October 2021, the missing month! What can I say? I was busy, teaching all the things, making all the lunches, blah blah. But so many people appreciated my one-word review in the November post—I hate reading stuff too, I get it!—that I thought I would aim, not for single-word reviews (something to aspire to) but for single sentences. I’m such a wordy bastard that even that idea mostly failed (plus I had written a couple at the time, so those were already longer), but I herewith present what for me is a breezy summary of my month’s reading.
James Whistler, Nocturne in Grey and Gold: Chelsea Snow, 1876
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle (2021)
Are you a striver or a crook? That’s the question in Whitehead’s new novel, nominally a crime novel but in fact a novel about crime. “Strivers grasped for something better—maybe it existed, maybe it didn’t—and crooks schemed about how to manipulate the present system,” muses Ray Carney, the small businessman at the center of the novel. How can he, the owner of a furniture store in Harlem (Whitehead delights in midcentury furniture, and who can blame him), get that elusive better thing, in his case an apartment in a nice building on Riverside Drive, without manipulating the system? In a story told in three sections—set in 1959, 1961, and 1964, landmark years of the Civil Rights movement—Whitehead argues that strivers are just crooks in better suits, able to “give back” to the community. Ray begins by turning a blind eye to the origin of some of his merchandise and ends as a fence. But Whitehead, in this novel anyway, is no Malamud. Ray’s is not a tragic story—he hasn’t degenerated or sold his soul or become a moral bankrupt—unless you take capitalism as a tragedy. Which it is. But in Whitehead’s New York-centered vision, capitalism’s ability to turn all that is sold into air is presented as a form of irrepressible effervescence, most magnificently captured in a final set piece in which Ray visits the construction site of what will become the Twin Towers. Omari Weekes’s Bookforum review made me appreciate the book more than I first did. I’m not convinced, though, that Whitehead critiques Ray as much as Weekes thinks he does, or should. For the tone of Harlem Shuffle is as unsteady as the movement described in its title. Is Ray to be admired or condemned? The novel doesn’t seem sure. It sure loves late 50s, early 60s Harlem, though, presented with an energy and delight that undoes any sentimentalism, which is more than I can say of its soppy depiction of women and children.
Charlotte Wood, The Weekend (2019)
Three women, now in their seventies, friends for forty years, converge on a house on the Central Coast, an hour from Sydney. Jude, a former maître’d’, has been kept by a married man for decades, and lives for the moments she’s able to snatch from his life, a state of affairs she can share with no one. Wendy, an intellectual who became famous as a pioneering second-wave feminist (and apparently made plenty of money at it, the book’s one implausible note), ruminates over the germ of a new book though she spends most of her time dealing with her dog, old, deaf, shaken by some unspecified past trauma. Adele, an actor with a critically esteemed career, mostly in theater who hasn’t worked in a long time and who never made any money to begin with, has just been kicked out by her younger lover, a woman who had been supporting her. (The novel takes money seriously, which I appreciated. How do you live when you no longer want to work, or when no one any longer wants you to work?)
The weekend of the title falls over Christmas, but the women are not on holiday. They have a job to do: cleaning out the house that belonged to Sylvie, the fourth member of their little band, who died a year ago and seems to have been the glue that kept them together. (At first she’s an anodyne, if spectral, figure, but she turns out to have been as messy as the rest of them.) Now that they are three, the women find their old allegiances shifting rapidly. A novel about how things end, The Weekend implies that their friendship might be the final casualty.
In terms of novels about older women, friendship, and end of life, I liked The Weekend more than Nunez’s What Are You Going Through and less than Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, but I liked it quite a bit. A short book with heft that describes aging bodies (in all their frustrations and competencies) with, to me anyway, impressive, almost uncanny, awareness. (Wood is only in her 50s.)
Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982, revised 1984)
Memoir of Tec’s childhood in wartime Poland, living at great risk to her safety, under an assumed non-Jewish identity. I’ve written about this book before: it’s a favourite of mine, and my students like it too, this year’s group being no exception. They are rightly fascinated by Tec’s guilt at the ease with which she sinks into her new identity. Tec is bewildered by the antisemitism espoused even by the Polish family who, for a lot of money, is hiding her, but she also finds herself laughing along to jokes made at her own expense. Her indictment of postwar Poland is [fire emoji], as the kids say. Reading it for the who-knows-how-many-times, I noticed that Tec’s Jewish identity is in fact identity with her nuclear family. Even before the war, she offers little sense of extended family or community. Not sure what to make of that (I said I noticed it, that’s all): could her guilt at passing have been amplified by detachment from an identity that persecution forced her to affirm? A rich, moving text, strongly recommended.
Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990)
African-American PI novel, groundbreaking at the time and still pretty good. I prefer the end of the film, actually (in general, I am pro Denzel in a wifebeater), but the novel makes even more of Easy’s desire for a home of his own—a sign, I think we are meant to see, that his sacrifices in WWII weren’t in vain and that he does, in fact, belong to and in America.
Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn (2016)
Dreamy, evocative, does a lot with omission. Wouldn’t have minded if it were longer.
Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (2020) Trans. Adrian Nathan West (2020)
Feels like everybody’s reading this (thanks, Obama), so you don’t need me to tell you about it. I’ll add to the chorus of praise, though: I loved these quasi-essays about scientists and the depredations they unleashed on the world and themselves. Apparently, each chapter includes at least one fictional element; it’s an indictment of my scientific education (which was not a bad one, I don’t think) that I wouldn’t have known this had Labutat not said so. I do agree with the person on Twitter—can’t remember who now, sorry—who said that the book validates a romantic idea of science as practiced by solitary, often mad or otherwise extreme geniuses, an idea completely at odds with the day-to-day practice of science, which, I’m told, is slow, often dull, and of necessity done with others. Many readers seem to dislike the last chapter, which is different in tone and subject matter. It’s also the only one set in Labutat’s native Chile. I felt differently—as brilliant as the rest of the book is, I already knew its early to mid-20th century European settings, characters, and preoccupations perfectly well—and I hope on the strength of the success of When We Cease to Understand the World his earlier books will be translated.
Miriam Toews, Fight Night (2021)
Shambling, likeable novel about three generations of women of Mennonite ancestry trying to keep it together in Toronto. It’s narrated by nine-year-old Swiv, precocious and scared and brave, ostensibly as a letter to her father, who’s run away in mysterious circumstances. Swiv’s mother, heavily pregnant, is a struggling actor (is there any other kind) who’s understandably exhausted, so the girl spends her days with her grandmother, Elvira, irrepressible lover of life and people and donuts and, above all, the Raptors. (I loved her use of basketball metaphors in teaching Swiv life lessons and her trash-talk at the tv during games.) Elvira is everything to Swiv even though she continually mortifies the girl by accosting strangers about their love lives, going about in public in her dressing gown, and forgetting her heart pills. Sound treacly? The novel isn’t, but it does have a bit of a “live, laugh, love” vibe that wasn’t working for me. I liked it okay, especially in parts—Swiv and Elvira take an impromptu trip to California to see the old woman’s cousins, and they are a hoot—but it’s not a patch on Women Talking, a book I still think about a lot. When it comes to recent novels about feisty old women who are sick and tired of being sick and tired, I prefer Bina.
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905) Trans. James & Alix Strachey (1925)
Taught this for the nth time, and I’m still a fan, but each time Freud’s treatment of Dora is crueler and crueler.
Jonathan Petropoulos, Göring’s Man in Paris: The Story of a Nazi Art Plunderer and his World (2021)
Sordid. The art world, then and now, is sordid. Bruno Lohse, appointed by Göing to loot tens of thousands of art works from French Jews, many of which were siphoned to the personal collection of the commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, was really sordid. And Petropoulos’s own dealings with Lohse are, if not sordid (he seems too fundamentally decent for that, if a little nonchalant about his own privilege), then disquieting. The best chapter is about Petropoulos’s attempts to find out what happened to a Pissarro Lohse claimed for years he nothing about. Much of the book is plodding—Lohse’s life story, before and after his time in Paris, isn’t that interesting; I wish its dutiful prose and endless citations had been distilled into a crackerjack essay.
S. A. Cosby, Razorblade Tears (2021)
Violent, over the top, almost mawkish, tremendous fucking fun. Two men, one black, one white, investigate the deaths of their married sons, victims of a hate crime. Neither man had accepted his son’s sexuality; it’s too late to make good on those failures now, but they can tell themselves they can at least find justice. Smart and funny about racism, kinship, the toll of life in prison. It’s going to be a hell of a movie.
Val McDermid, 1979 (2021)
Glasgow, January 1979, snow and chilblains all around. Newspapers might rule the media landscape but it’s hard to be a female journalist, as the hero of this crime novel quickly learns. Non-professional investigators are tricky to pull off, especially in a series, which McDermid clearly has plans for this to be. (Next thing you know, you’re Jessica Fletcher, and there’s a murder in your little town every five minutes.) But McDermid, a former journalist, lived that world and her expertise shows (though I’m not sure Denise Mina’s Paddy Meehan novels, set in the same milieu in the same place at almost the same time, aren’t the better books). Can’t help but feel that the book was an excuse to riff on the music and movies of the time, though.
Wassily Kandinsky, Study for Sluice, 1901
That’s that. And what about you? Read any of these? Feel free to be as pithy—or as verbose—as you like!
A woman in Essen brings flowers to friends of her in-laws; their home, where she has enjoyed many musical evenings, was looted the night before. To get to the couple cowering in fear and shame inside she fights her way through a crowd of hostile onlookers.
A man who knows that deportations to the East have begun seeks to offer moral and physical support to the deportees, slipping into a synagogue where hundreds have been ordered to marshal. A woman—she will be sent to Minsk the following day—thanks him for his efforts. He should be thanking her, the man replies; his paltry efforts have allowed him to feel a little less guilty for what is happening “to his fellow countrymen.” The woman breaks down at this gesture of solidarity.
A woman writes to the professional association of teachers: she has lost her ID card and needs a replacement. She includes a photo not of herself but of a friend who has been in hiding for six months. The card which duly arrives, bearing the name of one woman and the photo of another, is a lifeline, not proof against discovery but enough to give the hidden woman a modicum of freedom.
A man who works for the Acoustic Institute of a university in Braunschweig is sent to an isolated site in the Harz mountains to run some tests for the military. While there he stays in an old forester’s hut. Friends ask if he can help a woman on the run; he agrees, and the woman, whom he has never met and never sees again, stays with him for several days.
These vignettes launch historian Mark Roseman’s fascinating new book. Lives Reclaimed: A Story of Rescue and Resistance in Nazi Germany tells the story of the Bund, an organization of about two hundred men and women in the industrial Ruhr valley who, beginning in the 1920s and continuing through the 60s, sought a different way of living. Their idealism led them to resist the Nazi regime in small, uncoordinated, but meaningful ways. Roseman describes this resistance, shows how those involved considered their actions both at the time and afterward, and, most significantly, offers a new understanding of resistance.
The Bund—not to be confused with the better-known secular socialist Jewish movement in interwar Poland—was “part political group, part 1960s commune, and part Quaker society.” Its full name was Bund: Gemeinschaft für sozialistisches Leben, which Roseman translates as “League: Community for Socialist Life.” Yet even though its members were close to the socialist and communist parties of the period, the Bund was never a political organization. Founded in 1924, it was one of many social movements in Weimar Germany, movements that modelled themselves on prewar youth groups, like the Wandervögel, the Naturfreunde, and even Zionist groups. These organizations believed themselves to be “natural fellowships,” in contrast to the artificial institutions of society. As Roseman nicely puts it, such organizations typically “sought freedom for the collective rather than for the individual.” Yet it was also true that they tended to be organized around a single leader, whose charisma would keep the association from splintering.
In the case of the Bund, that leader was Artur Jacobs, a high school teacher in his mid-40s, whose commitment to revolutionary pedagogy had gained him devoted followers and implacable enemies. (He once led a group of girls on a hiking trip during which teachers and students slept in the same barn. People were not amused.) Stymied by parents and superiors from bringing his teaching aims to fruition, Artur poured his passion, energy, and conviction into the Bund. He led the organization until his death, age 88, in 1968, together with his wife Dore (neé Marcus), the daughter of “two highly acculturated, educated German Jews.” (She had been one of the students on the hiking trip; maybe his critics were on to something. Their marriage was quite devoted, though.) Dore’s passion was Körperbildung, “body education,” an all-purpose name for activities—including nudism, sun worship, and primal dance—aimed at cultivating a more natural relation to the body. The most popular of these was eurhythmic gymnastics, invented by Émile Jacques-Dalcroze in the late 19th century. (It was the yoga of its day and features prominently in D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love.) In 1925, Dore founded a Bund school for body training and eurythmic education in Essen; many of the Bund’s core members were introduced to the organization through the school, which also provided crucial cover during the Nazi years (both literally—as a place to hide from prying eyes—and figuratively—as an activity the Nazis deemed harmless).
But even at its most corporeal, Bundist activity was grounded in core philosophical beliefs, specifically a counterintuitive attempt to blend Kant and Marx. (Marx directly opposed his materialism to Kant’s idealism.) Whereas Kant believed individuals must “learn to act in such a way so as not to impinge on others,” as Roseman puts it, Marx believed that social change would come from inescapable class conflict that exceeded any voluntarist acceptance of moral positions. Perhaps the tension between individual ethical beliefs and determinist social forces allowed the Bund able to negotiate the Hitler years as it did. In pressing “for socialist transformation at the societal level and for individual ethical improvement at the personal level” the Bund was neither an established organization nor a temporary confluence of individuals. It was something in between—flexible enough to evade easy detection yet strong enough to maintain the faith of its members. Thus, the Bund allows us to rethink our ideas of resistance and rescue, which, Roseman convincingly argues, have been narrowly conceived and overly reliant on retrospective thinking.
Before the war, the Bund sought cooperation among left-wing organizations and groups. But its main interest was to ensure members abide by Bund ideas about how to live—freedom for the self would come from freedom for the collective. Bund adherents organized camping trips and hiking excursions, celebrated the solstice, danced and trained their bodies, abjured alcohol and tobacco (caffeine, though, was a bridge too far), and generally enjoyed being among like-minded souls (so much so that their children often felt left out and later harboured ambivalence to the organization).
Thanks to Dore the Bund attracted many more women than most Weimar-era organizations. This would be important later—the Nazis certainly had plenty of rigid ideas about how women should live, but in general didn’t think of them as potential resisters. When the Nazis came to power, the Bund, like so many progressive groups, felt existentially threatened. Artur even spent several months in 1933 tramping through the countryside and hiding with friends, convinced he was on an arrest list. This fear eventually proved unfounded, but it was reasonable at the time. More at risk were Dore and Lisa Jacobs, Dore’s second-in-command at the eurhythmic school, both of whom were Jewish. In general, the pre-war Bund had little interest in Jewishness. Its spirituality, if it could be said to have any, was ill-defined and centered on nature-worship. Moreover, the small Jewish population of the largely working-class Ruhr valley tended to be middle-class: owners of the means of production, in Marxist terms, rather than workers. It is remarkable, then, and a sign of the group’s lack of dogmatism and willingness to shift to meet the needs of the moment, that many of the Bund’s wartime actions centered on helping German Jews, by expressing solidarity, sending food parcels to deportees, and even hiding Jews who had gone underground.
After the war, Bund members presented themselves as natural opponents of Nazism, suggesting that countering the regime—by providing both material aid for the persecuted and mental succor for “ordinary Germans,” as a light in the dark times and a possible way forward afterward—had been its rationale during those twelve terrible years. Roseman, who has been studying the Bund for almost 30 years, uses the group’s surprisingly large surviving historical records to show that this thinking in fact appeared only in hindsight. At the time, especially in the years after the Nazis took power but before the war, Bund members were shattered and demoralized, both scared for their safety and unsure how they could continue to live meaningfully when forced to limit their activities to secret meetings and despondent correspondence.
Paradoxically, the Bund’s postwar self-understanding obfuscated its wartime reality:
If there was one key words for the Bund in staking its claim in the postwar period, it was that it had continued to “live” in Nazi Germany—that is, it had gained vibrant, meaningful, lived experience. Yet the more the group marshaled its memories to establish its postwar fitness to lead, the more the complexity of lived experience—with its despair, fears, and more—slipped out of view.
Thanks to letters, diaries, and official documents, Roseman is able to reconstruct not just the Bund’s activities but also its members’ feelings during the Nazi era. He tracks them as they send hundreds of parcels to deported Jews, both to Poland (until 1942 when such parcels were no longer accepted) and to the way-station/giant prison of Theresienstadt. They added letters of succor and encouragement; Roseman notes that, especially “for a certain kind of high-minded, politically left-leaning German Jew, the Bund’s language and ideas were instantly recognizable and appealing, conveying the sense that the ethical and intellectual world they had felt themselves to be a part of still existed and accepted them within its fold.” As one recipient wrote from a ghetto in Poland, “to feel the warmth and proximity of people so similar to myself is like having a transfusion after losing a lot of blood—it is lifesaving.”
Bund members even accompanied deportees to holding centers, sometimes carrying their bags—risky actions, especially after a regulation prohibiting “persons of German blood” from having friendships with Jews was enacted in October 1941. Perhaps the most courageous thing they did was to help at least two and perhaps as many as five Jews survive the war. Dore was more or less protected by her marriage to Artur (though she and a dozen of the group’s core members spent the last year of the war in hiding in a house near Lake Constance, close enough to Switzerland that they sometimes risked slipping across to border to mail letters). But Lisa Jacobs had become a “non-person” by deciding not to answer her deportation notice, which meant she had to live without a ration card and at constant risk of discovery. She moved frequently from house to house—the fake teacher’s ID offering a little protection—staying only a few days at a time to reduce the risk to the person hiding her.
Perhaps even more surprising was the group’s efforts to save Marianne Strauss, who they had not previous known. In 1941-42, Artur had befriended David Krombach, a leader in Essen’s shrinking Jewish population. Krombach’s son was engaged to Marianne; the young woman, who worked in the Jewish Community office, acted as the intermediary in Bund efforts to help the Krombach family once they had been deported. When she went underground in 1943, defying her deportation order, Marianne had to trust that the kindness Bundists had shown her would hold: she showed up late one night at a member’s home, literally on the run from the SS. Until the end of the war she stayed with at least ten Bund families and made between thirty to fifty journeys across the Ruhr, each of them highly dangerous. (Not least because the Allies were bombing it pretty much every day.) Roseman gives us only a taste of this extraordinary story, having devoted his first book, A Past in Hiding, to it. (I’m reading it right now; it’s excellent.)
Importantly, although Artur and Dore and some of the others had talked about helping Marianne, they had no plan for doing so. They improvised, they sacrificed, they did what they could, never knowing if it would be the right thing or for how long they would be able to do it. They did not set out to “rescue” Marianne. Moreover, neither Marianne and Lisa—like everyone, Roseman intimates, who survived the war in hiding or on the run—were simply passive victims, mere recipients of aid. Lisa, for example, taught occasional gymnastics classes and even arranged to send packages to Poland. Marianne cooked for the people who sheltered her and even made artificial flowers from felt, which she sold for valuable ration coupons. Too often we think of survivors as either passive objects of rescue or as self-interested actors cheating fate through shrewdness and luck. Roseman complicates this view, showing us that, yes, survivors contributed to their own survival but they also helped others in need.
A similar sense of complication inheres in his argument that rescuers are not only disinterested altruists. Many of them were motivated by greed and graft, desiring money or sexual favours. (Nechama Tec’s terrific memoir of her experiences as a hidden child in Poland, Dry Tears, offers examples of both.) But Roseman also argues that “even those who made a strong and conscious decision to help Jews might have been involved in their destruction.” In fact, “some perpetrators were rescuers, and some rescuers were perpetrators”—not everyone who helped Jews did so for ethical reasons, and not everyone who helped out of moral principle could escape being caught up in the killing process. Several Bund members were conscripted into the army; one was sent to France, where at one point he was a guard on a transport that he knew carried Jews. This is a dramatic example; more innocuous is Artur’s criticism of Marianne when she got involved in a domestic dispute between a husband and wife who were hiding her. Roseman marvels that Artur could have rebuked a young woman whose parents had just been deported to Auschwitz, but he insists we need to take account, as much as the historical record allows, of realities, like this one, that “became unsayable after the event.”
Time and again, Roseman offers startling conclusions. The Bund succeeded in its resistance because it “created a collective space, a counterweight, to the world outside.” But that collectivity was loose, seemingly harmless (the camping trips, the gymnastics), and involved at least as many women as men (also deemed harmless). It had a big goal—“to create a just, socialist society”—but used small ways to achieve it, “day-to-day decisions, commitments, and practices.” Postwar German society did not think of the Bund—inasmuch as anyone thought of it at all—as a resistance organization. After all, it had predated the Nazis and had never been solely motivated by their defeat; it had rejected leafleting and vandalism as risky and ineffective; it lent its efforts to victims of the regime rather than setting its sights on the regime itself. (It was the opposite of “the Red Orchestra” group led by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Haas-Heye.) Roseman suggests that the Bund was an embarrassment to postwar Germany—it showed what had been possible but that almost no one had done.
Although Bund members continued to meet throughout the late 1940s, 50s, and even into the 60s, the movement petered out. Young people were not interested. Even though the Bund self-consciously did not criticize the younger generation that had been indoctrinated by Nazism, the hierarchical nature of the organization (Artur was still the leader) and its insistence on personal discipline (the Bund’s commitment to communal ideals did not include sexual liberation or experimentation with drugs) turned young people away. They saw it as too similar to the Nazi past they were eager to leave behind. On the face of it, the comparison is ridiculous. I was shocked, though, to read these lines written by Artur on the day when the Allies liberated the region around Lake Constance:
That we remained strong, that not a single one of us fell by the wayside, even among those who lived far from us, that is a glorious page in the Bund’s history. And that we remained alive, that we lived through this time awake, that we matured and grew—we owe that all to the Bund.
I thought immediately of Himmler’s infamous exhortation to members of the SS at Posen in 1943:
Most of you will know what it means when 100 bodies lie together, when 500 are there or when there are 1000. And . . . to have seen this through and—with the exception of human weakness—to have remained decent, has made us hard and is a page of glory never mentioned and never to be mentioned.
Both writers reference strength, pride, and, most disquietingly, pages of glory. Both allude to a difficult task not just undertaken but seen through.
Of course, the comparison is ultimately not just ridiculous but disgusting; Artur’s references to maturing and growing have nothing to do with Himmler’s mass murder. Artur was no Führer. But that young Germans could have rejected the Bund as another relic of a terrible and embarrassing past begins to be understandable.
Which was ultimately a failure on their part, for as Roseman convincingly shows the Bund offers an inspiring model for social change. In recent years, historians have emphasized the ways the Nazi regime worked to gain acceptance, binding ordinary Germans together and, thereby, ultimately eliciting their at-least tacit support for its genocidal acts and aspirations (after the Jews, the idea was to kill the so-called Slavs). Considered in light of the regime’s efforts, the Bund’s quiet refusal is all the more remarkable:
The more historians have uncovered the degree of support the regime was able to elicit in its “dictatorship by acclimation,” the more impressive the Bund’s ability to maintain its separate life becomes. Perhaps we do not quite have a category that fits this intense, self-conscious cultivation of a communal shared space. It was more than mere non-conformity, but less than active combat against the regime.
Roseman adds that we especially lack accurate ways of thinking about rescue, which for many years after the war was not thought of as a mode of resistance—nice, for sure, but not something that could bring down totalitarianism. The reason Lives Reclaimed is one of the most consequential books I’ve read this year is that it argues not just, yes, rescue is resistance, but also, and more importantly, that our definition of rescue must be expanded. The way we usually think of rescue is too retrospective and too reliant on the idea of individual will-power. After the war, more than one attempt to have Bund members declared as Righteous among the Nations failed. This is the highest honour the state of Israel, through the Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, bestows on non-Jews who saved Jews during the Holocaust.
Bund dancers; Lisa Jacobs in front
In the postwar environment of anti-communism, with Israel and West Germany locked in a delicate pas de deux, rescue meant actions done by a single person who had no self-interested reasons for helping. On this definition, Jews could not be deemed Righteous, nor could non-Jewish spouses of Jews—they were said to be acting in self-interest. Roseman asks us to shift from a psychological mode (which, by focusing on the individual, is also a capitalistic one) to a sociological one. Rather than looking for extraordinary, almost saint-like people who do good out of awe-inspiring altruism, Roseman suggests, we should look to networks of people who did good things, or things that had good results, from complicated motives. Most people who survived were helped by several, often many people, like Lisa Jacobs and Marianne Strauss who moved from house to house.
By overvaluing the individual, Roseman argues, we lose sight of what he calls rescue-resistance really happens. In the case of the Bund, then, we need to look beyond the Bund’s postwar emphasis on moral principle, which Roseman judges to be as misleading as psychologist’s insistence on empathy, and instead look at what they did and why they did it at the time. Even the term “rescue” is too retrospective, Roseman suggests—it implies a completed action; it suggests that people helped others with a definitive end point in mind. (“I will do something to save this person from the Holocaust”—a statement that makes no sense when we think that at the time no one knew, exactly, what “the Holocaust” was.) In reality, as Bund members diaries and letters suggest, people help others from much more temporary, obscure, and uncertain reasons and in temporary, obscure and uncertain ways. They were answering a knock on the door and giving someone a bed and soup for a few days, not “rescuing a Jew.”
There will always, Roseman notes, be tension between experience and memory. As Kierkegaard put it, “life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” But we would do well, Roseman argues, to reverse the dictum as best we can, to try to live in that past. After the war, people wanted heroes—and a particular kind of hero. The exigencies of the postwar moment, particularly in western Europe meant it was better for reasons both economic (we want the US to help us) and psychological (we don’t want to think about all of us as a collective) to emphasize individual responsibility. But those reasons have been falsely naturalized into unchanging psychological concepts (martyrs, saints, etc). Even the retrospective self-understanding of those who helped is shaped by those concepts, obscuring and distorting their actual motivations and actions. If we take even the Bund’s own postwar self-presentation as the truth, we will paradoxically dilute the power of what the Bund did. Taking flowers to an elderly couple the day after Kristallnacht, or thanking a woman on the point of being deported for the chance to help her, says Roseman, are not actions that “lead” to rescue. And when we look back on the Holocaust and other fascist atrocities, such actions seem insignificant. But at the time they were pretty amazing, and certainly consequential.
Lives Reclaimed really impressed me. It’s super learned but also very accessible. Roseman is a much better writer than most academics; he offers us satisfyingly detailed historical context without overwhelming his narrative drive. And even as we learn about many of the Bund’s members, he keeps his focus on the group as a collective. Personally, I found it liberating to think that we can resist without setting out to be resisters, especially if we can find some likeminded people to surround ourselves with. Too often, Holocaust education, especially for children, argues that people need to be “upstanders,” not bystanders. But we don’t have to—can’t—do it all alone. Surprisingly, given its subject matter, Lives Reclaimed is one of the most optimistic books I’ve read in a long time.
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.
January 27th is International Holocaust Remembrance Day; it was on that date in 1945 that Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau.
A powerful way to commemorate the Holocaust is to read its literature: the letters, diaries, memoirs, essays, poems, and fiction created during the events and since. A handful of these texts are well-known: Anne Frank’s Diary, Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi’s memoirs Night and Survival in Auschwitz, Art Spiegelman’s comic Maus. These are rightly famous, and well worth reading (even if Night drives me crazy).
But what if you’ve read them and are looking for more?
Here are 15 less-familiar titles that will deepen your understanding of the Holocaust:
David Albahari, Götz and Meyer (1998) Translated by Ellen Elias-Bursac (2004)
In this novel, a teacher in Belgrade traces the fate of his relatives, uncovering the circumstances of their deaths in a gas van driven by the SS officers of the title. A novel about the limits of history and the possibilities and perils of the imagination.
Molly Applebaum, Buried Words: The Diary of Molly Applebaum (2017)
Why read this out of the many fascinating and heartbreaking Holocaust diaries? For one thing, the story is extraordinary: together with a cousin, Applebaum took refuge on a farm near Tarnapol, Poland. For much of their time in hiding, the two young women were buried in a wooden box, about the size of a wardrobe, able to come out only for an hour or two each night. More vexingly still, both women had sex with their protector, events described obliquely yet excitedly by Applebaum, yet which can’t help but lead us to ask questions about consent and abuse. Another quality that distinguishes this diary is that it’s paired with a memoir written much later, in which Applebaum describes her new life in Canada and reflects on her wartime experiences, yet in ways that seem at odds with the way she told them in the diary.
Heimrad Bäcker, transcript (1986) Translated by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling (2010)
Conceptual poetry, writes the scholar Leslie Morris, “seeks to create texts that disavow the very act of creation.” Bäcker’s poems are taken from official documents and eyewitness testimony. Here’s one, taken from a postwar record of criminal proceedings:
whereas he had to prepare breakfast each morning for about 300 prisoners in camp III, he had to provide a midday meal for only about 150.
Jurek Becker, Jacob the Liar (1969) Translated by Leila Vennewitz (1990)
Maybe the most brilliant ghetto novel, written by one who survived the Lodz ghetto and two concentration camps. At the beginning of the novel, Jacob happens to overhear a bulletin on German radio describing a Russian advance. Having let slip the news, Jacob, who is too frightened to explain how he came by this knowledge, pretends that he has a radio (strictly forbidden in the ghetto) and invents the news. Amazingly, the book is funny, as well as very, very sad. Jacob’s inventions are an allegory for our own desires as readers of traumatic events.
Tadeusz Borowski, This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen and Other Stories (written 1946-48) Translated by Barbara Vedder (1967)
Dark. So dark. These stories are more or less loosely based on Borowski’s own experiences as a non-Jewish political prisoner at Auschwitz and Dachau, most famously about his time as a member of the “Canada Kommando,” the prisoners tasked with separating the new arrivals from their belongings. Desperate.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Bark (2011) Translated by Samuel E. Martin (2017)
The bark of the title comes from a birch tree at Birkenau, peeled off by Didi-Huberman on a recent visit. These same trees can be seen in the four famous photographs taken (at great risk and with daring subterfuge) by a member of the Sonderkommando (the “special squad”—the name given by the Nazis to the groups of Jews they selected to take the bodies from the gas chambers to the crematoria) in the summer of 1944; these comprise the only images of the Holocaust taken by its victims. In this little book, Didi-Huberman intersperses his own amateur photographs of the Auschwitz-Birkenau site with essayistic meditations on the paradoxes of commemorating mass murder.
Ida Fink, A Scrap of Time and Other Stories (1983) Translated by Madeline Levine and Francine Prose (1987)
Ah, these stories! I’m in awe of how much Fink packs into just a few pages. Plus, she turns each text into a meditation on the stakes of representing and interpreting traumatic events. You would think the allegories of reading would get in the way of the emotional power of the stories. But no, Fink’s genius is to combine self-awareness with heart. Maybe the greatest Holocaust writer.
Imre Kertész, Fatelessness (1975) Translated by Tim Wilkinson (2004)
The most difficult but also the most brilliant Holocaust novel I know. Fourteen-year-old György is deported from Budapest in the summer of 1944 to a series of camps and (barely) lives to tell the tale. He tells his story in a fussy, roundabout style that is more amazed than horrified. What makes the book so challenging is that Kertész never allows his narrator the benefit of hindsight. Which allows us to experience the events of the Final Solution as its victims would have: as bewildering, boring, even at times exciting. An amazing accomplishment.
Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001)
Kluger’s bitter insights spare no one: she’s as scathing about the Vienna of her childhood as of the Jim Crow America she arrived in shortly after the war. And her portrait of her relationship with her mother—together, the two women survived Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen—is similarly unflinching. The memoir is highly self-reflexive; no surprise, perhaps, for Kluger, who re-wrote the book in English after writing a version of it in German, became a professor of literature.
Sarah Kofman, Rue Ordener, Rue Labat (1994) Translated by Ann Smock (1996)
Enigmatic and fragmentary memoir by an eminent philosopher of Nietzsche and Freud about her experiences as a hidden child in Paris after her beloved father, a rabbi, is deported. The heart of the story is the triangular relationship between Kofman, her mother, and the loving yet anti-Semitic woman who took them in. I blogged about it here.
Liana Millu, Smoke over Birkenau (1947) Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz (1991)
Brilliant memoir in which Millu tells heartbreaking stories of life in the women’s Lager in Birkenau. Here we find stories of pregnancy, prostitution, maternal love, self-sacrifice, sabotage, and gossip, told in unshowy, elegant prose. I’ve no idea why this book isn’t much more famous.
Jona Oberski. Childhood (1978) Translated by Ralph Mannheim (1983)
Spare, memorable novel based on Oberski’s own experience: born in 1938 in Amsterdam to German Jewish refugees, then deported first to the Westerbork transit camp and then Bergen-Belsen, where he was orphaned and cared for by a family friend. Much of its power comes from the point of view—we see what the child sees, we know what the child knows, leaving us often in the dark. I wrote about the effects of its style when the book was reissued a few years ago.
Göran Rosenberg, A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz (2012) Translated by Sarah Death (2015)
Rosenberg, a Swedish journalist, uncovers his parents’ story: how they respectively survived the war and built a life in Sweden after being miraculously reunited. As the title suggests, though, that life, although successful in many ways, was always lived in the shadow of the Holocaust. Rosenberg, as I wrote here, excels at depicting the scope of the concentration camp system, and the similarity between it and the Displaced Persons camps that replaced it.
Rachel Seiffert, A Boy in Winter (2017)
Proving that great books about the Holocaust can still be written, Seiffert’s novel has several things going for it: its discrete, matter-of-fact style, which is nonetheless beautiful, even at times incantatory; its focus on an underexamined (at least in the English-speaking world) facet of the Shoah, the depredations of the Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine in 1941/42; and its braiding together of stories of victims, perpetrators, and so-called bystanders.
Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982, revised 1984)
A recent discovery for me: an absorbing account of Tec’s wartime experiences, in which she lived with a Polish family and passed as a Gentile.
Do you have favourite Holocaust texts? Particular omissions you want to rectify? Let me know! And take a moment to thank the translators of these books; the Holocaust was a multilingual phenomenon: we need translators to understand its true dimensions.
Nechama Tec, Dry Tears: The Story of a Lost Childhood (1982/84) I’ve 
Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau 