Marie Jalowicz Simon (1922—1998) was the only child of accomplished, elderly parents. Her father, a lawyer interested in jurisprudence but uninterested in the day-to-day aspects of being a lawyer, let his brilliant wife run the practice. Jalowicz Simon’s beloved uncle, perhaps her closest confidante, a man seriously committed to silliness, was both a communist and a deeply Orthodox Jew who basically starved to death once Nazi regulations prohibited kosher slaughtering practices. Her mother died of cancer in 1938; her father in 1941, possibly of a stroke. In the last few months of his life he had unwillingly become involved with a woman named Johanna Koch, an old family friend, who, together with her husband, Emil, would later help Jalowicz Simon survive, despite complicated mutual hate-love.
In 1940 Jalowicz Simon was sent to Siemens as a forced labourer. She became close with many of her coworkers, both Jewish and not, and was even accepted into a saboteurs’ ring at the armaments factory. She avoided deportation in 1941 by telling the postman who brought her notice that the woman under that name had disappeared, and then, in June 1942, dressed only in her petticoat, slipped past the two SS men who had been sent to pick her up. At that point she “went under,” becoming, like Inge Deutschkron and about 1500 other Berlin Jews, a so-called U-Boot.
Marie Jalowicz Simon, circa 1944
She was briefly engaged to a Chinese man (they could not speak to each other), and later went to Bulgaria with another man she had fallen in love with; in Sofia a sympathetic German official gave her a false pass to enable her to return to Berlin rather than be arrested. A family friend, a doctor who performed abortions and together with his hated wife helped out many Jews in hiding before himself disappearing in mysterious circumstances, placed her in various safe homes, but she could never stay in any of these places for long. For a time she stayed in a villa outside the city with a former circus performer. In the most grotesque and extraordinary moment of these dramatic years, she was sold for 15 Marks by a scurrilous associate of the abortionist to a syphilitic ardent Nazi who boasts of his ability to sniff out a Jew and who paid handsomely for a hair from Hitler’s dog, which he framed and hung on his walls. (Even as I write this I can’t believe what I’m saying, but it’s all true!)
Through Hannchen Koch Jalowicz Simon was introduced to an important player in the communist resistance; this woman, Trude Neuke, in turn passed her on to a Dutch volunteer worker with whom she shacked up in an apartment owned by an old woman. Jalowicz Simon came to both love and loathe this woman, a “repellent, criminal blackmailer with Nazi opinions”; as she later put it, with characteristic insouciance, “life is complicated.” Jalowicz Simon stayed in this curious ménage—the Dutchman would occasionally beat her, but she was grateful for the bruises as they helped her blend in to the neighbourhood—from late 1943 until early 1945. She spent the end of the war and the months immediately after it in far-eastern Berlin, at great risk from the Russian soldiers who had ostensibly liberated her, not to mention the increasingly paranoid fantasies of Hannchen Koch who was convinced the young woman was out to steal her husband.
After the war, Jalowicz Simon decided to stay in what became East Germany. A member of the Communist party, she became a professor at the prestigious Humboldt University, where she taught classics and the history of philosophy. She almost never spoke of her wartime experiences to her son, the historian Hermann Simon, until the very end of her life, when she recorded 77 tapes’ worth of reminiscences, which came out, her son tells us in his foreword, in elegantly phrased lectures, with almost no uncertainty. Hermann Simon was able to confirm almost everything in her story; together with the writer Irene Stratenwerth, he turned the tapes into a memoir, Underground in Berlin: A Young Woman’s Extraordinary Tale of Survival in the Heart of Nazi Germany, capably translated into English by Anthea Bell. (It has a wonderful map of the city, showing the locations of all her safe houses; I wish more books did this.) The book is particularly valuable for its frankness on sexual abuse, which is only now becoming a significant topic in Holocaust Studies.
I recently read and discussed Underground in Berlin with some students who are working with me on a Holocaust education project. Before we talked I circulated some questions about the text—which, I hope I’ve made clear, is well worth reading, both a fascinating and suspenseful narrative—and I’ve copied these here, in case they are of interest.
Most of you have read at least some Holocaust memoirs. How does Underground in Berlin compare? You might answer this question by thinking about material you expected to find but didn’t, or, conversely, material you didn’t expect would be included but is.
Jalowicz Simon grew up in mostly left-wing circles at a time when one’s political affiliations really mattered. She later spent most of her life in a communist country (East Germany). No surprise, then, that class is so important to her memoir. But what about cultural background? (I’m thinking of what the sociologist Pierre Boudieu called “cultural capital.”) What is the relation, for Jalowicz Simon, between cultural capital and class? Take a look at pp. 258 & 308 for just two examples.
I’m interested in Jalowicz Simon’s interest in excretion—what she with bracing directness calls shit and piss. Finding somewhere to relieve yourself is a big deal in the memoir. And on a couple of occasions, excretion is disgustingly related to eating, like the chamber pot that becomes a dish. How do such moments contribute to our understanding of the text? (Some examples: 100, 142, 151)
Sex is central to Jalowicz Simon’s wartime experiences. Sometimes she uses sex or its promise (flirting, etc.) to get something she needs (72, 87, 143). Sometimes sex is a price she has to pay for staying alive (25, implied on 326, the whole Galecki experience). And sometimes sex is violently forced upon her (i.e. rape on 99, 314, 323-4, or the threat on 125). Sometimes it is replaced by violence (238). When she meets a man who has no sexual interest in her she finds it noteworthy by virtue of being so unusual (192). What did you make of Jalowicz Simon’s portrayal of sex? When is she overt and when is she covert? When does she tell us straight out, and when do we need to read between the lines? What difference does this difference make?
You surely noticed how many places (apartments, cottages, sheds) Jalowicz Simon stayed, and, correspondingly, how many people were responsible for her survival. You also doubtless were struck by the varying motives of her helper/rescuers. (Is that even the right term?) Her experiences support the historian Mark Roseman recent claims that we like to think of rescuers as being altruistically motivated, and clearly motivated (not changing their minds, not being ambivalent); we similarly like to think of victims as being helped by a single person over a sustained period. (Think Oskar Schindler.) These fantasies are not borne out by the historical record. To save a life required a network of actors, many of whom did not know each other or think of each other as being involved in a common enterprise. What are the consequences of rethinking rescue?
“You’re Jewish. You must let the world know that that doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as good as they.”
So begins Inge Deutschkron’s Outcast: A Jewish Girl in Wartime Berlin (1978; translated by Jean Steinberg, 1989). The memoir mostly concerns her time as a so-called U-Boot—a Jew in hiding during the war—but it begins on March 31, 1933 with these words, urgently spoken to her by her mother. Hitler has taken power the month before; being Jewish suddenly matters a lot. At the time, ten-year-old Deutschkron knew neither that she was Jewish, nor what that meant. She doesn’t ask, either: “I sensed that it would upset [my mother], and me too.” Deutschkron, who honed her sense for when people were equivocating during her nerve-wracking hears of hiding in plain sight, must have caught the hesitancy, even the internalized prejudice in her mother’s command: “You must let the world know that that doesn’t mean you’re not every bit as good as they.” However unconsciously, the mother’s double negative frames the experience of being Jewish from the perspective of the antisemite.
But the world wouldn’t let Deutschkron ignore her newly revealed identity. The upshot might be good for the writer, but it’s hard for the person. She is positioned as an outsider and an observer. Turning away from her mother’s demand, the child directs her attention to the world outside her window:
What interested me was what was going on outside in our corner of Berlin, on our quiet street. I liked looking out of the window of our apartment on Hufelandstrasse. It may have been nothing more than a sleepy little corner, yet for a ten-year-old there was much to see. I could watch the other children play. I was not allowed to play outside, my parents thought it wasn’t safe. I, of course, didn’t agree. I knew all the children by name, but I wasn’t allowed to play with them. All I could do was watch. It hurt.
This passage is typical: neither showy in style nor demonstrative in tone. Deutschkron is smart, capable, forthright, gently ironic. She often holds her feelings in reserve. Perhaps she thinks that although her experiences were exhausting, frightening, debilitating, and risky they weren’t representative of the persecution of the time. It’s true, this is a Holocaust story without trains, camps, or ravines (even though these elements hover at the margins of her tale, where lurks the suffering she knows she is always only one step away from, even if she can’t quite fathom its exact form). Yet one of the salutary aspects of Outcast is to expand our sense of what the Holocaust was, and what we expect of those who survived it.
I said reserve is characteristic of Deutschkron’s self-presentation. But I don’t mean she’s unfeeling. Look again at that opening anecdote. Yes, her separateness gives her a certain power: where others might see nothing, she sees a whole world, the better for being barred from it. But turning suffering into wisdom isn’t much fun. Deutschkron first says she liked to look out the window. But she ends by reversing course and admitting the harder truth: “It hurt.” The emotion stings the more for the effort of trying to hold it in check.
A few pages later, Deutschkron admits that she has not even especially been looking at the neighbourhood kids. In fact, she’s not looking at anything. She’s pretending to look as a cover for her real activity: waiting. Her father is late, should have been home long ago. Word has gone around that the Nazis will be boycotting Jewish-owned businesses the next day. People talk of arrests and violence. Deutschkron’s worry is fueled by her sense that her mother, too, is worried. She keeps sticking her head out the door and looking down the stairwell. The doorbell rings. A friend has come with a warning: “‘Your husband must get out of town immediately.’”
Eventually the anxiety subsides—for now. He is safe with friends for the night, mother and daughter learn, and returns the next day full of laughter: the man he stayed with, a doctor, put him up in his office, where he slept under the watchful eye of a skeleton. But Deutschkron’s mother doesn’t think it’s funny. All day she burns papers and sorts books. The Deutschkrons are committed socialists, everyone in the neighbourhood knows this, including the child herself, for whom socialism was her earliest identity. (If she’d been born in the US a decade later, she would have been a Red Diaper baby.) And it is being a socialist, more than a Jew, that, for the time being, is most dangerous. The family takes precautions, but they feel they are safe enough, things will blow over. They spend a few nights with relatives across town, and later move to a different neighbourhood where nobody knows their political affiliation, but they don’t pursue emigration. Even a couple of years later, when the father has the chance of a job in Australia, he doesn’t leave: “‘After all, I’m a Prussian civil servant; I can’t just run away.”
Claude Lanzmann, who interviewed Deutschkron for three hours during the making of his epic film Shoah (1985), sadly leaving all but a few minutes of their conversation out of the final nine-and-a-half-hour cut, notes that by equating leaving with running away the father reveals how much he felt he belonged to Germany. Like so many assimilated German Jews, the Deutschkrons story is a story of betrayal, of failed belonging. In this sense, the memoir’s English title is quite accurate. Germany’s Jews were indeed cast out. (The original title, Ich trug den golden Stern, I Wore the Yellow Star, references this exclusion more obliquely.) In this regard their persecution was different from that of Jews elsewhere, especially in Eastern Europe, who had never been allowed to feel they belonged.
As Deutschkron grows up, she responds to her increasing feelings of alienation by resisting however she can, saying Aufwiedersehen instead of Heil Hitler, declining to give to “the countless collections for various national and social causes.” But even though she is undoubtedly correct when she tells Lanzmann that she is “a fighter,” her resistance can opnly go so far. Little things get to her. Sitting for a portrait at a photography studio, she is asked to tuck her hair behind her ear. The photographer had no ulterior motive, Deutschkron says, but the girl bursts into tears anyway: Nazi “race science” claimed you could tell a Jew by their ears. (I’m reminded of Carlo Ginzburg’s brilliant essay “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method,” which takes the study of ears as an index for modernity’s various ways of knowing, among which, Ginzburg would surely insist, we must include phrenological racism.) Deutschkron doesn’t tell her parents what happened, fearing that they will only laugh (shades of her father’s return from his night at the doctor’s office) and retell the story, which circulated among Jews at the time, about the man pulled from the crowd at a Nazi rally to demonstrate Aryan typology: unbeknownst to the Nazis, the man with the perfect German ears is a Jew. No one cared if the story was true: “Jews loved it because it helped them bear the humiliation of this particular indignity.” Deutschkron is unconvinced, though—just as she is unimpressed by the tenderness of the policeman at her local precinct as he wiped her fingers when the family are forced to comply with a fingerprinting decree. Yes, the officer might have been more embarrassed than her by “this demeaning procedure,” and, yes, the ear joke is a way for those who have suffered to claw back a brief moment of control over their lives, but Deutschkron implies that these moments don’t amount to anything significant.
They don’t, for example, keep the family together. In April 1939, her father leaves for England. After Kristallnacht, England eased its immigration policy slightly, granting visas to those who had relatives in England and could prove they had applied for admission to other countries. Her father had a cousin in England, and he had applied to go to Palestine. But the cousin could only sponsor him; Deutschkron and her mother would have to stay behind. Fitting, then, that she’s alone with her mother in the book’s opening scene, for this will be their fate throughout the war. The father is absent from the rest of the book (his story too must have been interesting); even when they are eventually reunited, Deutschkron says almost nothing about him. Hard for me to read this elision as anything other than judgmental.
From the time the war begins, Deutschkron’s memoir might have taken the title of Lore Segal’s own description of her wartime experience, Other People’s Houses. For the next five years, Deutschkron and her mother will shuttle through a series of rooms and other, less orthodox, hiding places. Their experiences support Mark Roseman’s claim that those who survived relied mostly on a network of helpers, some of whom they knew, and others they didn’t, some of whom provided long-term assistance, and others who helped spontaneously or briefly. The Deutschkrons relied on their friends in the socialist movement. One man had a grocery and gave the women fruit and vegetables; another, a butcher, sold them cuts of meat without ration cards. Still others offered places to stay or let them work off the books.
Deutschkron’s formal education had ended in April 1939 when the Nazis closed all Jewish schools. Her options were either to work in a Jewish household or in a factory. But for some reason the Jewish training school for kindergarten teachers had not yet been closed, and so she enrolled for the one-year course. The school was run by a highly educated woman who offered her students a much more wide-ranging humanistic education than would have been expected. Deutschkron appreciated the opportunities, yet she did not find early childhood education to be her métier the way one of her fellow students did. This a beautiful girl from the Ruhr valley was Marianne Strauss, the subject of two books I’ve recently been reading—this connection impressed me in a spooky, almost mystical way, as if even in the midst of destruction all manner of connecting webs still existed.
After graduating from the course, Deutschkron took a job in the household of Dr. Conrad Cohen, head of the welfare department of the Reich Association of Jews in Germany. As such, he and his family still lived in relative privilege. Deutschkron did cleaning, laundry, childcare for the family until April 1941, when a new edict declared that Jews could no longer keep household help. That left only compulsory factory work. Through her connection to Cohen, Deutschkron was sent to see Otto Weidt, who ran a workshop in which blind and deaf workers, most of them Jewish, made brooms and brushes for the army.
Weidt might be the most remarkable person in the memoir, which is saying something. Legally blind, at times reliant on an oxygen machine, active before the war in pacifist circles, aided by his competent and shrewd wife, Elise (regrettably absent from Deutschkron’s account), Weidt routinely defied the Gestapo. “He was a gambler and a risk-taker and liked a good fight.” Thanks to his army contracts Weidt had been deemed essential to the war effort. He obtained extra materials on the black market (paying policemen to cut hair from their horses’ tails, for example) so he could exceed his production quota and sell the extra illegally. That allowed him to hire more workers, almost all of them Jewish. Contrary to regulations, he even let able-bodied Jews work in the office as secretaries and accountants. Weidt offered one such place to Deutschkron, where she worked closely with Alice (Ali) Licht, a young woman with whom she became close and who, thanks to Weidt, would survive the war in the most extraordinary way. The 60-year-old Weidt became a surrogate father for Deutschkron, though one more kindly and less threatened by his daughter’s sexuality than most. When Deutschkron fell for a man named Hans Rosenthal, who worked as a purchasing and distributing agent of the Jewish Community (which meant relying on black market connections), Weidt would facilitate meetings between them. He even arranged dinners for his favourites at the factory. When the Gestapo descended on the workshop, as they regularly did, Weidt would pretend to curse his employees for their laxness, though always ending by noting to the Nazis that he could never fill his army orders “without these Jews.”
Otto Weidt, left, with Alice (Ali) Licht, and Gustav Kremmert, whom Weidt was unable to save
Outside the workshop, the situation got worse and worse. The first deportations left Berlin in October 1941. Over a thousand people, one of whom had for a time lived with Deutschkron and her mother in a shared apartment, were corralled in a synagogue before being shipped east. Deutschkron and her mother walked by the building in case they could catch a glimpse of their friend. Thinking of the mostly elderly people inside, they felt at once relieved and guilty: “We breathed a sigh of relief that we were still able to work, and we felt ashamed.” Deutschkron knew there was no good reason why they were outside the building and not with the others inside.
That conviction was reinforced when Deutschkron herself received a notice. Her mother insisted that she would voluntarily register so that they won’t be separated, an idea Deutschkron furiously rejected. At their wits’ end, they went to see Dr. Cohen for advice, who angrily tore up the notice. There had apparently been a mix-up; it was meant for someone with a similar name. “For a while I was haunted by the thought that someone else was going to take my place,” Deutschkron says. Note the temporariness of her feeling (“for a while”); it was difficult to worry about others.
By mid 1942 the Deutschkrons moved into a Judenhaus, apartments in which Berlin’s remaining Jews were crowded together—eleven of them in a five-and-a-half-room flat. Friends disappeared; even the Cohens were deported. Hans Rosenthal escaped deportation by a hair’s breadth—a Gestapo officer familiar with his contacts thought it would be better to make use of them than to send him away.
Deutschkron movingly describes visiting her aunt and uncle (her father’s sister) on the day of their deportation. She and her mother consoled the couple as best they could, slipping out of the house just before the Jewish police arrive:
To this day I can hear the squeaking of the stairs. As we stepped out from the dark hallway into the wintry street we saw a police car approach. We stopped to watch. Two Jewish orderlies wearing the yellow star went into the house. They reappeared minutes later behind my aunt, who was lugging the heavy backpacks. She walked quickly, as though eager to get it over with. My uncle followed haltingly. They didn’t look back as they stepped into the car, not a single backward look at the city that had been their home for almost thirty years. I cried. My mother, although just as moved, warned me to control myself. “Suppose somebody were to see us?” We had gone out without our stars. We were the only ones on the street. Strange how the Berliners knew when to make themselves scarce so as not to have to see what was happening on their streets. It is anybody’s guess how many watched from behind their curtained windows.
It’s as though Deutschkron were a little girl again, forced to watch the neighbourhood from her apartment. Yet what she watches now is more terrible. Is her looking compensation for the backward look her relatives can’t bring themselves to give? As in the earlier scene, there is here an us and a them, yet unlike the moment a decade earlier, when “they,” the children at play, were visible in the street, here, they are invisible. They are hiding now. Notice that they are “the Berliners,” not ‘our fellow citizens.’ Notice too how Deutschkron, in a reverse synecdoche, substitutes the city for their apartment building: “not a single backward look at the city that had been their home.” It’s as if she is accompanying them all the way to the station, and beyond, as the train departs for the East. This is telling, because Outcast is more than most memoirs I’ve read, even of Jews who lived there, a Berlin story.
All the more amazing, then, what a select few of its inhabitants were willing to do. Weidt, in particular, continues to perform miracles—when his disabled workers are taken in a raid, he marches to the Gestapo and somehow gets them back. But he mutters he won’t be able to do it again. Death is all around. A friend tells Deutschkron that their neighbour’s son has come back from the east with news about what is happening there to the Jews. This corroborates what she and her mother have heard on the BBC, which they listen to in secret whenever they can: “There’d been vague allusions to gassings and executions that none of had believed, or, rather, wanted to believe.” The friend insists they must not let themselves be deported. This is January 1943. Almost no Jews are still living in Berlin; the last will be taken in February. Deutschkron and her mother will have to go underground.
The U Boots move frequently, from place to place, all uncomfortable and risky, sleeping for a while even on the floor of a stationary stop owned by Socialist friends, and, later in their boathouse outside the city. They never stay anywhere long. If they are introduced by their hosts as friends on a visit, neighbours soon say, “They’re staying a long time, aren’t they?”
In the summer of 1943 the Gestapo finally “cleans out” Weidt’s workshop—everyone is deported, though Weidt manages to get Ali Licht and her parents (who he had been hiding in a false room at the back of the shop) sent to Theresienstadt. He didn’t know that the so-called model camp was just a station on the way to Auschwitz, though Ali managed to get a note to him when she was deported there. Ali’s story is remarkable: Weidt actually travelled to Oświęcim, the town where the camp was built in a former army barracks, found out that Ali was in fact in Birkenau, and bribed a Polish worker to smuggle a letter to her explaining that he had rented a room in town and left civilian clothes there, should she ever be able to escape—which she did in the chaos of the camp’s evacuation in January 1945. Ali Licht returned to Berlin and was hidden by Weidt for the rest of the war.
Deutschkron’s path to survival was less fraught than Ali’s but still harrowing. In the fall of 1943 the Allies begin bombing Berlin regularly. A terrible time for the city’s non-Jewish citizens is a boon for Deutschkron (though still dangerous, especially since she can’t go to the bomb shelter when she is hiding in someone’s apartment). She is able to get help at the NSV (National Socialist Welfare Agency) like any other bombed out victim; she even gets a new ID, after claiming that hers was lost in a raid. That doesn’t mean she is in the clear, though. After all, she has to worry about death from above as much as denunciation from those around her. Friends take the Deutschkrons to Potsdam, just outside Berlin, where they rent a meager shed, a “former combination goat shed and laundry room.” With only a few interruptions they spent the rest of the war there, scraping together enough to eat (while foraging for mushrooms, Deutschkron dreams of being able to take a walk without having to think of survival) and dodging identity checks. Once Deutschkron is even recognized by an old acquaintance on the subway, which is almost her undoing. Later she is threatened with denunciation by a woman jealous of her husband, who is hiding Inge and her mother. Even when the war shudders to a close and the Russians appear in Berlin, Deutschkron isn’t safe. Now she needs to dodge “the Ivans,” narrowly avoiding several assaults and attempted rapes.
After the war, hungry and weary, Deutschkron falls ill; moreover, she is depressed about the news out of Belsen and Auschwitz. She finally hears from her father, but she and her mother can’t get to the UK until August 1946. The last pages of Outcast are more concerned with the machinations between socialists and communists in immediate postwar Berlin than with her feelings. The shell Deutschkron has offered readers from the beginning of the book seems to have hardened. Even her final references to Israel, where she eventually settles, are perfunctory, giving nothing away. But why should we expect anything different? Deutschkron doesn’t owe us tears. Besides, the descriptions of how the communists repressed the socialist movement she and her parents had so identified with, and her concomitant claim that Israel is the only place she can be safe (ironically the book was written just at the moment when, with the election of Menachem Begin, Israel was abandoning its socialist past) do in fact get at what eats at her most: her exile from her home, Berlin.
Still from Deutschkron’s interview with Claude Lanzmann
Describing the roundup that swept up the city’s last Jews, Deutschkron declares: “A Berlin without any Jews was inconceivable.” She was living proof that such a city in fact never existed, but not for lack of trying. Jewish Berlin persisted only in hiding, in stealth, on the other side of a window or around a corner away from the invisible prying eyes of those who did everything they could to make the inconceivable a reality. Less bitter than Ruth Kluger in her postwar response to Vienna, less ambivalent than Marianne Strauss’s postwar attempts to identify with a new Germany, Inge Deutschkron is the clear-eyed, composed, yet wounded fighter who appears not just in this fascinating memoir but also in that interview with Lanzmann, which you can watch here. (Highly recommended; she’s amazing.)
Lanzmann likely cut Deutschkron from his film because she didn’t fit the story he wanted to tell. He wanted to focus on those forced to do the Nazis’ evil work in the extermination camps; his is a more lachrymose tale. I doubt Deutschkron cared that Lanzmann had no use for her. Well, maybe she did. But she might have expected something of the sort. She was used to being on the outside, looking in. She answered her mother’s demand—she proved herself as good as the ones who wanted to kill her—but it left a bad taste in her mouth.
I read this for Caroline and Lizz’s tenth annual German Literature Month. Lots of other great posts here.
I recently read two books about resistance to fascism:
Norman Ohler, The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (2020) Trans. Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarborough (2020)
Justus Rosenberg, The Art of Resistance: My Four Years in the French Underground (2020)
I learned from both, but I didn’t learn what I most wanted to, namely, why do some people resist when most do not? Both books privilege historical detail over theoretical analysis. Still, the experiences recounted in these texts are interesting; setting them down, I found I had a lot to say, so I have divided this post into two parts. Notes on Justus Rosenberg’s The Art of Resistance are below; those on Norman Ohler’s The Bohemians are here.
Justus Rosenberg began setting down his memoirs at age ninety-eight. (I do love a late bloomer.) Published on the eve of his centenary, The Art of Resistance emphasizes Rosenberg’s wartime activities—its subtitle is “My Four Years in the French Underground”—but its most interesting sections concern the author’s childhood in the Free City of Danzig. This political anomaly was a compromise reached after WWI that balanced Allied intentions to grant Poland independence with the reality that 75% of the port city’s inhabitants were German. Danzig (today Gdańsk) and surrounding areas were made into a semi-autonomous city state; oversight was provided a high commissioner appointed by the League of Nations who sought to ensure that the rights of Poles (20% of the population) and Jews (5%) were respected in this new parliamentary democracy. In the early 1920s, almost 100,000 Jews from Russia and Poland passed through Danzig on their way to America. Others, though, especially those cultural affinities were with Germany, stayed on.
Among these were Rosenberg’s parents. Bluma Solarski and Jacob Rosenberg grew up in a shtetl only a few miles from the East Prussian border. Danzig was their haven—they eloped there to avoid familial disapproval (the Rosenbergs were rich; the Solarskis were not), and Justus was born soon after, in January 1921. The young couple rejected Zionism, attended a highly reform synagogue (and that irregularly), and hired a German nanny for their only son. (He barely mentions his sister, it is curious, even a little disquieting.) Like most of the rest of the Jews in the Free City, the Rosenbergs prospered. Not that the place was entirely idyllic; it wasn’t immune to developments beyond its borders. The local Nazi party won the most seats in the elections of 1932, yet the city’s international nature (its economy depended on the port) made them much more circumspect than their sister parties in Germany.
But by 1937 the gloves were off. Rosenberg witnessed a frightening attack on Jewish-owned businesses and homes to which the authorities turned a blind eye. After this, Rosenberg’s parents looked for a way to send him abroad, eventually arranging for him to study in Paris. Before leaving Danzig for good, he spent three weeks with his grandfather’s family in Poland, getting a crash course in Jewishness (Rosenberg was amazed to learn that not all Orthodox Jews were Chassidic). Still the sixteen-year-old was more interested in losing his virginity to a friend of his mother’s and reading French novels, which experience, admittedly, served him in good stead in Paris.
His trip to France was broken up by a stay with his paternal uncle in Berlin, a socialist, laryngologist, and composer (who had studied for a time with Schoenberg). Wandering the streets, sixteen-year-old Rosenberg saw posters advertising a rally where Hitler would be addressing the nation. Curious to know what sort of man could elicit such hatred in so many, Rosenberg ignored the signs blaring NO JEWS PERMITTED. His blond hair and blue eyes made him inconspicuous; before he knew it, he was in the middle of a fourteen-thousand strong crowd, watching with queasy fascination as the little man whipped up his audience.
This was the first of many times in his life when Rosenberg found himself in the presence of famous figures of the era. He had a knack for ending up at the centre of things. That Zelig-like quality manifested in full after three unremarkable, if satisfying, years in Paris. In the spring of 1940, his studies at the Sorbonne were interrupted by the invasion of France. By this time, Rosenberg was following events keenly. Already in 1938 most of the Jews of Danzig had left the city, most for Poland, but some, like Rosenberg’s parents, for Palestine. They wrote to say they had made it to Bratislava, and were embarking down the Danube to Romania in the hopes of reaching a ship. Rosenberg would not hear from them again until after the war.
When Paris fell, Rosenberg decided he need to do something. Like so many others, he left the city on foot; his destination, the barracks of the Polish army in exile, in Brittany. But he ended up south of the city instead, and when he finally, weeks later, made his way to Bayonne, near the Spanish border, where the British navy had agreed to take any remaining Poles to England, he found he had missed them by hours. By chance, he ended up in Marseille where, through friends of friends, he was taken on as a courier by an American who had recently arrived in the city with pockets full of money and orders to secure exit visas for prominent refugees. This was Varian Fry of the Emergency Rescue Committee; through him, Rosenberg met luminaries like Victor Serge, Andre Breton, and Max Ernst. He procured blank identity cards for forging, delivered sealed messages, laundered money through the Marseilles mafia, and even accompanied Franz Werfel, Alma Mahler, and Heinrich and Golo Mann on a nighttime trek over the Pyrenees. He played Exquisite Cadaver with Breton, took a message to Marc Chagall, and was given $500 by Peggy Guggenheim, “for an emergency.” See what I mean? Crazy stuff.
After Fry was expelled from Vichy France, Rosenberg tried to escape to Spain himself, but was arrested by the authorities. After a number of close shaves, he joined the French Resistance, who sent him to Grenoble to live undercover, but he was arrested again, in the summer of 1942, and interned in a camp near Lyons from which, a sympathetic guard told him, he and the others would be deported to Poland. (The map in this New York Times piece is excellent.) Chance intervened again—“Sometimes chance itself occasions good fortune,” the book’s epigraph explains—in the shape of the sister of a friend from his student days in Paris. Before being arrested she had been a medical student in Lyon, and she counselled Rosenberg on how to fake the symptoms of peritonitis. Before long, the “violently ill” Rosenberg was sent from the camp to hospital in Lyon where he was operated on. (Rosenberg speculates with pleasure about the surprise the surgeons must have felt when they found nothing wrong with his abdomen.)
In recovery from what was a dangerous operation, even if it was fake, Rosenberg befriended a nurse who, it turned out, had studied with the medical student and, putting two and two together, put him in contact with the Resistance. A friendly priest hid a change of clothes in the hospital bathroom and a bicycle near the exit; clutching his stitches, the woozy Rosenberg wobbled his way to a safe house from which, after recovering for good, he was sent into the countryside, where he monitored Swiss radio. Later, he joined a cadre of resistance fighters and laid mines for German truck convoys. In the summer of 1944 he was swept up by an American battalion and became their interpreter. On leave in liberated Paris in late 1944 he learned of a new organization, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up to respond to what the Allies knew would be an unprecedented refugee situation after the war. Rosenberg, who as a child had wanted to be a diplomat and spoke several languages, was a natural fit. When mediating between the victorious Americans and the vanquished Germans paled, Rosenberg jumped at the chance to take a US military ship to America, where he began a new life that led him eventually to become a professor of literature at Bard. (He’s been emeritus for almost 20 years but still teaches, or did until recently anyway.)
Rosenberg in Marseilles, 1941
The Art of Resistance is as odd a book as its subject’s life has been eventful. Its tone is strangely cheery, which certainly fits the story of a man who seemed always to have landed on his feet, but which to me only highlights the grief that routinely goes unmentioned. In an epilogue detailing what happened to the various people referenced in the book, Rosenberg offhandedly notes that sixty-four of the sixty-eight members of his extended family alive at the start of the war were murdered in the Holocaust. Rosenberg, it is likely, did not know many of these people well (of the few that he did, his grandfather’s family died, as best he can tell, in the Warsaw Ghetto and the uncle in Berlin was killed at Auschwitz, but not before he organized a clandestine choir in the camp at Sachsenhausen where he was first interned). It is also true that, miraculously enough, his entire immediate family survived. His parents and sister made it to Haifa; his sister, now 92, still lives in Israel. All of which might explain why this is not a book about loss. And why should it be, I suppose? My sense, however, is that despite the fluency of the narrative, there is something blocked about it. I was regularly surprised that Rosenberg was not more forthcoming about his feelings, or reflective about his situation. How does he feel about his survival? He says only:
Time and time again, there was what I call a ‘confluence of circumstances’ that presented me with a window of opportunity, or a moment to be seized. At each juncture, a combination of factors enabled me to seize that moment or slip through the window. That’s my best explanation for how I survived.
He names some of those circumstances—he didn’t look stereotypically Jewish; he appeared younger than he was (people often took him for a 14-year-old), which inclined them to look kindly on him; he knew five languages and had had parents who arranged for a wonderful education—but the awkward, passive syntax of the passage tells a truth. Survival wasn’t only—wasn’t even primarily—a function of ability, but of chance. Rosenberg was plenty clever and resourceful, don’t get me wrong. But The Art of Resistance shows more clearly than many memoirs of Jewish WWII experience that the Bildungsroman imperative of the memoir as a genre sits uneasily with the realities of the period.
It’s fascinating to read an excerpt from a letter Rosenberg received, decades after the war, from a woman who had also worked with Varian Fry, a woman who “shrieked with joy” to learn of his survival. Rosenberg, she writes, was “just another kid, a Jew, a ‘nice boy, but there’s nothing we can do’ (as Fry said to me when I pressed him to help you).” (Fry is someone I need to learn more about; Rosenberg’s portrayal is ambivalent at best.) The woman says she and Rosenberg and the others who worked on the team are “a people apart,” but Rosenberg doesn’t seem to think of himself that way. He is a competent writer, but not an especially good one (he explains in plodding detail what it means to be a flaneur; gives a capsule definition of the Folies Bergère; writes of his student days, “I came to be of the opinion that eating is culture on a plate!”). He even gets a little sententious when, describing the sad fate of Walter Benjamin, who died attempting to cross the Pyrenees, on one of those missions of the sort Rosenberg himself helped lead (though not that one), he notes that gifted people have their weaknesses too, like anyone, before lauding his own habit of “thinking seriously about what was happening along the way,” as if others who died didn’t think seriously, too. And he can be a little boring: the last part of the book reads like a series of testimonials—he quotes from various commanders who extolled his work with them.
But the man’s had a hell of a life, and who cares if he’s a little complaisant. You won’t learn what the art of resistance is from this book, or even if it has an art—Rosenberg’s claim about chance seems to suggest no—but you’ll hear an amazing story. That might be enough to compensate for book’s inability to be clear about what it means to have such a story.
Maybe the lesson of books like The Art of Resistance and The Bohemians is that if we’re looking for a lesson, something like a manual for resistance we won’t find one. We just have to do it.
Earlier this semester, I presented for the third time at the annual Arkansas Holocaust Education Conference. In addition to giving the keynote talk (“Holocaust 101”), I also taught a session (basically, a class). The conference has an unusual format and remit. It is designed for high school students, their teachers, and interested community members. In a single busy day, participants hear two plenaries plus a presentation from a Holocaust survivor, and attend two breakout sessions from a selection of about six or seven.
I love being able to teach such a wide range of ages and experiences: a typical session will include as many retirees as 15-year-olds. The unusual format comes with its own challenges, of course: keeping the students from feeling intimidated by the adults; making sure the older participants really listen to the younger ones. By making participants work together to close read something, I seek to put everyone on the same footing and build a sense of community.
My session this year was called “Strangers in their Own Land: Jewish Self-Awareness in Holocaust Memoirs.” As I’d like eventually to turn it into a more formal piece of writing, I thought I’d transcribe my lesson plan here.
Ruth Kluger
The handout that we used for our exercise was headed by two quotations; together, they offer a condensed version of what I was hoping the participants would learn:
I had found out, for myself and by myself, how things stood between us and the Nazis and had paid for knowledge with the coin of pain.
—Ruth Kluger
To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word.
—W. E. B. Du Bois
At first glance, Kluger—the Viennese-born survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, Christianstadt, and a death march—and Du Bois—the legendary African American sociologist and writer—might seem an unusual pairing. I argued that, on the contrary, they share the same way of thinking about the vicissitudes of being a member of a persecuted minority. For persecuted minorities, to know is to hurt, to exist is to be a problem.
Nechama Tec
I began by explaining my title, which I adapted from an anecdote in Kluger’s brilliant memoir Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered. In 1937—Kluger was about to turn six—her family summered in Italy. They had a car, rather unusual for the time, especially in Italy. Driving through the rural South, they pass another car with Austrian plates. The tourists wave to each other. Kluger is taken by the experience. She thinks, We wouldn’t have done that at home; we don’t even know each other. Writing many years later, she reflects:
I was enchanted by the discovery that strangers in a strange land greet each other because they are compatriots.
But this comforting nationalism, in which strangers become acquaintances by virtue of calling the same place home, would soon prove false and alienating. Kluger learned, along with the rest of Europe’s Jews, that being Jewish trumped being Austrian (or German or Polish or French or whatever). On her prewar holiday, Kluger enjoyed the experience of being a stranger in a strange land; just a year later, after the Anschluss, Kluger became a stranger in her own land.
To realize you are not at home in your home is shattering. The experience is powerfully ambivalent one, at once harmful and helpful.
To show how that might be the case, I referenced three Holocaust survivors: Kluger, Nechama Tec (born in Lublin in 1931 and hidden together with her family in a series of safe houses across Poland), and Sarah Kofman (born in Paris in 1934 to parents who had emigrated from Poland and who survived in hiding with a family friend she learned to call Mémé). Interestingly, all of these women later became academics: Kluger a professor of German, Tec of sociology, Kofman of philosophy.
(I’ll skip the potted bios, but I’m happy to say more in the comments if you’re interested.)
That brief orientation over, I divided the class into three and assigned each group one of the following passages, which we first read aloud together:
I found a small opening in the wall from which, unobserved, I could watch the girls at play. To me they seemed so content, so carefree, and I envied them their fun. Did they know that a war was on? At times, as I watched them, I too became engrossed in their games and almost forgot about the war. But the bell that called them back to class called me back to reality, and at such moments I became acutely aware of my loneliness. These small excursions made me feel, in the end, more miserable than ever. The girls in the boarding school were so near and yet so far. The wall that separated us was thick indeed, and eventually I could not bear to go near it.
—Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982/84)
(Before we read, I explained the context. The scene takes place in 1940 or 41. Tec and her family are living in hiding in a disused part of a factory formerly owned by Tec’s father. The factory abuts on a convent school, a source of fascinated longing for Tec.)
In 1940, when I was eight or nine, the local movie theatre showed Walt Disney’s Snow White. … I badly wanted to see this film, but since I was Jewish, I naturally wasn’t permitted to. I groused and bitched about this unfairness until finally my mother proposed that I should leave her alone and just go and forget about what was permitted and what wasn’t. … So of course I went, not only for the movie, but to prove myself. I bought the most expensive type of ticket, thinking that sitting in a loge would make me less noticeable, and thus I ended up next to the nineteen-year-old baker’s daughter from next door with her little siblings, enthusiastic Nazis one and all. … When the lights came on, I wanted to wait until the house had emptied out, but my enemy stood her ground and waited, too. … She spoke firmly and with conviction, in the manner of a member of the Bund deutscher Mädchen, the female branch of the Hitler Youth, to which she surely belonged. Hadn’t I seen the sign at the box office? (I nodded. What else could I do? It was a rhetorical question.) Didn’t I know what it meant? I could read, couldn’t I? It said “No Jews.” I had broken a law … If it happened again she would call the police. I was lucky that she was letting me off this once.
The story of Snow White can be reduced to one question: who is entitled to live in the king’s palace and who is the outsider. The baker’s daughter and I followed this formula. She, in her own house, the magic mirror of her racial purity before her eyes, and I, also at home here, a native, but without permission and at this moment expelled and exposed. Even though I despised the law that excluded me, I still felt ashamed to have been found out. For shame doesn’t arise from the shameful action, but from discovery and exposure.
—Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001)
(The passage offers its own context; but I reminded participants that by 1940 the situation for Jews in Vienna was increasingly dangerous. Kluger’s father, a doctor who had already been arrested for seeing Aryan patients, had just fled for France (from where he was later deported to the Baltics and murdered); Kluger’s own deportation was less than two years away.)
Knowingly or not, Mémé had brought off a tour de force: right under my mother’s nose, she’d managed to detach me from her. And also from Judaism. She had saved us, but she was not without anti-Semitic prejudices. She taught me that I had a Jewish nose and made me feel the little bump that was the sign of it. She also said, “Jewish food is bad for the health; the Jews crucified our savior, Jesus Christ; they are all stingy and love only money; they are very intelligent, no other people has as many geniuses in music and philosophy.” …
My mother suffered in silence: no news from my father [arrested and deported]; no means of visiting my brothers and sisters [in hiding in various places in the French countryside]; no power to prevent Mémé from transforming me, detaching me from herself and from Judaism. I had, it seemed, buried the entire past: I started loving rare steak cooked in butter and parsley. I didn’t think at all any more about my father, and I couldn’t pronounce a single word in Yiddish despite the fact that I could still understand the language of my childhood perfectly. Now I even dreaded the end of the war!
—Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) Translated by Ann Smock (1996)
(The passage, set in 1942 or 43, describes how Mémé, the woman who saved Kluger, also abused her.)
Sarah Kofman
Each group worked together to discuss the passages and answer two questions. The first was the same for everybody: Do we see self-awareness in this passage? If so, how?
The second was particular to the excerpt. I asked the Tec group to track the passage’s verbs. What can we learn about Tec’s experience when we pay attention to those verbs?
I asked the Kluger group to track the word “home” and its synonyms in this passage. What can we learn about Kluger’s experience when we pay attention to those words?
I asked the Kofman group to track two repeated words in the passage: “detach” and “nose.” What can we learn about Kofman’s experience when we pay attention to those words?
As the participants worked on their assignment, I wandered the room, eavesdropping and cajoling if the conversation seemed to falter. After seven or eight minutes, I brought the class back together and asked each group to report their findings (after reminding everyone that, since we’d all read the passages aloud, anyone could feel free to chime in at any time).
They did well! If you like, you can take a minute to think about how you’d answer the questions.
My annotations
Here are some of the things we noted:
Tec shows us both the appeal of fantasy and its cost. Spying on the children lucky enough to still be living ordinary lives takes her out of her situation, allows her to remember another life, even to almost forget the war. But the school bell that rings for them but not for her recalls her to reality. And that reminder is painful: she feels even worse than before, to the point where she eventually gives up her voyeurism. I’m always struck by “these small excursions”—such striking and unusual phrasing. What does an excursion imply? A vacation, a trip, a holiday, students will say. An adventure, but a safe one. Yes, I’ll add, an inconsequential one (a sense furthered by the adjective “small”). Tec is an explorer, but not, in the end, a successful one. She can’t keep going back to look at the childhood she no longer has. Excursion implies choice; yet this fantasy too fails her, just as the active verbs of the beginning of the passage (to find, to watch, to envy—things Tec herself chooses to do) are replaced by the experience of states of being (become engrossed, become acutely aware—things that happen to Tec).
The story of Kluger’s clandestine, dangerous trip to the movies (itself a salutary reminder for participants of how thoroughly Jews were shut out of ordinary life) centers on exposure. The “ex” prefix here, as in her use of “expelled” and Tec’s “excursion,” gestures to a desire, expressed at the very level of phonetics, to get out, to escape. Kluger tries to hide in plain sight, but the effort fails. Significantly, it is her next door neighbour who finds her out, showing us both how intimate persecution is, and how much, in this context at least, it functioned through an undoing of everything home should stand for. (To sell the point, Kluger uses many variations of the word home: I’m especially struck by her decision—not unidiomatic, but also not typical—to describe the theatre as a “house.”) Just as persecution makes home foreign, so too does it pervert justice. The baker’s daughter is right when she scolds Kluger for breaking a law: it’s easy for us to forget that Nazi persecution was legal. Kluger’s world has been turned upside down (her use of “naturally” is thus ironic); only she herself, her personality, her determination, offers the possibility of continuity. She is forbidden to go to the movies, so “of course” she goes. That’s just who she is. But the consequences of that persistence (nearly being turned over to the police) suggest that the idea of being true to one’s self is for Kluger as much a disabling fantasy as Tec’s spying.
Kofman similarly struggles to understand who she is. The figurative nose in her first sentence (and I’m cheating here, since we were working with a translation, and I don’t know the original) is echoed, then amplified by the literal one that Mémé so disparages. As a group we marveled, if I can put it that way, at Kofman’s anguished situation: out of a complicated mixture of gratitude, internalized self-hatred, and adolescent rebellion against a difficult mother, who, to be sure, is herself in an unbearably difficult situation she falls in love with a woman who turns her against herself. Mémé teaches Kofman to hate her own body and her own identity, by making her experience herself as others do. In that sense, she turns Kofman into someone who must live in bad faith. Yet, as we noted, the repetition of “detachment” inevitably carries with it a reminder of attachment: in describing what she has lost Kofman indirectly reminds us of what she once was. And we speculated that Kofman’s similarly indirect presentation of Mémé’s litany of anti-Semitic canards (where even the compliments are backhanded) implies a kind of resistance on her part to the older woman’s actions. It is unlikely, I suggested, that Mémé said all of these things at once, in a single sentence, as Kofman presents it. Which implies she has arranged the material: by piling the attacks on, she is inviting us to see them as ridiculous, contradictory, unhinged. But Kofman’s critique is retrospective. At the time, her position is utterly confused. Witness her (classically hysterical) aphasia—able to understand her mother/father tongue, but no longer able to speak it. Years later, Kofman eventually throws Mémé over, even refusing to go to her funeral. The “good mother” in the memoir—well worth reading—turns out to be neither of the two women she is caught between but rather Frenchness itself: the language & culture Kofman becomes so adept in, able to wield rather than submit to.
Having facilitated discussion, and with time drawing short, I emphasized that resistance and rejection are intertwined in these passages. Resistance takes the form of self-knowledge.
W. E. B. Du Bois
To understand the implications of that double position, I had us turn to a thinker from a different tradition. I read aloud the last passage on the handout:
The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, — a world which yields him [sic] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
Then I defined that consequential term double-consciousness: it’s what results when we have to define the self through the eyes of others. (I always use the example of Canadian identity, because it’s relatively low stakes and I can try to be funny with it: when Canadians think about what it means to be Canadian, as they often do, they usually begin, “Well, we’re not Americans…” In my experience, Americans seldom think about what it means to be American. They certainly don’t say, “Well, we’re not Canadians…” Which is because in geopolitical as well as cultural terms, America is dominant; they set the terms of understanding. The tape Americans use to measure themselves has been made to measure them.)
Minorities, Du Bois argues, typically define themselves in terms set by the majority. A significant result of this claim is that there is something valuable about that position of double-consciousness, for it is by definition a critical position. As Kluger explains in her memoir, her earliest reading material was anti-Semitic slogans, which gave her “an early opportunity to practice critical discrimination.”
The position of the majority or the dominant is properly speaking stupid, because it never has to translate its experience into terms given by someone else. It need never reflect. That is the definition of privilege.
But double-consciousness isn’t just enabling. To be in that position, to be a minority, specifically a persecuted minority like Jews in fascist Europe or Blacks at any time in American history, including the present, is to be at risk. Critical positions are precarious, dangerous, even intolerable—not just psychologically but also bodily. Think of Du Bois’s resonant, pained conclusion: to inhabit double-consciousness (to be at home in the idea of never being at home) is to feel “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Torn asunder. How can we read that and not think of lynching, or gassing, or any of the myriad ways minority bodies have been and continue to be made to suffer?
We were out of time. So I could only end by saying that the reason I had us to read Du Bois alongside Holocaust survivors was to think intersectionally. In terms of double-consciousness, minority experiences are more similar than different. And I wanted participants to think about the lesson for us today from these (to them) very old texts. To ask these questions: If we are a member of a minority, can we harness the power of double-consciousness and not be crushed? If we are a member of a majority, can we become self-aware enough not to harm, whether knowingly or unknowingly, minorities?
Can we be at home without being smug? Can we be self-aware without being strangers?
A busy month, the semester grinding away, an invited lecture to prepare and deliver, the puppy growing more Clifford-like by the day. Yet also, finally, some relief from the heat. Unseasonably cool, even; some of the best fall weather I can remember in Arkansas. And along with it some decent reading.
Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982/84) I’ve written before about this memoir of the author’s time in hiding in Poland during WWII. I re-read it because I’ve added it to my Holocaust Lit syllabus. Although I missed Imre Kertesz’s brilliant Fatelessness, which I had to cut in order to fit Dry Tears in, I’m glad I made the switch. It was useful for students to read about a Holocaust victim who avoided the camps (plus it gave them a glimpse into life in the ghettos, although Tec and her family did not spend long there). It’s leading nicely into our current discussion of Agnieszka Holland’s film Europa, Europa. And it’s a great book pure and simple. Tec’s style is low-key, but that just heightens the impact of the psychological abuse she suffered. Pretty sure I’ll keep this memoir in my teaching rotation for a while.
Andrew Taylor, The Fire Court (2018) Second volume in Taylor’s series set in the aftermath of the Great Fire of London, featuring James Marwood, a Whitehall clerk whose father supported Cromwell and is now is disgrace, and Cat Lovett, similarly at odds with the new Court and her family as well, who is beginning to pursue her dream of becoming an architect. The books are nominally crime stories, but more interestingly they are about rebuilding: London itself, and the lives destroyed by both the fire and the Restoration. This one was better than the first, and I look forward to future installments.
Yoko Ogawa, Hotel Iris (1996) Trans. Stephen Snyder (2010) A few days before the awarding of the Nobel Prize, someone on Twitter was speculating that Ogawa might win. This piqued my interest and reminded me I had one of her books on my shelves. At first, I was engrossed in this story of a teenage girl, Mari, who helps her domineering mother manage a down-at-heel hotel in a Japanese seaside resort. One night they have to kick out a man who becomes violent with a woman he’s hired for sex. Mari is unaccountably intrigued by the man, and when they later meet on a ferry to a nearby island—where the man, who is a translator from the Russian, lives in regimented solitude—they begin a relationship that at once frees and imprisons the girl. In ordinary life, the translator is courtly, snobbish, a little nebbish-y. In his sex life, he is violent, abusive, domineering. Mari, it turns out, perhaps to her surprise, it’s hard to tell, loves it.
Hotel Iris made me uncomfortable because, even though narrated from Mari’s point of view, it’s unforthcoming about what Mari might be getting out of the affair. Eventually it’s hard to see it as anything other than abusive. Yet the novel offers no clear signals that it wants us to see things this way. There’s a subplot about a nephew of the translator, rendered mute after a childhood accident: also enigmatic, but in a way that felt clumsy rather than intriguing. In the end the book left a sour taste in my mouth. I could feel quite differently on another reading—it’s clear Ogawa is a writer of interest: she’s brilliant on atmosphere—but I don’t really feel like visiting that world again. Any thoughts, hive mind?
Tayari Jones, An American Marriage (2018) Much fêted, but in the end forgettable novel about an African American couple who seems to have it made—recent graduates from terrific HBCs, they have interesting jobs and a nice life in Atlanta—until one night everything they know is overturned. Roy is falsely accused of raping a woman; he’s convicted and begins a lengthy sentence. Celestial supports him, but her need to forge her own life, and the distance between them (both literal—he’s in jail in Louisiana—and figurative—they can’t imagine each other’s lives) drives them apart. And yet not quite apart. A bond between them persists.
Mass incarceration is one of the issues in the US today—I’ve been heartened by how strongly students now feel about this, many of them rejecting the idea of incarceration tout court, thinking of it (rightly IMO) as just a form of torture: I’m reminded of how strongly students 5-10 years ago felt about LGBTQ issues, especially gay marriage. Jones ably depicts the psychological brutalization that incarceration is deigned to cause. And she makes you feel strongly for all of the major characters, even when their desires conflict. But in the end, I was annoyed by how “literary fiction-y” the book was. This is the kind of book that feels the need to introduce, apropos of nothing, ¾ of the way through, Roy’s childhood hobby: collecting keys. A lyrical aria on Roy’s keys follows, what they look like, where he found them, what he did with them. But keys, get it? He’s in prison. (Celestial’s career—she makes dolls, all of which are uncanny variations of Roy, that become collectors’ items—is similarly freighted, though at least Jones develops it more than the key business.) Give me an essay or non-fiction study of incarceration instead, thanks.
Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018) The second Canadian Indigenous post-apocalyptic novel I’ve read in the last year or so. This one isn’t a patch on Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves—the writing clunkier, the characterization blunter, the idea that Indigenous people have resources to survive dark times that Whites don’t less developed—but Rice has a nice hand with suspense, and he offers a pleasingly enigmatic ending My wife read it before me and, as she predicted, once I’d read the first 30 pages or so I had to read the rest with as few breaks as possible. Pretty sure this is a first novel; curious to see how Rice develops as a writer. He’s got potential.
Jane Gardam, Old Filth (2004) Late to this party, but better late than never. A really fine and moving novel, a bit old fashioned, but so well done. You have to write for a lifetime to write a novel like this, I think. I pretty much agree with Daniel Polansky’s take entirely. (His reading log is pure joy. So punchy. Check it out.) Old Filth—as every review will tell you, the name stands for “Failed in London, Try Hong Kong”—is Edward Feathers, a Raj Child (a history totally unknown to me: fascinating and sad) who has, in fact, never failed at anything, except perhaps making emotional connections with others, yet even this judgment, which comes from the ways his childhood failed him, proves to be premature. I was captivated by the book from the beginning, in which an old man locks himself out of his house on a snowy Christmas day and is forced to ask his neighbour, also his oldest enemy, for help.
Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938) I’ve read Woolf’s extended essay on violence and gender many times: it never gets easier or less thrilling. A difficult book to master—the conceit is that Woolf is responding to a letter from a man asking her how we can best prevent war, but there are letters within the letters, imagined responses to an imagined response, so it’s hard to stay oriented—Three Guineas always seems relevant, especially in its gender and class politics. As always, I was fascinated by the violence of Woolf’s own rhetoric, as if to suggest that violence cannot be expunged even in an investigation into its dangers. But this time I was particularly struck by how cynical (realistic?) my students were about how far their own college is from the ideal (women’s) college Woolf imagines in the second letter. The shift from Millenials to Gen Z has happened.
Max Eisen, By Chance Alone (2016) Even though it won a big recent prize in Canada I had no great expectations for By Chance Alone. Yes, it’s my personal mission to read every Holocaust memoir, but sometimes the ones written many years after the event can be forced or pious. But even though Eisen is by his own admission no stylist, the book is fascinating, of interest to specialist and general readers alike. Eisen’s experience was amazingly wide-ranging: he lived through almost every facet of the Holocaust.
Born in Czechoslovakia in 1929 in a small town near the Hungarian border—in territory which was in fact given to Hungary in 1939, a fact which played a part in his survival—Eisen grew up in a close-knit family under almost idyllic circumstances. But in August 1942, together with his mother and siblings (his father has already been conscripted into forced labour), Eisen was deported to the Ukraine where he miraculously escaped death in the infamous killing fields near Kamenets-Podolsky (their transport was turned back at the last minute). Because after this short series of deportations Hungary dragged its feet in persecuting its Jewish population (at least from the Nazis’ perspective), after that narrow escape Eisen was able to live in relative freedom under Passover 1944, at which time he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There another extraordinary turn of events led him to get a (coveted) position in the medical unit at Auschwitz I, where he became the assistant of the remarkable Polish surgeon Tadeusz Orzeszko.
Many Holocaust memoirs speed up at the end, stopping at liberation and alluding only vaguely to the difficulties that came afterward. But Eisen describes at length his experience on one of the notorious Death Marches in the freezing winter of 1945, and his long odyssey through a series of work and displaced persons camps in Austria, his journey home to Slovakia, and the events leading to his emigration to Canada in 1949. Eisen is an appealing character; I was moved by and engrossed in his book. (And it has great maps—something most Holocaust texts lack.)
Jane Gardam, The Man in the Wooden Hat (2009) More about Filth and friends, this time focusing on Filth’s wife, Betty. On Twitter, Teresa suggested that the second and third volumes are good but not quite as good as the first, and I agree. But Gardam has a nice line in revelation, managing to keep surprising us without seeming manipulative.
Jane Gardam, Last Friends (2013) In some ways, the slightest of the trilogy, but Gardam has tricks up her sleeve even here. Here she focuses on Filth’s rival and Betty’s lover Edward Veneering, whose upbringing is, as the publisher rightly says, as Dickensian as his name. But two minor characters from the other volumes end up stealing the show: the trilogy ends with on a ramshackle but joyous note. Gardam knows what she’s about, and I’m curious to try some of her other stuff.
Tara Westover, Educated (2018) I confess that when I saw this on several best-of lists last year my not-so-secret-inner-snob thought, “Not for me.” But a couple of colleagues recommended it, and when I was looking for a new audiobook there it was on the New Shelf. And now I’m so glad I got over myself. By now probably everyone knows the deal: Westover grew up in a survivalist Mormon family in Idaho. Like most of her six siblings, real didn’t go to school. Now way was she going to succumb to the godless socialism of the Government. Westover wasn’t immunized, visit doctors (charlatans all, at best, according to her father), own a birth certificate, or participate in any of the milestones of middle-class American life.
Instead she spent her childhood working in her father’s junkyard and, later, on his crew building barns. Dangerous work. One of the many extraordinary things in this book is its description of bodily harm. Westover herself narrowly escapes falling into a crusher. One of her brothers burns his legs terribly, and her father nearly dies (suffering permanent disfiguration) from burns suffered while preparing a car for the crusher. (He’s removing the gas tank with a welding torch but he’s forgotten to drain it.) Another brother falls off a roof on to his head and later smashes it again in a motorcycle accident. Her mother suffers a traumatic head injury in a car crash. Westover is regularly abused, even tortured by one of her brothers, who bends her wrists until they threaten (and once, actually do) snap. I winced many times while listening to the book. I was struck by Westover’s depiction of the head as the vital part of the human being: the damage to the brain is juxtaposed to the development of the mind.
In some ways the arc of the book is conventional: Westover escapes her upbringing and thrives; she seems to be amazingly good at almost everything she tries, from musical theater to writing a dissertation; after getting into BYU by scoring well on the ACT, she attends Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship (insanely hard to get) and scores a fellowship to Harvard. Yet in other ways, she is permanently damaged by her upbringing: unable to accept help, ungrateful to the people who go out of their way to help her, terrified of being ostracized by her family to the point of being willing to recant what she knows to be true. She is abused in so many ways. Yet she never makes fun of her family. I wasn’t left thinking, Wow, what a bunch of nuts. Westover’s mother, in particular, is a compelling, complicated, even tragic figure, at once highly competent (she is a midwife and herbalist who grows her kitchen business into a million-dollar concern) and terribly deluded about the abuse perpetrated in the family.
As a teacher, I was struck by how relatively little time Westover spends talking about the kind of learning that goes on in and around a classroom. Which suggests how many different ways to learn there are. And Educated was a salutary reminder that we don’t know and shouldn’t take for granted what our students have experienced before they come to us. It would be interesting to compare Educated to Rousseau and Mill’s autobiographies (Westover ends up specializing in social thinkers like Locke, Mill, Smith, and Bentham, so she is undoubtedly referencing those texts in ways I missed).
One scene in particular I’ll want to come back to. (Almost every piece on the book seems to refer to it: I want to think more about why.) In her first semester at college, Westover takes an Art History class. She sees an unfamiliar word in the textbook and raises her hand to ask about it. The room falls silent. The Professor winces and cuttingly says, “Well, thanks for that.” The girl who sat next to her, with whom she has struck a tentative friendship, berates her at the end of class: “Some things you don’t joke about.” No one in the class speaks to her again. At the end of the period she runs to the library and searches for this mysterious word: Holocaust.
Laura Cumming, Five Days Gone: The Mystery of My Mother’s Disappearance as a Child (2019) (a.k.a. On Chapel Sands: My Mother and Other Missing Persons) The US title isn’t a patch on the UK original, a much better reflection of this slow-burning memoir centered on the author’s mother, who was taken from a Lincolnshire beach in 1929 before being returned to her adopted parents five days later, unharmed. (Though there is plenty of harm in this story.) At first, I wasn’t sure how much it was working for me. (Reading it right after Educated was probably unwise: the former so brash, the latter so muted.) But the more I read, the more I appreciated, and by the end, which is amazing, I was well under its spell. Cumming is an art critic (her book on Velasquez awaits me on the library hold shelf) and she folds interpretations of various images into the story of her mother to surprisingly good effect. She’s a brilliant close reader: the book particularly comes alive when she considers family photographs. And she’s just really smart. I’ll close with a few choice quotes:
What is my mother’s own true nature, and what is the life she has been dealt, the tide of daily events that knocked her back and forth, that she swims in, or tries to swim in?
In the great democracy of family albums we all have photographs upon which, disastrously, nothing is written. Identities drift in a sea of unknowing. We have no idea who they were, these people smiling, frowning, or resisting the camera’s tyrannical hold. Each may be somebody, or nobody, of importance to the past or future story.
The lives of even quite recent generations might almost disappear from our understanding if we did not think of their aspirations.
Home is where nobody ever says anything by way of explanation about loss, death, or tragedy; where it is possible for George and Veda [her mother’s parents] to explain nothing about anything, for a whole childhood to pass, with all its racing school weeks and Sunday longeurs, its endless summer holidays and cyclical autumns, without anyone ever telling her anything—for the secret of her own origins to be kept entirely from her. The catastrophe is happening and everyone is looking away.
There you have it, another month gone. Of the books new to me, the Gardams were satisfying, but a trio of memoirs, by Eisen, Westover, and Cumming, carried the day.
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 19th 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 20th 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 Rabbitlast 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…
In The Cut Out Girl (2018), the Dutch-born English academic Bart van Es investigates his family’s past. At its heart is Lien de Jong, who in August 1942 was given into the safekeeping of van Es’s grandparents by her desperate Jewish parents.
Van Es’s title refers to a paper silhouette that Lien pastes into an album that surprisingly survived the war. Such albums were common in Holland (the famous diary Anne Frank received for her 12th birthday, less than two months before Lien joined her new family, was probably an album of this sort). Friends, family, and neighbours would fill the pages with well-wishes, typically phrased as achingly sententious poetry.
But the title also refers to Lien herself, who is sliced away from life as she has known it—and then, many years later, cut out again, this time by her adopted family. Van Es’s detective work is prompted by the confusion and resentment, the whole no-go zone that surrounds Lien’s place in his family. Is Lien his aunt or not? What happened between her and his grandmother? Most families suffer from blights of this kind: some fight or hurt the causes of which no one is even sure any more but the effects of which persist through the generations. In this case, though, that ordinary event is complicated by war, displacement, and trauma.
In their first meeting, Lien tells van Es, “Without families you don’t get stories.” For Lien, stories are important because they ensure continuity. They let you make sense of yourself by connecting you to those around you. Van Es would agree, but for him the act of telling is as important as the substance of what’s told. After all, the word Lien uses is stories not story: stories compete with but also complete each other. The plural implies richness, motivation, complexity.
Midway through his researches, van Es is shown a book called Bennekom: Jewish Refuge, detailing the fates of the 166 Jews who were hidden in the town, more than 80% of whom survived. (This is particularly remarkable, since the death rate for Jews in Holland was the exact opposite of Bennekom’s—80% were murdered, higher than anywhere else in Western Europe.) With trembling fingers, van Es finds the entry for Lien:
At Algemeer 33 with Gijs van Laar there was a Jewish girl, Lientje [a diminutive of Lien], in hiding. Lientje belonged to the family and was a total part of it. She attended the Reformed School. She survived the war.
The Cut Out Girl is an attempt to replace this brusque—and, we learn, misleading—narrative with a fuller picture; to take this quasi-official story and to show what it doesn’t or cannot tell; to expose what is self-serving or misguided in it. For van Es also recognizes that stories can blind us. They can confer a false sense of mastery. Which is why he aims to be as self-aware as possible in reconstructing Lien’s story.
That story begins in 1933 in The Hague, when Lien is born to Charles de Jong and Catharine de Jong-Spiero. In the handful of surviving photos, Lien’s parents are attractive, sporty, carefree. That can’t have been the whole story: there was some sort of trouble between her parents when Lien was very small, and she was sent to live with relatives for a year. But her parents reconcile, and Lien grows up an ordinary child living an ordinary life, even after Germany invades Holland in May 1940. But by the next year life is more difficult for Dutch Jews, even ones like the de Jongs who do not identify as such. By 1942, deportation notices are widespread. Lien’s parents look for a way to send her into hiding; in August they entrust her to a resistance organization headed by a couple named Heroma (who seem absolutely heroic and deserve a book of their own). Mrs. Heroma brings Lien to the van Es home in Dordrecht, and later ferries her to the many safe houses she passes through.
Despite some initial difficulties—Lien has always been a finicky eater and her new family has no patience for that sort of thing; she has never slept in a room with other people; her upbringing has been more sheltered and more emotional than the world she now enters—Lien fits in well with the family, who have children close to her age. At first she calls Jans and Henk van Es Auntie and Uncle; later it will be Ma and Pa. Van Es includes heartbreaking letters smuggled from Lien’s parents to their daughter congratulating her on her ninth birthday. By the time she receives them, both have been deported to Auschwitz. Neither survive.
Lien does, though it is a near thing. One day in early 1943 two policemen arrive at the house, looking for Jews. (Holland was the only country to offer cash rewards to those who turned in Jews.) Lien narrowly escapes: Auntie sends her to a neighbour where she cowers in the unused sitting room). Thus begins the most difficult phase of her time in hiding. She is moved from one safe house to another, often staying only a day or two in any one place. Eventually, she is placed with a family in Bennekom. The van Laars are pious and self-righteous. Yes, they have taken a risk by accepting Lien into their home, but they also treat her as a servant. Lien spends the rest of the war with the van Laars. By this time, events have taken a toll on her. She loses a clear sense of who she is: her life was on low heat, she tells van Es. She lived in a dreamworld, she sometimes felt herself flying over her surroundings. She regresses, wetting her bed, losing weight. She becomes numb, disassociated, feelings that only intensify when Gijs van Laar’s charismatic but violent brother, a man she has also learned to call Uncle, sexually abuses her. The van Laars turn a blind eye—it is understood that Lien and her Uncle have a special friendship. What this means is that the man takes her into the forest and rapes her.
Lien is desperate to escape. When the war ends, Mrs. Heroma asks her what she wants to do. She wants only to return to the van Esses. At first they refuse. It is a great blow. In the time Lien has been away they have had another child; Henk is increasingly involved in socialist politics and the postwar reconstruction effort; bringing Lien back into the house would just be too much. But Mrs. Heroma senses it is a matter of life and death, and eventually the family relents.
A happy ending? Not quite. Lien is happy, she becomes one of the family again, even more so than before. But she never fully fits in. There’s an unhappy incident when the van Esses basically browbeat her into not applying for the gymnasium, the academic high school: the practical school was always good enough for them. But Lien finds her way. She trains to be a social worker, specializing in troubled children. Unsurprisingly, she is perfectly suited to the work. One day, in 1953, she is at home for a few days from school and falls ill. Dozing on the sofa, she is awakened by Pa kissing and stroking her. It is yet another terrible hurt, but, amazingly, this incident, which Lien keeps to herself, doesn’t separate her from the van Esses. That happens later, around 1980, after Lien has married and had children and gotten divorced. The ostensible reason for the falling out is banal, but presumably it’s just a stand-in for the sense both Lien and Ma have long felt that she never quite fit with them. Ma writes Lien an icy letter: she doesn’t want to see her again. Lien becomes part of murky family lore: thirty years pass until Bart van Es reaches out to her.
*
I certainly enjoyed The Cut Out Girl, reading it in a single day, drawn into the mystery van Es sets out to solve. But I wasn’t only reading for the plot. I had another agenda, another question in mind. Would I teach this book? On the face of it, The Cut Out Girl fits perfectly with the concerns of a course I teach called Literature after Auschwitz, which explores “postmemory,” Marianne Hirsch’s influential term for the experience of those who did not live through the Holocaust but whose lives have nonetheless been strongly shaped, often disfigured, by what those close to them (usually their parents) did experience.
Van Es’s memoir would usefully add a third-generation perspective to the class, plus one that isn’t Jewish. My interest in it as a teaching tool lies elsewhere, though. Ever since Helen Epstein first wrote about the children of survivors in the 1970s, the language of generations has dominated scholarship on the after-effects of trauma. Last year I was at a conference where Erin McGlothlin suggested that we retire or at least question this language, which she finds unnecessarily biologizing, as if there were a genetic component to trauma. Recent neurological research suggests this might in fact be true, but we should consider the relationship between these findings and the racism and biological essentialism of fascism. And what do we lose if we emphasize neuroscience? What happens to history, personal or otherwise, if we think about generations in a primarily genetic sense? What would be narrative’s place in understanding trauma? What would happen to Lien’s stories?
The Cut Out Girl adds to this conversation by advocating a non-biological sense of family. Movingly, at the end of the book Lien introduces van Es to her friends as her nephew, the man who is going to tell her story. (Too bad van Es dilutes this moment by adding an epilogue, though it’s lovely to read that in her 80s Lien has formed a relationship with a man she knew briefly as a child.) I think the book’s expansive, generous definition of family (or at least its willingness to challenge the dominance of biology in our thinking of family) will interest students.
As will its unflinching portrayal of sexual abuse during wartime, which emphasizes how easily victims can be re-victimized. This aspect of the book is so relevant to our own time, as we finally begin to acknowledge the scope of abuse and assault in society writ large. Van Es’s frankness fits with a sea change in Holocaust studies: in the past many Holocaust stories would have passed over such material in silence, though we are learning how common such experiences were. (I could usefully contextualize this material by assigning an Ida Fink story and brief selections from Molly Appelbaum’s diary that also depict the sexual abuse of Holocaust victims.)
As you can see, then, there is a lot to like from both a readerly and a pedagogic perspective about The Cut Up Girl. Yet I also have reservations, particularly about its style and structure. I found it pedestrian at the level of the sentence, and I’m always nervous about teaching texts that I don’t think are especially amenable to close reading. (I’ve barely quoted from the book, because it’s the content much more than the expression that’s interesting.) In terms of structure, van Es does a few things well. At times, he doubles back when narrating Lien’s experiences, explaining that she has no memory of the events he’s just told. He’s forthright about how he put the story together, how he supplemented Lien’s telling with other sources, where he is speculating, etc. His telling is self-aware, which is an essential component of Holocaust literature. (But why oh why must he write in the present tense? I hate that it’s become the default narrative mode.)
But van Es’s own story is not very interesting. Of course, it’s never going to match Lien’s, nor should it. But his exercise routine, his trips to the archives, his nights clubbing with his cousin, they are all so prosaic. The point of including his own story, I think, is to assert how easily familiar terrain can become unfamiliar. How could this village have been filled with hidden people? How could this pleasantly anodyne fitness center have been the home of a family dispersed and destroyed? Sudden revelations—where what you think you know vertiginously reveals a hidden face—are as much a part of family history as of geography.
But for this conceit to really work the book would need more of van Es’s past. We would need to know more about his childhood memories, more about his own (much more modest) dislocation, between England and Holland, more about what being Dutch means to him. And we would definitely need to know more about his relationship with his stepdaughter Josie, which has been fraught in ways that, he hints, resonate compellingly with Lien’s experiences. (Not the abuse part; the having a hard time accepting someone who is thrown into your life part.) I totally get why he won’t tell us more, but it’s frustrating to be asked to imagine these connections.
But if in talking about himself van Es is too elliptical, in telling Lien’s story he uses indirection to good effect. He ably delays the big reveal (what happened between Lien and Ma?) And, more interestingly, when the answer turns out to be pretty underwhelming, he is smart about the significance of what it means that we feel let down. In other words, he has a lot to say about our desire to explain and understand. On the one hand, order is central to self-understanding. As Lien says, once she understood her own experiences as part of a pattern (a sentiment she thinks of in Buddhist terms) she was able to live more fully and freely. But on the other, we can value order too much. Patterns can become templates, sense can become cliché. The villains in The Cut Out Girl—aside from the obvious ones of the Nazis, who, true to the experience of most of their victims, barely figure in the story, or the Dutch collaborators (and there are quite a lot of these)—are those, like Mother van Laar and even Ma, who live with unshakeable conviction about how the world works. Rigidity can be a way to handle the troubles the world throws at you, not least when you’re risking your life to hide someone in your home, but it can also cause further trouble. (This paradox is similar to the one van Es proposes when he considers the Dutch tradition of tolerance, which has involved staying out of other people’s business, leading to the creation of a siloed society comprised of “pillars” (Protestants, Catholics, liberals, etc.) that seldom overlap. Could that very separateness, he asks, have been what allowed the Germans to act as they did in Holland?)
In this regard van Es’s use of the poems from Lien’s album is interesting. At first I wondered why he felt the need to include so many of them. They’re objectively terrible. Here’s one:
Roses big and roses small
Soft as velvet on a wall
But the softest petal part
Is the rose of Lietje’s heart.
But the contrast between the sentiments they express—the things Lien’s loved ones wish for her: health, happiness, success, long life—and the reality of her experience is important, and not just because of their ironic juxtaposition. Instead van Es explores an analogy: conventional form is to idealized (that is, false) sentiments as unconventional form is to accurate experience. The clunky poetry of the well wishes is so kitschy because it can’t express actual experience. To do so, especially in a time of war and disruption, would require a more unconventional way of telling.
In the end, I’m unconvinced van Es has found such a form. His book is nothing like those poems, but neither is it like the daring comparison of the story of a family and the story of a people that structures Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million or the elegant prose of Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with the Amber Eyes, to name two books doing similar work to The Cut Out Girl. In the end, van Es’s book reminds me a bit of the doggerel that Lien’s friend Lily, who copied the lines I cited above, added at the bottom of the page: “I lay in bed and mucked about / so mum got cross and started to shout.” A lot better than the canned poem, and an engaging and daring act of non-conformism in a conformist society, but not exactly great art.
Still and all, I think I’ve talked myself into assigning the book. Do you agree? A couple of years ago I did something similar with Sara Kofman’s memoir of her time as a hidden child in Paris, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat. And Kofman has been a staple of the class for years. Students love it. Indeed, I might describe it as the book Lien might have written. That is, it is totally fractured, cryptic, and fragmented. It’s like an expression of trauma, whereas van Es’s book is a consideration of trauma, if that makes sense. The latter is less striking, but also, perhaps, more necessary. Certainly more healthy.
Rohan’s post on The Cut Out Girl is well worth reading. She liked it more than I did, but in general we agree about its merits. She also mentions an important sub-plot, as it were, when van Es visits the street where Lien first lived in Dordrecht, which has now become public housing inhabited mostly by Muslim immigrants. A man gets upset at him for taking pictures—van Es agrees that coming to look and not to tell is a problem. Which leads me to wonder: when does a story end? What would happen if we juxtaposed that man’s story with Lien’s?
March is a long time ago now, but I wanted to say a few words about my monthly reading. A better than average set.
Yiyun Li – Where Reasons End (2019) Sad, funny, wise, painful. I quoted bits here.
Christopher R. Browning – Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992/98) This Holocaust scholar could have won plenty of rounds of Humiliation for not having read Browning’s classic microhistory of the actions of Order Police Battalion 101 near Lublin in 1942. Sometimes books you feel just have to have read disappoint. Not Ordinary Men, which remains as eye-opening now as then. (Browning has written a thoughtful essay for the 25th anniversary edition, bringing the latest research, especially concerning the photograph record of the unit, to bear on his original conclusions.)
The book begins with a sobering statistic: in March 1942, 70—80% of the eventual victims of the Holocaust were still alive, and 20—30% had been murdered; by February 1943, the proportions were reversed. 1942 was the darkest year in Jewish history; Browning examines one example of the men who perpetrated that darkness. The average age of the 500 men in the battalion was in the upper 30s, meaning that they had come of age before the Nazis came to power, and they were working- and lower middle class men from Hamburg, an area and the social classes famously antipathetic to National Socialism—facts which, taken together, suggest these men would have been among the least likely to be drawn to fascism. Yet they readily participated in mass executions, round-ups, and deportations.
Browning notes that 10—20% refused to partake in atrocities (and they had the benefit of a commander who actually asked before the first action if anyone wanted out—rather than a death sentence or a transfer to the front, these dissenters were moved into clerical positions or even sent back home); 20—30% participated avidly in atrocities; while the majority (50—70%), although reluctant, participated anyway. For the men in this last category, it was easier to follow along, and too unpleasant to risk the scorn of their more hateful colleagues. These are sobering numbers, with implications beyond Browning’s specific example. What makes us think we wouldn’t number among the majority in a similar scenario?
Leslie Morris, The Translated Jew: German Jewish Culture Outside the Margins (2018) I had a realization as I reviewed Morris’s book on the idea of translation in postwar German Jewish culture: academic monographs make me grumpy and I should stop writing about them. Thus, I’ve given up reviewing books for Choice, a publication designed to help libraries decide what to buy. (I wrote for them for 10 years.) Morris, whom I have not met even though the field we work in is small, probably deserves a more charitable reviewer. I did my best to point out the inspiring range of her material—ranging from a defunct Berlin sculpture park to Jewish body art to the poets Raymond Federman and Rose Ausländer. But her insistence, so typically academic, that we think, read, or engage “in new ways,” without explaining how or why, grated on me. As I concluded: “her description of Jewishness as an endlessly deferred cipher, at once spurring and spurning interpretation, is as unexceptional as it is unexceptionable.”
Andrea Camilleri – The Overnight Kidnapper (2015) Trans. Stephen Sartarelli (2019) Of course, the crime itself has vanished from my memory, but I recall the latest Montalbano as a decent effort. I didn’t want any surprises, and I didn’t get any.
Gengoroh Tagame – My Brother’s Husband [Volume 2] (2016) Trans. Anne Ishii (2018) I read Volume 1 last month; happy to say that the conclusion doesn’t disappoint. It plays a trick on us, but a fair one: leading us to believe in an impossible ending, then gently showing us why the all-too-possible one, however melancholy, is the right choice.
Ian Rankin – In a House of Lies (2018) The latest Rebus—once again improved, I suspect, by the audiobook’s excellent narrator—is one of the best in a while, featuring a rich set of storylines, plus better use of Brillo the dog (see my February complaint). The détente between Rebus and Edinburgh crime boss Big Ger Cafferty suggested in the previous installments is gone. This despite the fact that Rebus is coming to terms with a COPD diagnosis. Has anyone written about the pathos of ailing detectives?
H. F. Heard – A Taste for Honey (1941) I admit, I did not do this book justice. I read it on a Friday night when I was exhausted and should have gone to bed. But even in a better frame of mind, I think I would have found this tale of Holmes in retirement thin gruel. You better like Holmes a lot more than suspense if you’re going to enjoy it.
Virginie Despentes – Vernon Subutex I & II (both 2015) Trans. Frank Wynne (2017 & 2018) Not sure how long they’ll stay with me, but I liked these books a lot. I tried to articulate why—and the issue I take with the conclusion they seem to be coming to—here.
Mihail Sebastian – Women (1933) Trans. Philip Ó Ceallaigh (2019) More anon.
Solomon Perel – Europa, Europa (1990) Trans. Margot Bettauer Dembo (1997) Almost on a whim, I decided to teach Agnieska Holland’s adaptation of Perel’s extraordinary Holocaust memoir this semester. It went well—I’m finding the movie more interesting the longer I spend with it (always a good sign). The film is plenty unusual, but Perel’s memoir even more so. His story is stranger than fiction: after escaping the Nazi advance by fleeing east of the Bug river (the part of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union in the Hitler—Stalin pact) and finding refuge as a Komsomol in an orphanage in Grodno, the Jewish Perel passed himself off as an Ethnic German when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. (He had been born in Germany before moving to Poland with his parents as a child.) Perel found himself honoured for fighting at the Front and then shipped to a boarding school for elite members of the Hitler Youth, where he spent most of his time worrying someone would notice his circumcision. (Tonally, both book and film are crazy: sort of funny, sort of campy, sort of moving.) Remarkably, Perel survived the war surrounded by Nazi true believers, and at war’s end found himself reunited with his elder brother, the only other member of the family to survive. Perel’s story is even more unlikely than most survivor tales. What is most interesting is the way his cognitive dissonance features in odd switches between first and third person. At heart there seems something fundamentally incurious about Perel. An effect of his experiences? Or a predisposition towards surviving them?
Michelle McNamara — I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer (2018) I don’t read much True Crime. But I do read a ton of crime fiction. So, I naively assumed, when I started listening to McNamara’s acclaimed description of her pursuit of the serial rapist she named the Golden State Killer, that I knew what I was in for. Nope. I was shocked by how visceral, graphic, and uncomfortably voyeuristic this book—and, I suspect, its genre—turns out to be. It’s creepy as shit. To her credit, McNamara is aware of these difficulties, and doesn’t shy from highlighting her obsessive interest. Sadly, McNamara couldn’t finish her book: she died about three-quarters of the way through, and the finished version has been pieced together from notes. (The editors clearly describe when and how they’ve reconstructed.) Still, I did find the book repetitive and confusingly structured—perhaps a fitting response to the relentlessness of the crimes, dozens and dozens of them, perpetrated over a decade all over California. (If I had a better sense of California’s geography I might have had an easier time of it.) The tension between what we know—the killer was finally caught (in part thanks to McNamara’s efforts—and what she didn’t gives the book a macabre poignancy. Not for the faint of heart.
Lissa Evans — Their Finest Hour and a Half (2009) Read my take, if you like, but be sure to read this novel. There’s a dog that understands Yiddish!
David Bezmozgis — Immigrant City: Stories (2019) Bezmozgis is one of my favourites, the heir to Bernard Malamud. I snapped up his new collection on a recent weekend in Canada (why no US pub date?) and finished it before I was even home. I’m not sure Bezmozgis has ever written anything as rich as his first novel, The Free World (the great novel of the emigration of Soviet Jewry), but most of these stories are the equal of those in his terrific first collection, Natasha and Other Stories. Of course, some stories are stronger than others. “A New Gravestone for an Old Grave,” for example, is a bit travelogue-y. But “Immigrant City” breaks new ground for Bezmozgis (not sure the attempt to juxtapose earlier generations of Jewish immigrants to newer ones from Syria and Somalia completely works, but it’s thought provoking—I suspect it would hold up to rereading). And “Little Rooster” is a classic that is going straight onto the syllabus of my course on postwar representations of the Holocaust.
More before too long, I hope, about April reading, which is proving decidedly more unavailing.
Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood, Nechama Tec (1982, revised 1984)
The Journey, Ida Fink, Translated by Joanna Weschler and Francine Prose (1990)
Here we have two books about Jews living in hiding during WWII. Dry Tears is a memoir; The Journey is a novel, yet one based on its author’s experiences. I read them back to back, which people who don’t feel compelled to study the Holocaust probably shouldn’t do. But both are well worth reading, especially if you believe Holocaust survivor stories must include cattle cars, barbed wire fences, and concentration camps.
Tec was born in 1931 in Lublin to Roman Bawnik and Esther (Hachamoff) Bawnik. Her father—maybe the most important person in her life—had been groomed to become a rabbi, but suddenly broke with religion around the time he turned 14, around the same time he was orphaned. A period of hard years followed; eventually he found work in a candle factory, where he began, rather audaciously, given their class and religious differences, to court the owner’s daughter. Tec’s mother was from an Orthodox family and they looked askance at Bawnik, but he had excellent business sense, and it wasn’t long before he was running a factory himself. His shrewdness, tact, and measured approach to situations helped the family many times over during the war.
Tec begins her memoir with the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Rather than military defeats and political upheavals, however, she focuses on education. With the beginning of the war, school was interrupted, never to be resumed for Jewish children. The family engages a tutor for Tec and her older sister, a young woman named Hela Trachtenberg, who they nickname Czuczka (“piglet”) because they love her so. Czuczka engages Tec’s interest and sparks in her a desire to learn, if only because she dotes on her tutor. Tec, who became a sociologist and academic in America after the war, clearly spent a lifetime learning. Yet Dry Tears, like most Holocaust stories, details an unusual, perhaps more pragmatic but certainly more drastic education; once the Jews of Lublin and the surrounding areas are forced into a ghetto, the formal education stops. Tec will learn many things over the course of the book, but they will be of the order of how to lose herself in another identity, how to sell on the black market, and how to ingratiate herself with people who are taking a risk in hiding her and could turn on her at any moment.
Lublin, 1940
Where Dry Tears is unusual in the corpus of Holocaust memoirs is in describing life before the war. We don’t see these in the canonical texts by Levi, Millu, Wiesel, etc., which either begin with deportation or imprisonment. This difference might be because Tec’s reminiscences came later than those others (it was first published in 1982 and then reissued with a new epilogue in 1984). But the more important reason is that the ruptures in Tec’s life weren’t quite as drastic as the ones experienced by those other survivors. Amazingly, everyone in her immediate family survived the war.
Don’t get me wrong, though: Tec suffers plenty of trauma. Like any book about the Holocaust, Dry Tears is full of terrible, indelible images, ones that Tec assures us she has spent a lifetime haunted by. Some of these are terribly poignant, like this early scene, when the family is hiding in their factory, and Tec finds a hole in the wall separating their hideout from the convent school next door:
I found a small opening in the wall from which, unobserved, I could watch the girls at play. To me they seemed so content, so carefree, and I envied them their fun. Did they know that a war was on? At times, as I watched them, I too became engrossed in their games and almost forgot about the war. But the bell that called them back to class called me back to reality, and at such moments I became more acutely aware of my loneliness. These small excursions made me feel, in the end, more miserable than ever.
Here we have in miniature the tension that will structure Tec’s life for the next several years. Her ability to become engrossed in the lives of others will help her when she needs to become someone else. But such loss of awareness carries risks, not least the threat of losing one’s self. Or of becoming careless—though of course her identification with others can never be fully complete; she is never just a Pole. The bell doesn’t toll for her. She is always marked by difference, yet her life depends on not showing it.
Other images are more violent. Tec hears about the children of her father’s business partner, forced to cut their father’s body into pieces in order to smuggle it out of their hiding place, when the man takes a cyanide pill in the mistaken belief the Nazis are at the door. Even more viscerally, a family friend describes the death of Czuczka, murdered in a raid:
she was lying on the ground beside the house in which she had been hiding, her hair disarrayed, her glasses missing, and without eyes. The birds had attended to her body. The picture he drew was vivid and merciless. We were spared no details.
Don’t forget, Tec is 11 years old. How merciless that verb “attended,” which only reminds us of the attention she and millions of other victims didn’t get—the ritual observances that ought to have attended their bodies in the hours after death.
Maybe most terrible of all, for me at least, is the description of the partial liquidation of the Lublin ghetto in summer 1942. Tec’s mother rouses her in the middle of the night and as they make their way to a new hiding place, Tec sees baby carriages in the almost abandoned streets. But the carriages aren’t empty: “There was no place for them [the babies]. No one would allow them in to hiding for fear they would cry and lead to the discovery of others.” The next day, Tec looks into one of the carriages and sees “an unrecognizable bloody mass, that seemed strangely alive.”
The family realizes they cannot continue to hide in the factory. From summer 1942 they leave Lublin—the girls to a village called Otwock, and the parents to the city of Kielce. The girls can pass as Poles because of their looks and their fluency in Polish. The parents, whose Polish is heavy accented (their language is Yiddish), cannot be in the open.
Tec takes on new identity: her name is Christina, nicknamed Krysia, and like all Poles she is Catholic. She must learn to think of herself as Krysia, even with her family. The girls study up on Catholic ritual. Most importantly, they learn to behave like a Christian, which means, Tec tells us, to move with assurance. In hiding, her father explains, they no longer have the luxury of being afraid. They must be cautious, but they must be assured. No easy task for a young child, especially since her parents are unable to leave the house which puts a huge amount of responsibility on her. After several months in which the family is separated, the girls are able to join their parents in Kielce, where a family named Homar has taken them in, in exchange for which risk the Bawniks will pay the rent and all the food. Tec becomes entwined with the Homars and their extended family, as she is sent out first to work the black market and later to sell the rolls her mother makes in their hidden annex. (Her sister has a good but risky job in the canteen of a club for German officers.)
Time and again, Tec is faced with the anti-Semitism of her hosts, which is general rather than personal (“Don’t be a nosy Jew,” “Don’t be clumsy like a Jew,” they tell her, responding to her hurt looks by assuring her, “You are not really Jewish.”) Her father explains that this cognitive dissonance is useful, even essential for the family: were the Homars to realize they really were sheltering Jews they would likely be unwilling to continue taking the risk.
The Homars can live blissfully in contradiction, but Tec can’t. The most fascinating parts are the discussions of the psychological toll of living openly in hiding:
An extra layer of secretiveness, combined with a fear of discovery, became part of my being. All my life revolved around hiding; hiding thoughts, hiding feelings, hiding my activities, hiding information.
Everything has to be held in—when the girls are finally on the way to being reunited with their parents, her sister orders Tec: “Cry quietly!” Ideally these tears would be as invisible as the dry ones named in the book’s title. But dry tears aren’t the same as no tears. Complete repression is impossible—and undesirable.
Sometimes it almost seems to work, though:
And eventually I grew oddly accustomed to anti-Semitic remarks. A slow transformation was taking place in me. It was as if in certain circumstances I lost track of who I really was and began to see myself as a Pole. I became a double person, one private and one public. When I was away from my family I became so engrossed in my public self that I did not have to act the part; I actually felt like the person I was supposed to be. … I never talked about these changes to anyone. I was not proud of them. I felt guilty and embarrassed. I felt like a traitor. It was as if, as I gave up my old self, I was giving up my family as well.
There’s that word again, “engrossed,” the same one she used in describing the experience of watching the convent girls. But this is no war-time Stockholm syndrome. It’s more complicated. Tec needs to become a part of the Homars. And she even enjoys it. But she also doesn’t want to, and even recoils from them. That distance becomes complete when, at the end of the war, when everyone has to hide as low from the conquering Russians soldiers as they have from the Germans, the Homars ask them to leave, and moreover not to tell anyone that they hid a Jewish family for almost three years. Not out of modesty, but out of fear and shame. The Homars are worried what their neighbours and friends would say.
No wonder, then, when, in the last pages of the book, Tec returns to Lublin, pressed in the back of a military truck, she refuses to look, afraid that what she sees would confirm her sense that she no longer belongs there. The last sentence reads, “I closed my eyes instead.”
That liberation isn’t liberatory is a common conclusion in Holocaust texts. In the epilogue added two years later, Tec shows that her teenage self was right. Home wasn’t home any more. The family realized they would have to leave Poland and set off on another dangerous journey, this time into defeated Germany in order to reach the American sector. The details of that trip, and what happened after, remain untold. Even happy Holocaust stories are shattered, governed by silence, evasion, and elision.
Fragmentation is even more apparent in Ida Fink’s The Journey. I’ve written about Fink before. If you’ve never read her, start with her two volumes of short stories, especially A Scrap of Time. Fink has been called the Chekhov of the Holocaust, which sounds like a terrible, nonsensical description, but is actually quite apt. She has his mixture of poignancy and acidity, and she works so well with a short form. (She’s actually much more of a miniaturist than Chekhov, many of whose stories are really long. I doubt Fink ever wrote one more than 20 pages, and most are well under ten.) When I teach her stories, as I regularly do, I follow the scholar Sara Horowitz’s suggestion that Fink is perhaps the most brilliant writer of the Holocaust when it comes to showing what literature can do that history cannot. She plays with the order of events, mimicking how hard it is to narrate a traumatic experience, and she jumps from one perspective to another, allowing us to see what individual characters cannot, even to tell us the experiences of those who were murdered.
Because I love Fink’s stories so much, I came to The Journey with high expectations. It tells, as is to be expected, an extraordinary story. (All stories of survival are extraordinary. There were not supposed to be any such stories.) And I was fascinated by it as a guide to what Fink went through in the war. (I don’t know exactly how autobiographical it is, but it is always presented as such. Details about Fink’s life are hard to come by. That mystery, plus the fact that she was a very late starter as a writer, which I always find endearing, exert a strong pull on me. If I had any Polish, I would drop everything and write her biography.)
But I also found it a difficult book. Fink’s stories are, not warm exactly, that would be crazy, but poignant and pathos-laden, in the best possible sense. I am so moved by them. The Journey, by contrast, is distant, as if guided by the unconscious decision taken by the narrator and her sister (like Tec and her sister they are teenagers, but a few years older) not to let themselves be emotional with each other:
I said “Lie down, try to sleep. And don’t start bawling like an idiot,” I added, even though she wasn’t crying at all; she just had a pained expression on her face. And that’s how it would be between us from now on: no gestures of tenderness. The more we needed to be tender to each other, the colder and more distant we were.
Unlike Tec, the narrator uses her false papers to leave Poland, by joining a convoy of Ostarbeiter, Workers from the East, basically slave labourers used by the Germans to prop up the war effort, both in factories or on farms. What follows is a journey through Germany in wartime, not the crazed Germany of the Nuremberg rallies nor the bombed-out Germany of the end of the war, but rather a rural, almost bucolic, but poor, hardscrabble, and suspicious Germany. At every turn the girls (and the others they encounter who are like them) fear being taken for Jews. Perhaps because they experience that fear—that is, perhaps because they can’t follow the advice of Roman Bawnik—they are continually found out, sometimes by people sympathetic to them, but more often not. It is a life on the run, and it is always very, very dangerous, even though it is mostly characterized by boredom and backbreaking work.
Ostarbeiterin
The narrator never really knows where she is—we have references to the Ruhr and the Rhine, but nothing concrete, nothing like the certainty Tec has about at least her geographic, if not her emotional whereabouts—and she starts losing her sense of who she is. Unlike in Tec’s book (and here we see the difference in genre playing a role), the narrator doesn’t reflect on how this loss makes her feel. Instead Fink makes us feel that confusion, by calling the character sometimes by her real name but sometimes by her (shifting) aliases. Even more complicatedly, Fink mostly narrates in first person but sometimes switches to third, so our perspective on events is also undermined. I’m pretty good at following complicated texts, but I often lost track of who was who in this novel. And it’s not like it has a thousand characters.
The Journey, in other words, is a confusing book, but, again, this confusion is performative, offering us some semblance of the characters’ experiences. The paradox here is that even though the narrator must inhabit her new identity as fully as possible, she is never in Tec’s situation. She can’t ever really pass. Despite her Aryan looks, remarked on by almost everyone she meets, people sense her Jewishness, which is ineradicable in a way Tec’s doesn’t seem to be. And even more than Tec, Fink emphasizes luck, especially in a climactic scene when she on the point of being sold out to the Gestapo when a chance, banal occurrence intervenes and saves her life. Like Tec’s memoir, Fink’s novel ends with an epilogue, in which the narrator returns to the scene of that moment, only to find it as impossible, as meaningless as the first time.
If I could put it this way, I would say that Dry Tears is realist and The Journey modernist. But a realist Holocaust text is a contradiction in terms. Still, Tec’s memoir was a lot easier to get a handle on than Fink’s novel. I suspect if I read The Journey again I’d get more out of it, but I can’t imagine teaching it. Much too hard. Dry Tears, on the other hand, would probably teach well, and I’m thinking of adding it to my class. (Though then I’ll need to figure out what to cut to make room…) Taken together, though, these texts, no matter how difficult and desperate, expanded my understanding of what happened in those terrible years, and how writers have found ways to describe them.
In the years after the fall of communism, Zofia Illinska, an elegant, erudite Polish woman, an émigré who at that point had lived in England for fifty years, returned to the estate she and her mother fled in 1939 when the Soviets and the Germans divided Poland. Zofia was accompanied by an Englishman half her age, the author of this remarkable book; having befriended him when, as a boy he stayed with his family in her hotel in Cornwall, the two stayed in contact ever since. The Bronski House A Return to the Borderlands (1995) is a story about home and exile amid the violence of the 20th century. It is a meditation on the idea of return. And it is a portrait of a sweet and moving friendship that crosses generations, sexes, and cultures.
Few of the places that mattered in Zofia’s life exist anymore. She was born in 1921 in Polish Wilno, today Vilnius in Lithuania, and grew up at a house called Mantuski, in modern-day Belarus. Her story, like that of so many people in the past century (and in our own), is one of enforced change, driven by the violent dreams of others. The results of those dreams, more often than not, are sickness, death, and misery. As Marsden puts it, describing Minsk in the fall of 1917:
Stooped figures shuffled about, collecting water from puddles. Illness hung over that place like the thunder-clouds. Everyone was ill—ill from dysentery, ill from typhus, ill and widowed from other people’s war, other people’s ideas, other people’s revolutions.
Although the words are Marsden’s, it’s unclear whose sentiments these are. I’ve been speaking of Zofia, but the book is not only or even primarily hers; it’s at least as much the story of her mother, Helena. Helena is the one who experienced Minsk at the end of the First World War; Zofia, undreamed of by her mother, wasn’t yet born. The bulk of the book is based on diaries, letters, and notebooks Helena kept over the years, but for the most part Marsden is telling the story. (We are given excerpts from the diaries, allowing us to see that Helena was a gifted, if somewhat exuberant writer; little surprise that her daughter became a poet.) Marsden hews closely to Helena’s viewpoint—he tells us what she experienced and what she felt—but at times we sense his perspective.
In the Minsk passage, for example, the terrible, indelible image of the stooped figures and the puddles must come from Helena. The simile of illness hanging over the city like thunder-clouds is likely hers as well. (It fits with the language we find in her diaries.) But the final sentence, with its anaphora and its ringing condemnation of the harm done to blameless victims by ideologies and governments, feels like Marsden’s.
Indeed, if Marsden has a philosophy, a take on the material he is describing, this is probably it. There is nothing as damaging as an idea: ideologies are experienced by those who live under them primarily as violence and deprivation. To be sure, the 20th century gave us more than enough evidence to support this idea. I’m reminded of Primo Levi, who, describing Hans Biebow, the Nazi in control of the Lodz ghetto—“a small jackal too cynical to take seriously the demonizing of the race”—concluded that a pragmatist is always preferable to a theorist.
Marsden’s humanism has a lot to recommend it, though it skirts sententiousness. As I read the book—utter catnip to me; I swallowed it in a single day, and loved every minute of it—I wondered a little uneasily what is at stake when we read about vanished worlds, and about the suffering of others. It’s easy to romanticize lost worlds. They have a pathos and a dignity that our own seems to lack. (Here’s hoping someone eventually says that about us—though God only knows what that will mean for the present they are feeling bludgeoned and degraded by.) But we oughtn’t to forget that these lost worlds weren’t just the victims of history. They contained, even perpetrated, suffering too. (Zofia’s parents’ families were landowners on both sides, not tremendously wealthy, but privileged. On her mother’s side, she was an O’Breifne, descended from an Irish Catholic who came to fight for the Czars in the 17th century.) The Bronski House gives us a few indications of that inequality. One such moment is a brief standoff in 1926, when the local peasants refuse to allow the Bronskis’ timber carts to pass through the village, claiming that the wood belongs to them. The situation almost turns violent, before Zofia’s father exerts his landowning privilege and the villagers back down, for the moment anyway. In general, though, the book hews to the landowners’ perspective, which doesn’t so much disdain or disparage the peasantry as ignore them.
Marsden, however, is too smart a writer not to have thought about these questions. Early on, he describes two photographs of Helena, one a studio portrait from 1919, taken in Warsaw, showing an almost twenty-year-old young woman in “a white high-collared dress,” and the other a candid from 1936, taken on the estate of Mantuski. (Curiously, there are no photos or other images in this book, other than a helpful map on the endpapers. Unlikely that would be true in a book released today. I’m puzzled by the omission; likely Zofia wanted them kept out. Whatever the reason, the absence of images increases the mystery of the lives retold here.)
Marsden wonders why these photos cast such a hold on him:
It was the way this woman, Helena O’Breifne, had crossed the steepest contours of our age; that for me, living in flatter decades, in a quieter corner of Europe, her world represented everything that had been lost, a place of slow villages, muddy livestock and unfenced fields, of time passing with only the backdrop of the seasons, of lives exaggerated—exaggerated in wealth, in poverty, in suffering—lives buffeted by a history no one seemed to control: Helena’s was a bigger world, a crueler world, a world of half-mad nobles living on borrowed time, of noble peasants living outside time, another Europe, an older Europe.
This is beautifully—but also slyly—put: as the sentence amasses its clauses it veers into cliché (the half-mad nobles, the noble peasants), and knowingly so. For as Marsden goes on to admit, the truth is simpler: Helena is beautiful and he has fallen a little in love with her, as so many men will do in this book. (Helena’s lack of interest in men, until she wanders haphazardly into a marriage that to her own surprise brings her much joy, is interesting, and more might have been made of Helena as a desiring (or, often, non-desiring) being, though that would have meant speculating in a way Marsden typically refrains from. This is no psycho-biography.)
Marsden’s love for Helena is of course connected to his love for Zofia. It is refreshing to see how much respect he has for this much older woman. Zofia can occasionally be eccentric—she loves to sail, though she doesn’t know how, and often needs to be rescued—but primarily she is characterized by intelligence, mildness, and remarkable good sense. The trip she and Marsden undertake is quite fraught, especially given what she finds in a newly-independent and terribly impoverished Belarus: Mantuski, her childhood home is gone, burned to ground in the early days of the war; Klepawicze, her husband’s childhood home, has become a communal farm, complete with an alarming Geiger counter that continually tests the air for radiation (Chernobyl happened not long before and not far away); worst of all, the Bronski chapel, containing her father’s grave (Adam died of complications of scarlet fever in 1936), has been ransacked and looted.
But Zofia is never bitter; she never displays rancor to those who chased her family away. (Yes, the past is past, but some of the people she meets were alive at that time, making her forbearance all the more impressive.) After returning to England, Zofia begins raising money to repair and reconsecrate the chapel. Two years later she and Philip return to dedicate it. At the ceremony, Zofia makes a speech extolling her father’s love of the land he spent working and fighting for. Then she adds:
‘But there is one thing you must understand. For more than half a century now, no Bronski has lived here. Once this was our home, but not any more. The family is scattered around the world and the life we knew here is gone. The restoration of the chapel is not for us; it is not for my family, but for you, for all of you—Belorussian and Pole, Orthodox and Catholic. You must look after it as your own home. You must use it. Come here and pray whenever you want, whenever you can—even if there is no priest to officiate; you must say the rosary and in the spring cut back the forest around the building.
‘And be warned,’ she smiled, ‘that if the chapel again falls into disrepair, it will be my ghost that comes back to haunt you.’
It’s a generous gesture, a superb acknowledgement of the inevitability of change and all that is lost. It doesn’t dig up old grudges or wounds. Yet it also ends with a sting—a gentle one, but a sting nonetheless. The past never does fully go away; it always threatens to haunt us.
Before I end, a few scattered observations:
Marsden makes himself scarce in the book, and it’s all the better for his restraint. He is a translator, a Sherpa, sometimes a dogsbody; he is not the main attraction. There’s a lovely scene in which he and Zofia visit an old woman, Pani Wala Dobralowicz, Zofia and her mother’s former dressmaker, who lives with her chickens in a small cabin near the place where the great house once stood. The three have lunch—there are plates of potatoes and kielbasa and herring, and a bottle of vodka. Afterwards, the three sleep off the lunch “in the close heat of the afternoon—the two widows on beds behind a screen, me on an old sofa next to the stove.” Later he “hears the two women talking behind their screen long into the night.” A sweet moment, from which we, like Marsden, are quite properly barred. Their conversation is private.
So sweetness and gentleness, yes, but that isn’t the whole tone of the book. I’m not sure I’ve made it clear how dramatic, even exciting it is. The family’s escape from Poland at the beginning of the war, across the border into Lithuania and eventually to England, is the stuff of a spy novel. And the book is shrewd enough to admit that traumatic upheaval can be the making of a person. Here is Marsden’s description of Helena’s escape eastwards to Minsk and eventually Saint Petersburg with her mother and their servants and livestock during the First World War:
The forest banished all thoughts of war. Helena felt happy, exhilarated. Each day was different. Her mother withdrew the barbed constraints that normally surrounded her. She relaxed; the progress of the convoy imposed its own loose authority and, in years to come, Helena looked back on those weeks in the forest, seeing the horses’ twitching ears, the arc of the wooden hames, hearing the creak of carts, and knew that this was the closest she ever came to any sort of freedom.
It’s a melancholy conclusion (which is belied by the contentment she finds later in life at Mantuski—though of course contentment isn’t the same as freedom), which captures just how confined life could be for a gifted young woman in that time and place.
I noted earlier that Marsden helps us consider the risks of romanticizing the past. His point well taken, but I am a sucker for this particular past, and The Bronski House is filled with swoony period details, like this one that seems super Slavic and wintry and almost nineteenth century novelistic: in defiance of everything that has just happened, Helena’s aunt holds a ball on a December evening in Wilno at the end of the war. There are no horses in the city; they have all died in the war. So there are no sledges, no carriages; the guests arrive on foot. Marsden gives us this grace note: “In the portico of Aunt Marynia’s home, a great puddle spread out around the rows of felt boots.” (It’s the kind of detail you’d find in a Penelope Fitzgerald novel. No accident that hers is the only blurb on my edition.)
One last thing—and quite a different note: I found it extraordinary to read a book about this time & place that has almost nothing to say about Jews. (They are referred to once or twice, but only in passing, it’s really minimal.) I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, it’s a relief to have a break from those particular terrors, especially given my academic work on the Holocaust. On the other hand, it feels like a huge effacement. Notice that Zofia doesn’t mention Jews in her speech at the chapel. Even she wanted to, she couldn’t. Not because they couldn’t pray there, but because there aren’t any of them around to address. Even in a story filled with loss, then, there are even further layers of despair, even more ghosts who don’t get their due. In the end, I prefer to think of this as a sign of the book’s modesty on the part of the book (Jews simply didn’t factor much into Zofia’s daily life—but could this be true?—and of course the worst atrocities against Jews happened after she and her family fled) rather than a sign of its values.
Too bad The Bronski House is out of print. Some enterprising publisher should reissue it. It would pair terrifically well with the NYRB Classics edition of Eleanor Perenyi’s More Was Lost (hint, hint). I’ll even volunteer to write the introduction. In the meantime, search your library or AbeBooks. This one’s a keeper.
Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982/84) I’ve 
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 