never shows us. A triumph of ekphrasis, then. (And there’s always Google.)

Smart, witty, engaging:

“Not for nothing did it say on my seventh grade report: ‘When she applies herself, she excels. Only she hardly ever applies herself.’”

“It is my view that any artist too dependent on either seeking or presenting new and astonishing experiences will cease to be effective once he or she succeeds in, as it were, apportioning that sense of discovery.”

“I listened in as the adults held forth. It was like the soothing sound of rain on windows, my favorite lullaby, reassuring confirmation that the world was still going on even as I turned away from it.”

“Anytime I believe I recognize a fellow renegade, something in me instinctively draws back.”

“I have also realized that being good with quotations means avoiding having to think for yourself.”

Translator Bunstead seems to have done a marvelous job. Highly recommended.

C. R. Lorac, Murder by Matchlight (1945) There are always several of these reissued British Crime Classics on the New Books shelves of my local library. I’ve read a few, but abandoned more. Turns out I’m more drawn to the covers than the content. A Blitz mystery ought to be up my street, but this didn’t engage me.

Philip Marsden, The Spirit-Wrestlers: A Russian Journey (1998) Loved it. You can read more here.

Isabella Leitner, Fragments of Isabella: A Memoir of Auschwitz (1978) That’s me, reading all the Holocaust memoirs so you don’t have to.

Reminds me in some ways of Night. Both are constructed in short fragments, emphasize the Death March, and focus on importance of family. Leitner and Wiesel both lived in the Hungarian countryside, and were deported about the same time (early 1944). Their tone is similar, too, and frankly it drives me nuts: portentous sacralizing. Like all survivor stories, Leitner’s is remarkable: she was able to stay with three of her sisters in Auschwitz, later a work camp called Birnbaumel (where they dug anti-tank traps against the coming Russian invasion), and finally on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, where one of the four sisters got separated from the others. Like Wiesel in Night, Leitner offers no context: works like these are responsible for the common understanding of the Holocaust as a terrible thing characterized by cattle cars, barbed wire, gas chambers, and the triumph of the human spirit. The most interesting aspects of her experience go unspoken—for example, Leitner’s father had left the family behind to go to America early in the war; after the war they were reunited. What was that like?

The afterword is the most interesting part of the book. It’s written by Irving Leitner, her husband, not because it is better written (though it’s more ordinarily competent, he having been a professional writer) but because of an anecdote about a visit to Paris in 1960 where the Leitners and their two teenage children are surrounded by tables of German tourists, retirees old enough to have participated in the war. Leitner has a panic attack: she writes the names of various camps on a piece of paper, intending to give it to them; later, her husband slips back into the café and delivers it to the table in the guise of the check. Lots of things going on there: panic, rage, revenge, none of which we see in the memoir itself.

Bart van Es, The Cut Out Girl (2018) Competent, compelling. But not “inside baseball” enough for me. My thoughts here.

Esther Freud, The Sea House (2003) Something of a companion to Gaglow, in that it’s also set in the present (2000: cell phones are still clunky and annoying and largely useless outside London—I miss those days) and the past (1953). Once again, Freud mines her remarkable family history: one of the characters, Klaus Lehmann, is an émigré architect closely modelled on her grandfather Ernst Freud (Sigmund’s fourth child). Lehmann appears mostly through the letters he wrote his wife during their various periods of separation in the 1930s. He is paired in the novel by a similarly absent Nick, an architect in the present, and the sometime boyfriend of Lilly Brennan. Lily has come to a village on the Suffolk coast to work on her dissertation on Lehmann in the town where he summered. Got all that? While she learns something about Lehmann, we learn more, because the “past” half of the novel is centered on Max Meyer, an émigré painter who mourns both his lost family home in Germany and his sister, who escaped the Nazis with him but who has just died after a long illness. (In this way, the novel is also an investigation on the difference between history and fiction.) Max is invited to Suffolk by a friend of the family, an analyst in the mode of Melanie Klein, who has plans to help the man work through his traumas, but whom he largely avoids in favour of an affair with Lehmann’s wife.

Probably the most plotty of Freud’s novels, but like the others its real power comes from its investigation of domestic space. Do homes center us or do they imprison us? Do we in the end prefer to mourn their passing? Can we appreciate the natural world if we don’t have a home to return to? Totally engrossing.

Esther Freud, Love Falls (2007) It’s the summer of 1982. As England prepares for Charles and Diana’s wedding, Lara is invited by her father—a figure straight from an Anita Brookner novel: European, Jewish, displaced, intellectual, vague, a bit ruthless—to holiday in Italy, specifically to visit an old friend of his who, it turns out, is dying. (The father, an historian, is apparently modelled on Lucien Freud.) Lara gets taken up by a louche expat set, falls in love, grows up a little, and is terribly hurt. (There’s a shocking scene that resonates even more today—at least for me, clueless cis male reader—than it would have ten years ago.) Probably the weakest of the Freuds I’ve read (a long set piece on the Palio involves some unusually clunky exposition), but it’s still pretty great. The title is the name of a dangerous waterfall and a description of what happens to all of us. Worth reading.

Judith Kerr, The Other Way Round (1975) The second of Kerr’s autobiographical trilogy. (I read When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit last month.) Her stand-in Anna is 15 and living in London during the Phony War and then the Blitz. She’s desperate to help her family stay afloat and to gain some independence, and enrolls in a secretarial college, which leads to a suitably eccentric job in an organization that collects donated fabric to be made into new uniforms and, more somberly, donates the clothes of soldiers who have died to other young men. Anna begins to separate herself from her family, plunging with joy into night classes in painting and a love affair. But what does this ordinary teenage distance mean for an refugee family whose motto has been something like “Home is wherever we are when we’re together”?

Judith Kerr, A Small Person Far Away (1978) In the final volume of Kerr’s trilogy, we jump ahead to 1956. Anna is married to a coming screenwriter and starting herself to become a writer. But her efforts in this regard are interrupted by a phone call from Germany. Her mother’s lover, an official with a Jewish relief agency in Berlin, tells her that she has attempted suicide. Anna flies to her mother’s bedside—for most of the short novel she is in a coma—and grapples with her guilt over her own reluctance to be there, her mother’s long shadow over her life, the uneven responsibilities assigned to her and her brother, and, in addition to everything else, her mixed feelings about being back in Berlin, where things are at once familiar and unfamiliar, and it doesn’t take long for officially repressed anti-Semitism to reappear.

One reason the last two parts of the trilogy have fallen out of print, I suspect, is that they aren’t quite children’s books (without being anything like what we know as YA). But with the benefit of hindsight we can read the novel as a contribution to the burgeoning phenomenon at that time (70s/80s) of second-generation stories. A Small Person Far Away isn’t the same as, say, Maus, because Anna’s mother hasn’t experienced the Holocaust directly. But she is still traumatized by her wartime experiences as a refugee, and Anna, like Art Spiegelman, has to cope with the fallout. I probably should write an essay about this. Reprint these books dammit!

Cressida Connolly, After the Party (2018) Did you know many followers of Oswald Mosley (the leader of the British Union of Fascists) were held without charge in 1940 and eventually interned on the Isle of Man for much of the war? I didn’t, and one of the tricks of Connolly’s novel is the make us feel sympathy, almost outrage, at this suspension of habeas corpus and the rule of law. It helps, as it were, that her protagonist is a seemingly apolitical family woman who gets pulled into the Union through her sisters. (The family isn’t quite modelled on the Mitfords, but it’s that social set.) I enjoyed After the Party about as much as I found it distasteful. I think Connolly’s going for the Ishiguro Special: a protagonist whose cluelessness we are meant to read against, and find sinister in a way they cannot. But unlike his books, this one is (mostly) in third person. Which left me unsure if it’s Phyllis who misreads her own life, or whether it’s Connolly. I honestly couldn’t tell how much distance Connolly wants us to take from her protagonist. If anyone’s read it and has any ideas, do share.

So that was June. Esther Freud is great. Judith Kerr is great. But the book that won my heart this month was Marsden’s The Spirit-Wrestlers. I’ve got two weeks until the big annual Canada vacation. Before then I’m going to try to read this. My only vacation reading plans are to avoid everything Holocaust for a few weeks…