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Boy Meets Girl: The Golden Age

15 Monday May 2017

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Review: The Golden Age, by Joan London
Europa, 2016. 221 pp. $17

Unlike nearly all their extended family, twelve-year-old Frank Gold and his parents survived the Holocaust in Hungary, after which they emigrated to Perth, Western Australia, in 1946. But shortly afterward, Frank comes down with polio, a cruel blow that overwhelms his mother and father, neither of whom has much capacity for warmth or emotional expression, which leaves the boy struggling to find a reason to live or to hope. He’s a cynical lad, in some ways, too clever for his own good, though what’s underneath is raw and vulnerable. But he needs an outlet for those feelings, and he’s unlikely to find one without help.

Perth, Western Australia, as it appeared around 1955 (courtesy E. W. Digby, via Wikemedia Commons)

At the Golden Age, a small institution devoted to young polio victims, Frank, now almost thirteen, meets Elsa Briggs, six months younger than he. Until she was stricken, Elsa was a happy, radiant child, joyful and self-directed. Her parents are even less capable of facing their family tragedy than Frank’s, especially her father, who finds reasons to avoid Elsa. During his few visits to the Golden Age, he exhorts her to learn to walk again, already.

Meanwhile, Elsa’s mother, with younger children to care for, is too overwhelmed to do much, and she’s a doormat anyway. So Elsa, like Frank, feels abandoned, especially as she gathers that her younger siblings have taken over her belongings, her bedroom, her place in the house. Never having grappled for existence as Frank did, she’s less defended against her plight, which makes her both more innocent and yet more resolved, in her own quiet, self-enclosed way. She’s waiting for someone to understand her, though she doesn’t quite know it yet.

How these two brave, suffering kids find each other makes for a touching, beautiful story. But it’s not only a romance; I admire the way Elsa and Frank begin to realize themselves, how they unfold as the adults they will become. Which is only natural, for love would otherwise be impossible–and make no mistake, their feelings are real, not puppy love.

Being close made them stronger. They sat talking on the verandah or the back lawn. Their faces had colour. For some weeks now they’d shared the lonely task of rehabilitation, doing their exercises together. The Scottish physiotherapist commented on their rapid progress and motivation. The days were not boring, but seemed to hold at every glance something to tell the other. During the night they missed each other. Each morning was a reunion.

London’s prose is sparing and her chapters short, as is the entire book. But her vision and clarity ring out from every page, and each character has an inner life, not just the principals. I’ve rarely read a novel in which the author paid so much attention to minor figures, but you never feel as if the narrative has lost its way. On the contrary; everything fits. What’s more, the story, though more or less plotless, never flags, as each small moment takes on great significance. And the Golden Age is no Dickensian horror but a warm, sensitive, caring environment, staffed by hard-working people.

Rather, the horrors are the parents, who don’t know how to deal with their children’s illness except as a slap, a shame, a comment on themselves, which only sharpens the divide the kids feel from the outside world. By contrast, Olive Penny, the head nurse, is an intuitive, empathic soul who understands her charges and refuses to judge them. Her search for love mirror’s Frank and Elsa’s, though of course she’s coming from a vastly different perspective. She doesn’t expect much, but she’s not bitter about it–she gets that life has its limits, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

Other parallels to Frank and Elsa’s tale are those of Meyer and Ida, his parents. They struggle with their feelings of displacement from Europe, the guilt of having survived, their terror that, as so-called New Australians, they’ll be perpetual foreigners–or, in Ida’s case, her refusal to accept Australia as her permanent home. Meyer unbends more easily and, as such, can help Frank more. But in the end, Frank has his own path to follow, and, true to himself, he finds it from a fellow patient, a boy older than himself who writes poetry in his head while ensconced in an iron lung.

If I have one bone to pick with The Golden Age, it’s that London sometimes tells too much. But she also shows plenty, and with such a light hand that it’s hard to find fault. What a remarkable novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Stifling Assumptions: Among the Living

28 Monday Nov 2016

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Review: Among the Living, by Jonathan Rabb
Other Press, 2016. 303 pp. $26

When Yitzhak Goldah, a Czech Holocaust survivor, lands among his American cousins in Savannah, Georgia, in 1947, he at once becomes an object of fascination and dread in the Jewish community. Most people act as if they want to know what happened to him and what he feels about it. But they don’t, really. They’re scared of what he might say, but even more of what that would force them to reckon with–their guilt at having escaped, while their European brethren were murdered.

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

Congregation Mickve Israel, Savannah, Georgia, which dates from 1735, as it appeared in 2015 (Courtesy Jud McCranie, via Wikimedia Commons)

So they make sympathetic noises, and when he doesn’t respond the way they hope or think he should, they ascribe his reaction to “all you’ve been through,” without an inkling of what that is. And since he’s reticent by nature, a trait that his experiences at Theresienstadt and Birkenau only reinforced, he lets them assume what they wish, unwilling to reveal more and sensing that they wouldn’t hear it anyway.

He’s right. His cousins and benefactors, Abe and Pearl Jesler, have done their best to make him over. They haven’t even driven him home from the train station before they’ve told him that from now on, he should be Ike, not Yitzhak (Isaac, in English); he’ll work at Abe’s shoe store; attend services at their Orthodox synagogue; and, oh, by the way, there’s a party tonight in your honor, so you’ll want to take a nap first.

Ike feels more comfortable among the black servants and shoe-store employees (who of course are the ones to fetch and haul). It’s not just that he recognizes people who have suffered, or that, like him, they stand outside the gate of what’s accepted and acceptable, though he does so by choice. He grasps implicitly their fate never to be spoken of as an equal, for he endured that too; but again, he’s left that behind, whereas they’re still trapped. But more than that, he finds that Calvin, who tends Abe’s stock room, and Raymond, Calvin’s son, who drives a delivery truck, speak directly, from the heart, and he yearns for that.

He finds it also with Eva, a young war widow with whom he strikes up an immediate rapport. But to Abe, Pearl, and their community, Eva’s the enemy, because she’s Reform, not Orthodox. Maybe you’ve heard the old jokes about the town with two Jews and three synagogues, or about the Jewish castaway who builds two houses of worship on his island, so he can have one that he doesn’t go to. But here, it’s no joke, and Rabb nails that tribal fractiousness dead-center. Ike and Eva ignore the social pressure, but they’re lucky to have an ally. Her father runs a local newspaper, and Ike was a journalist in Prague before the war. You can guess where that will lead.

However, Rabb introduces a further complication, and here’s where things get tense. A woman whom Ike knew from Prague, and whom he thought had died in the camps, comes to Savannah too. And she says he promised to marry her, and that he owes her a good life, at least an attempt at what the Nazis interrupted. They don’t love each other and probably never did. Yet, as she says, if he turns her away, he’ll have to live with that forever. So what does he do? What can he do?

There’s much to like about Among the Living. I admire Rabb’s gift for economy, conveying what remains unsaid during social interactions, and his pitch-perfect rendering of innuendo and gossip. The story offers rich material in which to explore fear, prejudice, and trauma, much of which the author suggests with a subtle hand. For instance, a subplot concerning corruption at Savannah’s docks, for which Raymond pays a gruesome price, provides a contrast to Ike: Rabb sets the hero victim who stands as rebuke to repression against a black man who remains unknown and unsung, and for whom justice doesn’t exist. It’s a nice touch, and it makes you think.

Nevertheless, this lovely novel doesn’t deliver on its promise. Rabb captures the tribal milieu, but he doesn’t persuade me that this is 1947, and that everyone’s recovering from a world war. Rather, so intent is he on separating Ike’s experiences from everyone else’s, it’s as if the war had been an event in which participation was entirely voluntary, and most people in Savannah had simply opted out. Further, though Ike and Eva are engaging characters, I don’t know them as well as I’d like, particularly why he attracts her so easily, though I can see it the other way around. Finally, Rabb does his best to keep you guessing about how things will turn out, but I think he needed to push his characters further away from the happiness they deserve. With a subject like this, it’s hard to balance fairness with a satisfying reality, and yet, I wanted more from Among the Living.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Cultural Borrowing: The Last Brother

10 Thursday Nov 2016

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Review: The Last Brother, by Natacha Appanah
Graywolf, 2010. 164 pp. $14

Do authors have the right to tell stories from a culture to which they don’t belong? That question has roiled the literary world recently, though I’m not sure why it should. I believe in freedom of expression, which includes not having to ask permission to tell a story that nobody owns anyway. Condemning any work out of hand, especially on cultural grounds, sounds like an attempt to muzzle a voice with which you fear you may disagree, but to which others, less erudite or correct than yourself, may fall prey. It’s as if the old saw, “write what you know,” has assumed the force of literary law, which one breaks at his or her peril, and that there’s only one way to know anything: by direct experience.

Port Louis, capital and largest city of Mauritius, 2011 (courtesy Peter Kuchar, via Wikimedia Commons)

Port Louis, capital and largest city of Mauritius, 2011 (courtesy Peter Kuchar, via Wikimedia Commons)

Fie, I say. And yet, I also believe that if you’re going to write about anything, whether you’ve lived it or not, you’d better do your homework. That’s why The Last Brother, an otherwise accomplished novel in two important respects, leaves me shaking my head.

The premise, seemingly utterly improbable, actually isn’t. It’s 1944, and Raj, a young Mauritian boy, learns that a nearby prison contains white people, which would be strange enough, except that these prisoners seem too beaten-down and harmless to be criminals. What the reader understands, but Raj doesn’t, is that the prison serves as a displaced persons camp, and the inmates are Jews, though how they got there remains a mystery until the end.

Raj’s father, a terrifying brute, works at the camp as a servant. One day he beats the boy so badly that he must be hospitalized, and the camp possesses the only facilities. While there, Raj befriends David, a refugee from Prague his own age, the first friend he’s ever had. It’s a clever conceit, since both boys have lost everything. David’s whole family have been killed, whereas Raj’s two brothers both died in a mud slide, a tragedy that shadows him constantly. Understandably, Raj believes that meeting David gives him the chance at having another brother, hence the title.

So there’s a story here worth reading, and Appanah’s prose sings it:

For here, at Mapou, the glistening rain which falls from heaven, fine and gentle, almost like a caress, the rain that refreshes and for which one thanks heaven, such a manna did not exist. At Mapou the rain was a monster. We could see it gathering strength, hugging the mountain like an army rallying before an assault, hear the orders for battle and slaughter being given. . . We would raise our eyes toward the mountain while the dust granted us a respite, and the sighs of our elders would prepare us for the worst.

How, then, can things go wrong for The Last Brother? First (and I hate playing a familiar tune, but it’s unfortunately apt), the author chooses to tell the whole story in retrospect, starting with a prologue that falls absolutely flat. Not only does the opening give away what Raj has become and, to an extent, how, it reveals that David dies at age ten. Right away, that undercuts the tension, but it’s to serve a purpose, one I don’t agree with, but more of that in a moment. The older Raj, looking back, feels such intense grief over David’s grave that it seems overwrought, because the context only comes much later. I suspect that Appanah does this because she wanted to close with the story of how these Jews wound up interned on Mauritius, as though that were the climax, and so she turns the narrative on its head.

As for revealing straight out that David dies, I further suppose that she wants to underline what the older Raj says later. Toward the end, he observes that he coopted David as a replacement brother, completely ignoring whatever his friend must have gone through, as if the other boy existed only for him. This seems too authorial for me, interposing an adult thought in a scene narrated by a child. But that’s only half the problem.

The other half is that Appanah has borrowed the Holocaust without knowing a thing about Jews. The Holocaust gets thrown around quite a bit, and I wish it weren’t, but, as I said, I’ll defend Appanah’s use of it so long as she’s done her homework, and its evocation seems honest rather than cavalier. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced. The Jews are shadow figures at best, even David, of no significance other than their difference from anyone Raj has ever seen. The few details of dress or language ring false, and the crowd of prisoners might be anyone, as if they, like David for Raj, were a mere convenience, in this case, for the author’s purposes.

I never knew there were displaced Jews imprisoned on Mauritius, and I salute Appanah for recounting this story. I only wish she’d bothered to make them real.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

To Life: Fever at Dawn

23 Monday May 2016

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Review: Fever at Dawn, by Péter Gárdos
Translated from the Hungarian by Elizabeth Szász
Houghton Mifflin, 2016. 232 pp. $24

Imagine a Hungarian Holocaust survivor in 1945, receiving medical care in Sweden under Red Cross auspices. He weighs practically nothing, and he has metal false teeth, the real ones having been knocked out by thugs. Miklós’s doctor tells him he has tuberculosis, which will kill him in six months. But Miklós did not endure deportation, imprisonment, and torture only to succumb to an ancient plague, and he refuses to believe the diagnosis. So when he comes across a list of 117 Hungarian Jewish women also recuperating in Sweden, he proceeds to write each one, hoping to find a mate.

"Selection" of Hungarian Jews for either work or the gas chambers, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), May or June 1944 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

“Selection” of Hungarian Jews for either work or the gas chambers, Auschwitz II (Birkenau), May or June 1944 (Courtesy Yad Vashem, via Wikimedia Commons)

The results, by turns poignant and comical, carry this remarkable premise to a satisfying conclusion. But in saying so, I’m giving nothing away, for Gárdos has written this slim novel about his parents, drawing heavily on the bundles of letters his mother unearthed more than a half-century later and gave to him.

However, if Fever at Dawn ends predictably–the jacket flap leaves little doubt–how the narrative gets there is anything but ordained. Miklós, either a warm-hearted con artist or a vivid dreamer (take your pick), promises Lili Reich that everything will work out just fine, both between them and in life. This is a pretty astounding message for someone you’ve met only in brief letters, especially someone who was nearly left for dead at Bergen-Belsen. But Miklós actually believes it; and Lili, at first with reservations, gradually comes to believe it too. How he works that alchemy is marvelous to behold, and at times a little bewildering, because he can’t resist a soapbox. An ardent Socialist, whereas Lili is bourgeoise, Miklós lectures her on the proper way to view the world. It’s not always clear whether he takes himself seriously, but it’s his confidence that touches her, gives her hope.

But we all know the path to true love never did run smooth, and this courtship faces large barriers. For one thing, the two live in distant places, and the rules strictly forbid them to visit. They scheme, wheedle, plot, and attempt to manipulate their caregivers, pretending that they’re cousins–the oldest dodge in the book, which has no chance of persuading anyone.

Meanwhile, another of the 117 women shows up at Miklós’s rehabilitation center. How she manages is never explained, but she calls him her soul mate and expects him to work out every difficulty her presence causes so that they can be together forever. How Miklós gets around that uncomfortable situation, I won’t say. But I have to quote you the author’s description of what Lili and a girlfriend see when the two lovers meet for the first time, at a train station:

Miklós spotted the reception committee in the distance and smiled. His metal teeth glimmered in the weak light of the platform lamps.

The girls glanced at each other in alarm, then looked guiltily back toward the platform where Miklós was advancing through the thick veil of snow. He had to rest for a moment while he coughed. The left lens frame of his glasses was stuffed with scrunched-up newspaper–that day’s Aftonbladet–an operation he had performed in desperation half an hour earlier, leaving a crack free so that he could at least see a little. . . . . his borrowed winter coat, two sizes too big for him, floated around his ankles.

There are very few flashbacks, because neither Lili nor Miklós care to tell the other how they survived the war, or what they went through. But the author wants you to know, so there are a couple harrowing pages that put their romantic struggles into perspective. After sufferings like theirs, and what they’ve gone through to be able even to contemplate love, problems of time, distance, or unsympathetic, priggish administrators mean absolutely nothing. When you’re determined to love, you will.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

No Holds Barred: The Yid

25 Monday Apr 2016

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Review: The Yid, by Paul Goldberg
Picador, 2016. 307 pp. $27

If I told you that a novel about Stalin’s plans for a second Holocaust will make you laugh out loud, you’d probably wonder whether all this reading I do had tipped me over the edge. But The Yid, whose title merely hints at provocations to come, conducts an irresistible guerrilla war against Russia, the Soviet secret police, and anti-Semitism–inevitably intertwined–as a darkly comic theater of the absurd.

It’s 1953, and though Stalin’s rumored to be dying, the killings and “disappearances” continue unabated, at his orders. The Great Leader has been assembling lists of Jews and collecting rolling stock from the farthest reaches of the empire, preparing for a mass pogrom to rival Hitler’s. Meanwhile, the secret police have been rounding up Jews for torture, “confession,” and murder, and the blood libel has as strong a currency among Russians as ever (the notion that Jews require Christian blood for ritual purposes, specifically to make Passover matzos).

Consequently, one early morning in February, three secret-service thugs enter the Moscow apartment of Solomon Shimonovich Levinson, an actor from the now-defunct Jewish State Theater. I won’t tell you what happens next, only that he surprises his captors:

The reason for denying the humanity of your arrestees and your executees is simple in the extreme: you block them out, because as humans we have little control over our ability to listen. And when we listen–sometimes–we hear what is said. And sometimes this leads to a dangerous bond between the arrester-executioner and arrestee-executee. Nothing good comes of such bonds.

Levinson conceives a bizarre, hopeless plan: to assassinate Stalin and prevent the pogrom from going any further. Levinson’s profession and needling, cynical sense of humor lead people who get swept up in his scheme to wonder whether he’s serious. But he is. And the cast he assembles for his drama (which appears in sections labeled “acts,” occasionally rendered in playscript) includes several memorable performers.

There’s Friederich Lewis, an African-American who fled Chicago (and other places) for the USSR because he believed that racism wouldn’t exist in the Soviet paradise. He speaks fluent Russian and Yiddish, the latter of which allows him to understand and respond to Levinson’s quips and insults. Russians call Lewis “Paul Robeson,” whom they supposedly admire, yet they expect Lewis to be only a half-step above an ape, even though he’s studied Communist theory more coherently than they and is a gifted engineer. In a final absurdity, he must often go about in whiteface to carry out Levinson’s plan; as a black man, he’d stick out, otherwise.

Aleksandr Kogan, a surgeon, regularly faces anti-Semitism, because, in the Russian mind, Jewish doctors are murderers, intent on infecting the population. Yet Kogan feels that dignity under pressure is important, so when ignoring the bigots doesn’t help, he tries to reason with them. Kima Petrova, a young woman who goes out of her way to challenge death, says nothing about herself. But we learn that the police say her mother blew her brains out and left behind a typed suicide note, though she owned no weapon and no typewriter. The typed note was a carbon copy.

Decree awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for "unmasking" the so-called Doctors' Plot, January 1953 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Decree awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for “unmasking” the so-called Doctors’ Plot, January 1953. The medal was revoked the following year, after Stalin’s death. (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Kogan observes, “Let’s be fair: in our country, you don’t have to be a decent person in order to get arrested.” But it helps. When the secret police warn him that he’s about to be arrested, and that he should make a full confession, Kogan rebuts the accusations one by one. The most absurd is that he’s killed a fellow doctor, another Jew, because, his interrogator says, “Sometimes you have to kill one of your own, so people won’t think you are killing only Russians.” The interrogation follows the same lunatic pattern as random expressions of anti-Semitism, so Goldberg seems to be saying that the paranoia of the bigot and the secret service are one and the same. And with Lewis, the author makes a similar point: People don’t listen to this man, who should be a hero, because that would challenge their prejudice that he’s not really human.

Goldberg made up less of The Yid than it might appear. Stalin’s final purge, which took place shortly before the novel opens, involved accusations against eminent doctors who had treated top party officials. When those patients died, Stalin accused the doctors of murdering them as part of an international Jewish conspiracy to undermine the regime. To assume that he’d plan a national pogrom in response may sound far-fetched. But in his afterword, Goldberg insists that the lists of Jews and the movements of rolling stock have been documented. He dedicates the novel to his parents, whose names were on the lists.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Lethal Delusions: The German War

17 Thursday Mar 2016

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Review: The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945, by Nicholas Stargardt
Basic, 2015. 570 pp. $35

Some books, no matter how harrowing their subject, how unrelenting, or how complex, display such mastery, vivid detail, and fresh perspective that they demand a reading. To me, The German War is one, though I shuddered and cringed my way through, sometimes cursing or even shouting in anger. That’s what happens when terrible history feels as if it took place yesterday.

Stargardt, who teaches at Magdalen College, Oxford, asks a question that many other historians have posed: How did the German people feel about the war they waged between 1939 and 1945?

That deceptively simple inquiry involves many interlocking pieces, among them the Holocaust, Allied bombing, euthanasia, rationing, German leadership, and Nazi ideology. Stargardt covers these and more, plumbing private letters, government documents, newspapers, film, and court cases. Perhaps most revealing about public attitudes, he cites reports from the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, the security arm of the SS, which gathered what people were saying among themselves. Having sifted through this stunning amount of material, the author conveys not only the implications of political and military decisions at the highest level, but how they affected the lives of sixteen individual Germans, in their own words.

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The Nuremberg rallies were perhaps the largest public expression of loyalty to Hitler and the Nazi program. This one dates from September 1934 (Courtesy German Federal Archives, Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Stargardt has a myth-busting mission, which at times makes his narrative more than a little polemical. However, I think he succeeds, and it would be picky to condemn him for imperfect pitch when he shows why the most popular, accepted tunes are based on flat notes.

For instance, he demonstrates how the overwhelming majority of Germans supported both Hitler and the war effort, even to the end, even if they felt no sympathy with Nazism. This can be hard to understand, because most foreigners have grown up believing–or being taught–that the Nazis had somehow “brainwashed” an entire nation, that Germans obeyed out of fear, and that merely a fraction knew about the crimes committed in their names, let alone perpetrated them.

Not so, says Stargardt. Hitler was widely revered, and his radio broadcasts warmed the populace, lending them strength to bear ever-increasing sacrifices, even in the war’s final weeks. Many people assumed that if he’d only known of the daily injustices and hardships they suffered, he’d have corrected them. (The SD, as the Propaganda Ministry insisted, tolerated grumbling, so long as it betrayed no disloyalty.) Nobody welcomed the outbreak of war in 1939, except for the few who thought it an adventure, but, on the other hand, nobody questioned that the war was necessary to break the stranglehold of enemies threatening to destroy the Reich. Devout Christians, Catholic or Protestant, may have deplored the Nazi scorn for religion, but they agreed that Jews, as part of an “international Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy,” must be destroyed. Even in the last weeks, German forces bled freely for every inch of ground they yielded, as they had for almost six years. That tenacious, steadfast bravery could not have come from fear. Rather, the nation was determined not to surrender, as it had in 1918. Many fought on past the point of hopelessness to wipe away what they considered that old stain on the national honor.

As for what would later be called the Holocaust, the German public learned about it early and often. Not only did Hitler publicly promise on several occasions that Jewry would be wiped out, but on the Eastern Front, the army took part in mass killings, which were treated as perfectly natural. Soldiers described them in letters and took photos, which they showed to friends and family. The home front heard of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and so forth as death camps, though exactly how they functioned remained secret. Few people even cared until Allied air raids began causing serious destruction and loss of life, at which time many Germans assumed that these were retribution for killing Jews. Many also believed that the Jews were behind the raids, whose perceived intent was to exterminate Germany. By the same logic, Germans implicitly accepted that they were victims, not perpetrators, and even after 1945, insisted they had fought a legitimate war of self-defense. Some 37 percent still believed that their security had demanded the murder of “non-Aryans.”

If there’s one thing missing in Stargardt’s account–hard to believe, given its length and depth–it’s how certain German attitudes remained unchanged from the First World War. The notion that Britain had conspired to “encircle” and “strangle” Germany out of jealousy dates from then, as do the mantra of a defensive war compelling invasion of other countries and the belief in German victimhood. Hitler didn’t have to fabricate these popular narratives, only recall them from his own days as an ardent soldier in a Bavarian regiment.

The German War can be hard going because of its subject matter. But I’m glad I read it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Nobody Escapes: I Lived in Modern Times

19 Saturday Dec 2015

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Review: I Lived in Modern Times, by Linda Grant
Penguin, 2000. 260 pp. $24

In this disturbing, insightful novel, Linda Grant portrays the Jews who worked to create the state of Israel in 1946-47 as anything but heroes. They’re gangsters and lowlifes who somehow managed to survive the Holocaust; longtime German and Austrian residents who look down on their Eastern European brethren; arrogant revolutionaries; terrorists; and displaced people who think the world owes them a favor.

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

British paratroopers enforce a curfew in Tel Aviv, 1946-47 (Courtesy United Kingdom Government, via Wikimedia Commons)

Mind you, the British trying to enforce their mandate over Palestine are vicious anti-Semites, and worse. They believe that they had it tough during the world war, can’t decide whom they despise more, Arab or Jew, and express choleric amazement that their inferiors could dare rebel against them, the world’s most practiced colonialists. The only participants in this novel who get a free pass–or almost do–are the Arabs, aside from a rare bombing or sniping, referred to but never shown.

No doubt, the mainstream, heroic narrative about the founding of Israel (or anywhere else) needs correction. Nevertheless, this novel goes too far the other way, so much so that it offends me, though I share some of the author’s political views. Like her, I’m ashamed that my Israeli coreligionists oppress Palestinians today (of which I’ve seen glimpses, first-hand). Yet I reject her blanket portrayal of Israel’s founders as either misguided hoodlums or blind idealists, or of Jews as fractious and arrogant, or that any nation born in war is doomed to fight perpetually. War has always made nations, whether we’re talking about the United States, Serbia, or the Netherlands. How and when those nations make war afterward is another story, but in I Lived in Modern Times, Israel’s path seems predetermined and entirely of Jewish making, which is more than a little neat.

That said, Grant has written a provocative, illuminating story about identity. Her heroine, Evelyn Sert, is a young woman born in England of Eastern European Jewish parents. Through her British passport, she takes ship for Palestine in 1946, pretending to be Christian so as to evade the rules against Jewish immigration. She’s heard of the wonderful experiment that will build a new nation according to modern principles, in which a Jew may find a life without fear and ideals to live by.

But reality doesn’t measure up. First, she tries a kibbutz, whose socialist roots and practices (including free love) appeal to her, only to find that the heat and the hard labor wear her down, and the men treat her like a slab of meat. She settles in Tel Aviv, resuming her former occupation as a hairdresser, but her best customers are British women whose husbands are the police, one of whom believes she recognizes Evelyn from the boat.

So Evelyn splits herself. She dyes her hair blond, calls herself Priscilla Jones, and goes to the beach with these women and their husbands, listening to their diatribes. Her Jewish boyfriend, a mysterious chap who speaks fluent Hebrew, gives her the passion she’s always wanted but insists that she know her place as a woman. This poses a struggle for Evelyn, who has other ambitions and is more literate, smarter, and deeper than he is. Yet Johnny, the name she knows him by, also protects her, giving her a false passport that keeps her safe from the police as Priscilla Jones–for a while. It’s his other underground activities she’s nervous about.

As her openly Jewish self, however, the German and Austrian emigrés, though they open up a cultural world she’s missed since leaving England, also condescend to her as an ignorant bumpkin from Eastern Europe. That wears on her, but even worse, Evelyn tires of what she calls “the so-what people.”

So-what you are cold and hungry? You want to know about cold and hunger? Let me tell you where I have been. I know cold and hunger. So-what you miss your mother? My mother was gassed. And my father and my grandparents and my sisters and brothers. So-what you want your boyfriend? My boyfriend was murdered by British soldiers.

Like the contortions of self that Evelyn submits to as an immigrant to a bewildering, divided land, these passages about the social pecking order based on birth or suffering hit the mark. However, after a while, you begin to wonder why Evelyn is so passive, why she doesn’t stand up to her lecturers or simply walk away. It’s particularly jarring toward the end, when she allows someone to bully her into an action I don’t believe she’d ever take. Unlike the case in some historical novels, which rewrite history to achieve the desired result, I Lived in Modern Times takes the opposite route, putting the heroine in a false position to evade an inconvenient historical event. It doesn’t work.

As with its protagonist, this novel’s contortions come to a peculiar end.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Imposter Bride

19 Monday Oct 2015

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Review: The Imposter Bride, by Nancy Richler
St. Martin’s, 2013. 360 pp. $25

Montreal, 1946. A young Jewish woman named Lily Azerov, escaping from Europe via Palestine, steps off a train, expecting to meet her fiancé, a man she’s never seen. But at the train station, after one look at Lily, he decides he doesn’t want her, so his brother marries her instead.

Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).

Boulevard Dorchester, Montreal, 1946 (Courtesy Archives de la Ville de Montréal, via Studio Pluche).

From this arresting premise comes a richly layered, marvelously observed novel about deceit, betrayal, and (of course) abandonment. Though at first seemingly the victim, Lily never really joins her new family, and she winds up enacting her own betrayal, disappearing from Montreal without a trace. Lily leaves behind a three-month-old daughter, Ruth; a large, uncut diamond; and a diary in Yiddish that, like her name, may or may not be hers. Ruth’s father, aunt, uncle, and grandmother do their best for the abandoned child and answer her innocent questions about her origins; she could never say she went unloved. Quite the contrary.

But as Ruth gets older, she receives the occasional birthday package, always a beautiful rock specimen from various places in Canada, with time, date, and temperature, but no signature attached. Naturally, the girl becomes more curious, less accepting of her relatives’ explanations, more determined to learn the truth about her mother. Do they know more than they’re saying, or is it really a mystery to everyone? That’s the problem, but it goes much deeper. Told from several vantage points (though mostly Ruth’s), The Imposter Bride recounts how each person has his or her own reasons to feel abandoned and betrayed, and how these experiences have blinded them to their own deceptions, of themselves and others.

I got lost in this web occasionally, because Richler jumps back and forth in time. But her narrative always sorts itself out, and her moment-to-moment exploration of what goes said and unsaid reveals a keen grasp of psychology and portrays well-rounded characters. Several times, I had to laugh while shaking my head at familiar Jewish inflections and perspectives, which Richler captures perfectly. I’ve never met these people, yet I know them.

Richler’s prose is simple, depending as much on the states of mind she evokes as on the imagery she sparingly but tellingly deploys. Here’s an example, from when Lily first arrives in Montreal and shuts herself in her room, fearing to go out.

It was as if the world outside her bedroom was a stilted play she’d walked into and couldn’t walk out of again, a dream she couldn’t wake from, where everything was menacing in an intangible, slightly surreal way. She hadn’t felt this way during the war, when the dangers that she faced were real. Had she felt it then, she would not have survived, she thought; she would have given herself away with the sort of anxious glance or gesture that had been fatal to so many.

Why she hunkers down goes beyond the shock and trauma to which her new family at first ascribes her aloof unfriendliness. The answer is no great surprise, especially after the clues that pop up in the story, so the ending feels predictable and fails to carry the force it might have. The novel makes Lily out to be a stable person, yet it’s hard to imagine anyone sane (a) abandoning a three-month-old infant and then (b) trying to keep in touch by sending her rocks. I also wonder how the characters who’ve been abandoned by spouses can even think about remarriage without obtaining a divorce. But despite these criticisms, The Imposter Bride has so much to say about wanting to belong, recovery from tragedy and humiliation, and the purpose of truth–all told in a gripping, astutely described process–that I still like the book very much.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

No Time for Morality: Motherland

30 Thursday Apr 2015

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Review: Motherland, by Maria Hummel

Counterpoint, 2014. 375 pp. $26

The year 1944 is coming to a screaming, bloody close in Germany, but the war goes on, demanding ever more sacrifice. Frank Kappus, a reconstructive surgeon in Hannesburg, a spa town outside Frankfurt, has been drafted to an army hospital in Weimar. Two months widowed, he has remarried so that his three sons, the youngest of whom is an infant, have a mother to care for them while he’s gone.

Liesl, his new bride, must feed, clothe, and bring up three children who don’t know her. Food and clothing are impossible to find; air raids worsen life every day; the two elder boys run wild; and the neighbors treat her with suspicion and dislike, glad to tell her that she’s nothing like her beautiful, friendly, fun-loving predecessor. She’s done nothing wrong, but of course, that’s not enough. “The point was to be liked, or if you couldn’t be liked, to be overlooked.” And Liesel sticks out, leading people to wonder what secrets she has to protect.

One secret concerns eight-year-old Anselm (called Ani), the middle child, already young for his years, who’s been acting strangely, showing signs of cognitive damage, if not mental disturbance. A doctor has told Liesl that Ani may need to be evaluated at Hadamar, a psychiatric hospital where, it is whispered, the unfit are put to death. Frank Winkelmann Hadamar What Liesl does to keep him and her two other boys safe requires a remarkable degree of inner strength, which, she realizes, may vanish in an unguarded moment. Like the fine novelist she is, Hummel has set herself and her protagonist a tall task, for Liesl isn’t quite cut out for struggle. She grew up in her aunt and uncle’s home, treated like a servant among her six cousins:

Liesl had excelled at gratitude. She ate it for supper, always the last to be served. She wore it on her back, always clothed in her aunt’s stained, cast-off jumpers. She listened to it all night, positioned as nurse outside each incoming baby’s room, ordered to wake if he cried.

Meanwhile, Frank has his own troubles. He plans to desert if the Russians break through, only a matter of time, but that’s a deadly game. His superior, Captain Schnell (!) seems more devoted to punishing subversion than running a hospital, and when Frank hears a rumor that the medical officer at nearby Buchenwald may be infecting the inmates with typhus, Schnell warns him not to be curious. Frank takes the hint.

I admire much about Motherland, a novel head and shoulders above the other two I’ve reviewed here about wartime Germany (City of Women, David R. Gilham, December 11, 2014; The Undertaking, Audrey Magee, March 19). Hummel can make even a visit to the kitchen a tense occasion, and she captures the atmosphere of fear and deprivation without resorting to cartoon Nazis or melodrama. She’s also an excellent prose stylist. Women’s faces “looked as if someone had fixed their dread in stone.” Dust gathers on furniture, “as if it were ever so slowly growing a beard.” It’s details like these, rooted firmly in the mundane, that tell the story of day-to-day survival.

Yet Hummel lets her characters off the moral hook, despite her best efforts. She explains that she based her novel on family history, notably a series of letters that say nothing about the death camps or the totalitarian state, only about trying to cope. Okay. She resisted the temptation to allow her characters acts of resistance–wisely, I think–and says it hurt to leave out all but scant references to Jews or the Holocaust. (One brilliant, subtle description evokes the death camps and crematoria in a different, unexpected context.)

Fair enough. I accept that ordinary people, just trying to remain overlooked, would focus instead on where their next meal was coming from, especially when the bombs are falling. However, it’s those bombs that Liesl doesn’t think about, as in why Germany’s enemies are so relentless, or why the war has lasted so long. Nor does she ever connect the dots between the laws that may send Ani to Hadamar and those that condemn Jews.

Buchenwald was built in 1937, the first such camp on German soil, so Frank can’t be completely ignorant of what its purpose is, even if he’s never heard that inmates are injected with typhus. But he simply doesn’t think about it. Nor does he ever stop to consider that the horribly maimed men he treats have their counterparts on the other side. Nor, more broadly, does he reflect on what war has done to Europe.

Nevertheless, I could settle with this–in fact, I did, for almost the whole novel–except for the outrage that Liesl, in particular, expresses against the Americans. What they do is so unjust and heavy-handed, she believes, and I sense that the reader is meant to sympathize with her. But I can’t, not about this. Liesl never grapples with anyone else’s sufferings or how they might have come about. To me, Hummel squanders the empathy for Liesl and Frank that she’s so carefully built.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

A Marriage of Convenience: The Undertaking

19 Thursday Mar 2015

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Review: The Undertaking, by Audrey Magee
Atlantic, 2014. 287 pp. $25

It’s autumn 1941, and a young German soldier is so eager to escape the Russian killing grounds of World War II that he weds a woman he’s never met. This gives Peter the privilege to leave the ranks for ten days, whereas Katharina will receive a pension, if he dies, and the right to call herself a married woman. Surprisingly, the pair take to one another, and when Peter returns to Russia, memories of their brief time together will have to warm them over many cold months.

From this bold, startling premise spins a novel in the same vein, spare and unflinching, often as brutal as the war it describes. The way I read The Undertaking, Magee argues that Germans made a marriage of convenience, embracing Nazism out of greed and a temporary advantage that they trusted would be long-lasting. I like novels based on a simple metaphor, and juxtaposing marriage with a hideous, criminal regime is a brilliant concept.

Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad, ca. 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad, ca. 1942 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons, public domain in the U.S.)

Told largely through dialogue, usually in short sentences, Magee’s narrative packs remarkable punch in few words. I liked the group scenes best, especially the tension between Katharina and her parents, which results not from politics–they’re convinced Nazis, all–but from a young woman’s desire to live her own life. As for Peter and his comrades, it takes awhile for them to emerge as an entity, but some of the later scenes held me, most notably their attempts to help each other survive the battle of Stalingrad.

Even so, dialogue-as-narrative can only go so deep. Not even Katharina, whose portrayal is more complete than Peter’s, reveals an inner life. Magee allows them hardly any memories or associations to whatever they experience, nor reflections about what they’ve done.

This dissociation appears deliberate on the author’s part. Katharina wears jewelry and dresses stolen from deported Jews, and her family’s new apartment was once occupied by Jews. But she has no feelings about this, not even when she meets a starving Jewish woman in a park. Similarly, Peter helps Dr. Weinart, a friend of his father-in-law’s, to raid Jewish homes and deport the inhabitants, beating them if they don’t move fast enough. Yet he doesn’t think twice about it. He rationalizes nothing; he simply resents the evenings spent away from Katharina.

I doubt whether civilian SS officers, as Weinart seems to be, ever led such raids or recruited active soldiers to participate (and they certainly didn’t wear brown uniforms). Nor do I believe how the remarkably ubiquitous, all-powerful Weinart runs Katharina’s family and personifies the entire bureaucracy and social fabric of the Third Reich. For example, no secret police, neighborhood informants, or orchestrated patriotic displays appear, only the evil doctor. But historical fudging or shallow convenience aren’t the greatest flaws; it’s that Weinart’s wealth and promises of advancement have seduced Peter, and we don’t know how or why. Before the war, Peter was a schoolteacher in Darmstadt, like his father, and, up until meeting Weinart, wanted more than anything to resume that career. Why has he changed his mind? I think Magee wants us to believe that he always had his greedy, violent urges, and that marriage gave him an excuse to exercise them.

That conclusion fits her central metaphor, but we have only her word for it, not the characters’ thoughts or actions. Are Peter and Katharina meant to be psychopaths? If so, can a person really become psychopathic from mere temptation, as with the flick of a switch? More importantly, no matter how you label Peter and Katharina, how can a reader feel empathy for characters who have none themselves, who act with so little conscience? Doesn’t that violate the purpose of a novel?

I have to assume that Peter and Katharina are supposed to represent Germany, yet I sense that Magee’s too perceptive to ascribe genocide and a world war to a simple absence of human feeling. Even so, she offers no other credible explanation; by reducing her main characters to moral and psychological automata, she robs them and their actions of the complexity they deserve.

The Undertaking is another nominee for the Walter Scott Prize. It’s a well-written, thought-provoking book, but I wouldn’t put it on the short list.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.