Tag Archives: nationalism

Empathy?: The Welsh Girl

14 Monday Nov 2022

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Review: The Welsh Girl, by Peter Ho Davies
Houghton Mifflin, 2007. 333 pp. $10

For Esther Evans, seventeen, June 1944 in Cilgwyn, her village in North Wales, brings sights and sounds of the wider world she dreams of: BBC broadcasts, radio performers from London, English soldiers building an encampment. Living with her sheep-farmer father, who’s a Welsh nationalist, and an ill-tempered young evacuee, Esther has little to excite her except her job at the pub, where she rubs elbows with “foreigners,” including the English corporal with whom she’s stepping out. Don’t tell Dad.

Meanwhile, Karsten Simmering is taken prisoner defending a Normandy beachhead on D-Day. He doesn’t know what to think of himself for surrendering; his fellow prisoners, neck-deep in admiration for the Führer and certain of final victory, shame him for it, conveniently forgetting that they too put their hands up.

You know that Esther and Karsten are destined to cross paths, so you can guess that the encampment being built is for prisoners of war. Their relationship is an intriguing premise, and Davies shapes it well, conveying alliances and resentments with subtlety and aplomb, whether in Cilgwyn or the prison camp. He also colors his narrative with wistfulness, desire for escape, and search for a comfortable, fitting definition for the word nation, which several of his characters seem to lack.

Rudolf Hess, 1933, unknown photographer (courtesy German Federal Archives via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

I do question how Karsten speaks such fluent English. I also dislike the unmentionable trope that changes Esther’s path, both for itself and its predictability and borrowed from a humorless Victorian novelist (the offending work even rates a mention). But at least Davies makes it his own.

A chief attraction here is the prose, as with this vivid, emotion-laden description of Karsten’s barracks at the camp:

The hut stinks of men, of sweat and feet and damp wool and arseholes, and he rolls over to catch the sporadic scent of the sea. He can make out the smell of the damp trees on wet days, or of dry heather on fine ones. . . .The evenings, once it gets too gloomy to play football, once the dusk deepens and the white dots of sheep on the hillside vanish, are a slow, anxious prelude to this confinement. It makes him feel like a punished child . . . sent to bed early, and he dreads the winter when the days will get shorter and they’ll be locked in even earlier.

Unfortunately, Davies buries the Esther-Karsten narrative under a subplot connected to it only vaguely through the nation-belonging theme, an infelicitous addition at best. The novel begins with Joseph Rotheram, a British intelligence officer of German birth, assigned to observe and question the infamous Rudolf Hess. Hess, Hitler’s righthand man until 1940, when he flew an airplane to England, has spent four years under heavy guard. The Allies contemplate war-crimes trials, at which Hess would be a star defendant. Yet he claims amnesia, and no questioner can penetrate that mask.

Rotheram hates his assignment, especially for the reason he’s there: he’s considered Jewish, an identity he hotly (and accurately) denies, since his mother is Christian. But his superiors insist on saying he is, and they suppose that Hess will detect his “race” and react, whereupon they’ll have their prisoner in a bind. What an anti-Semitic trope, heightened when Rotheram’s officer comrades speak as if he has no country, only a tribe.

Davies knows how to set a scene, and he’s imagined a couple notable confrontations between Rotheram and Hess, especially during a screening of Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous propaganda film. It’s like Hamlet’s play within a play, hoping to catch the conscience of the king.

But to wade into anti-Semitic tropes requires insight, and Davies’s narrative suggests he knows little or nothing about Jews or Judaism. Rotheram’s Jewish only to the extent that others think he is and scorn him for it; he has no thoughts about that identity or his family’s past, other than rejecting it. You might as well say the Welsh characters are Welsh only because the English make bigoted jokes about them.

Toward the novel’s end, Rotheram starts thinking like his anti-Semitic superiors: “The Jews, he knew, had no homeland, yearned for one, and yet as much as he understood it to be a source of their victimization, it seemed at once such pure freedom to be without a country.” I suspect Davies has no idea his character appears to find liberation in thousands of years of expulsion, enforced statelessness, expropriation, and murder, justified by the slander that Jews owe allegiance to no country.

A critic quoted on the jacket flap praises Davies’s “all-encompassing empathy.” Not quite.

To my fellow historical novelists, please: If you must write about the Holocaust, make sure you treat your Jewish characters as full people. Please don’t deploy them like paperweights to keep themes or plot points from blowing away. Tropes and stereotypes hurt.

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

Dislocated Souls: Exile Music

20 Monday Jul 2020

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Review: Exile Music, by Jennifer Steil
Viking, 2020. 432 pp. $27

As the 1930s progress, Orly Zingel’s family watches the Austria of their birth turn into an unrecognizable monster, hostile to Jews like them. As a ten-year-old, Orly can’t readily understand how people she’s known all her life, who’ve smiled at her and been friendly, can turn away, call her hateful names, or threaten to have her arrested. Her parents, accomplished professional musicians, are banned from performing.

Anneliese, her closest — only — friend, who lives in the same Vienna apartment building, swears that she’ll stick by Orly, always. That’s a given, for the two are like sisters, absorbed in and devoted to one another. But Anneliese’s parents, who’ve always treated Orly as a favorite niece or even a daughter, now call her filth.

Booted out of the building they own, the Zingels are pushed into a ghetto, and they try to leave Austria. Orly’s older brother, Willi, flees Vienna, hoping to reach Switzerland, and the rest of the family lives in uncertainty about his fate. Her father attempts to obtain exit visas, but the only open doors lead to Shanghai, Dominican Republic, or Bolivia. Father joins the long line snaking from the Bolivian consulate and struggles not to lose hope, especially when the SS sends its thugs to beat and intimidate the would-be emigrants. That’s yet another brutality that Orly can’t understand; if the government wants Jews to leave the country, why put so many obstacles in the way?

La Paz, Bolivia, in winter 2008, with Mt. Illimani in the background (courtesy Mark Goble, via Wikimedia Commons)

From the title and cover illustration, you’ll know that the Zingels eventually reach Bolivia; they settle in La Paz. But in this patient, discursive narrative, there’s plenty of “no — and furthermore” to go around. If you’re wondering how these sophisticated refugees will cope with life in the Andes, their humiliation, emotional losses, and dislocation, Exile Music has plenty to offer.

But besides the expected themes of trauma, culture shock, loss, and chances for regrowth, which the author does a beautiful job exploring in a well-delineated context, she delves into much else. You’ll get such issues as what religion and identity mean; what constitutes “home”; how music and poetry, purveyors of metaphor, may offer hope through connection; and whether revenge and justice coincide.

That’s a lot to put in one novel, but everything belongs. Where the story pushes briefly into the spirit realm, I get impatient, because I don’t believe in that. But Steil ties that theme to Orly’s identity — this is a coming-of-age novel, after all — so it makes sense, and what the author includes about local customs provides a fascinating window on a culture I’ve never read about before.

Throughout, the narrative grounds itself in physical detail, so, for example, you see Austrian anti-Semitism and nationalist fervor merge with ever-increasing strength before your eyes. Orly’s experience, though specific and individual, conveys a general atmosphere with terrifying power. The occasional crowd scene packs a wallop too, as with Kristallnacht or here, the Anschluss, the day German troops took over Austria in March 1938:

A tram swept by, its roof displaying a massive swastika. Across the street I could see a curly-haired girl who used to be in my class; my former math teacher; the waiter from the coffeehaus at the end of the block, their arms all flying upward. They threw flowers at the soldiers, blew kisses as they marched past, cheering the death of our country.

Since by this time, Orly is not allowed to attend school or go to a coffeehaus, you implicitly understand her horror, fear, and deep-seated loneliness.

Steil also portrays the friendship between Orly and Anneliese with tenderness and even passion; it’s more than a little erotic. The girls create, and tell each other stories about, a mythic kingdom where predators have no place and enemies can gain no entry. It’s a lovely touch, and their fantasy won’t change life in the street, but it does give them hope.

Orly’s parents need to come through more clearly; too often, they seem more like attitudes and behaviors than fully fledged characters. But overall, I highly recommend Exile Music, which conveys both the Jewish and émigré experience with a sure hand — and worlds else besides.

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

Dreams of Freedom: The Parisian

27 Monday Jan 2020

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Review: The Parisian, by Isabella Hammad
Grove, 2019. 551 pp. $27

In 1914, young Midhat Kamal leaves Constantinople, where he’s graduated from a French lycée, for Montpellier, France, to study medicine. The relocation has two objects: to keep Midhat from being conscripted into the Ottoman army, therefore safe from the world war; and to become someone of whom his father can be proud. Father will demand his reckoning, that’s certain, for he’s a wealthy cloth merchant from Nablus, Ottoman Palestine, and a firm believer in traditional, hierarchical values.

Midhat, however, doesn’t quite see his father’s tyranny, despite having suffered from it his entire life. Such thoughts are unthinkable. But once in France, everything is thinkable, even sayable, often doable, and Midhat’s inner romantic flowers like a tree blooming in the desert. He falls in love with Jeanette, the daughter of the professor who offers him room and board, and maybe she returns his feelings. Subsequently, he goes to Paris, where he continues his studies, talks politics with Palestinian nationalists, and becomes a dandy and a seducer.

However, his inevitable return to Nablus shocks him to the core, and as he dutifully tries to reconstruct his life according to the traditions he’s been taught, he mourns his lost freedom, even as he makes the best of his circumstances. That’s what a man must do, he decides, fulfill his role as a proper son and heir to the family business.

Midhat’s inner struggle mirrors that of the Palestinian fight for independence. Hammad shows how his trust in French values gets crushed by colonial realities. But she also portrays the nationalists falling prey to rigid codes of honor that lead to self-destruction, when “flexibility,” as one broader-minded politician remarks, would be saner. So it is that telling one man’s fictional story depicts history.

Nevertheless, this brilliant, impressive novel — a debut, no less — almost sinks in the first hundred and fifty pages. The Montpellier narrative develops slowly, and Midhat’s character seems maddeningly concrete and restrained. To be fair, that’s culturally appropriate, and Hammad does a terrific job portraying her protagonist’s confusion as to language, customs, and behavior, suffering with an obsessive, overdeveloped sense of what people must think of him. Every failure, whether or not it really is a failure, feels like dishonor to Midhat. Still, though you understand why — especially in retrospect, which means those first hundred and fifty pages can feel like wandering — you want the young man to let looser within himself, even if no one else sees it.

But if you read The Parisian, which I highly recommend, don’t sink with the narrative. Tread water, and you’ll be rewarded. Once our hero connects with politics, then returns to Nablus, his character opens. Don’t be put off by the untranslated Arabic, usually honorifics or exclamations, which you don’t need to understand, nor the occasional French phrase. The plot, though simple, wields a very sharp blade, and I defy you to put the novel aside.

Palestinian women march against the British Mandate, Jerusalem, 1930; photographer unknown. The sign urges “no negotiations, no dialogue” until the Mandate ends (courtesy British Mandate Jerusalemites Photo Library, via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Ninety-nine percent of jacket blurbs are fluff and nonsense, but here’s an exception — Zadie Smith astutely remarks that Hammad has written in the tradition of Flaubert and Stendhal. Though I’m not yet ready to place Hammad on that exalted shelf, I see the comparison, visible in the filigree approach to the characters’ interactions as well as the prose, as in this scene with Jeanette in Montpellier:

A strong red blush started at her chest and covered her face. It was Midhat’s turn to look at the garden. He wanted to give her privacy, but he was also waiting for the grin to subside from his own cheeks. Outside, the clouds turned the grass grey, and the tree at the far end was animated with wind. When he looked back, Jeanette was still red, staring at her lap. Neither of them said anything. Something in Midhat’s chest began leaping wildly about as a fly zoomed into the silence and browsed the coffee things. Together they watched the fly inspecting the corner of a sugar cube, and then sitting on the silver rim, rubbing its hands together. He made a decision to look at her again. He found, to his amazement, that he was unable.

Also like the two nineteenth-century masters, Hammad has written a biography of one character standing for a time and place — think of Emma Bovary, Julien Sorel in Red and Black, or Fabrizio del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma. (If you don’t know these novels, grab a glass of wine, a comfortable chair, and dig in.) This is the most successful kind of biographical novel, I think, true to history yet unconstrained by having to set down the complete historical record, which doesn’t always squeeze into a fictional frame. Another similarity is that all three protagonists, like Midhat, have been educated in romantic ideals, which leave them unprepared for the cruelties of real life.

But perhaps the most compelling aspect of The Parisian, as with these predecessors, is Hammad’s authority as a storyteller: This is how it happened.

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

Prisoners: Caging Skies

12 Monday Aug 2019

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Review: Caging Skies, by Christine Leunens
Overlook, 2019. 304 pp. $26

Johannes Betzler might be like most Viennese boys of the late 1930s. He joins the Hitler Youth, in which he takes great pride, and swallows the Nazi message whole, much to his parents’ dismay. When the war comes, it’s his turn to be dismayed, for he figures out that they’re hiding a young Jewish woman, Elsa, behind a false wall upstairs. Outraged at first, he barely contains himself until, after being disfigured by a bomb during an enemy air raid, he becomes interested in Elsa and, later, consumed by her. When his parents disappear, and his grandmother, who lives in the house, becomes demented, he must care for Elsa’s needs by himself. And Johannes’s obsession grows so great that as the war’s end nears — he expects a Nazi victory — he wonders how to keep her, or what their relationship will be like.

From this simple, bizarre premise comes a bold novel of great fierceness, insight, and emotional savagery. I admire Leunens’s refusal to spare anyone or anything, even as, while reading, I sometimes had to put the book down and pace around the room. But if you stick with Caging Skies, this is what you’ll get. With a sweep reminiscent of A Gentleman in Moscow (and therefore Tolstoy), but decidedly without the humor, kindness, or generosity — this is the Holocaust — Leunens creates a microcosm of Hitlerian thought inside Johannes’s head. The truism about scratching a bully and finding beneath an ineffectual, strutting egotist secretly scared of his inadequacy emerges front and center.

Where other novelists (or historians) tell you that the Nazi creed attracted certain personalities, Leunens shows you why and how. It’s absolutely remarkable how she exposes Johannes as a pitiful, self-satisfying beast, casting the world in his own image, twisting all he sees to fit his vision of himself as victim. This is pure narcissism, but it’s more than that — it’s the far-right mindset, us-versus-them culture, and ultranationalism; that the portrayal seems so vivid and relevant is frightening in itself.

Throughout, Leunens’s prose drives relentlessly forward, as with this passage about Johannes’s training with the Hitler Youth:

In one exercise we were to kill a pen of ducks by twisting their necks with our bare hands. It was stressful because once we freed the latch they came to us in trust and quacked as if we could understand exactly what it was they wanted. One of the ducks was followed by a dozen ducklings and they had to be killed too. It was as if they were asking us to kill our own childhood, somehow. If a boy cried after the deed was done he was so thoroughly mocked that no one wanted to be in his shoes. He ate fowl like everybody else and would enjoy the duck once it was on his plate after others had worked to prepare it, wouldn’t he? He was then nothing but a whimpering hypocrite, a good for nothing!

If I may be clinical for a moment about this chilling scene, notice how the author uses the entire setup as a metaphor, which Johannes literally expresses as killing his own childhood. I like how Leunens employs this technique, sparingly, but to excellent effect, letting the action create the image and then lightly directing the brushstroke — or not.

A central theme of Caging Skies has to do with truth, lies, and being able to tell the difference. Johannes loses his way in that maze right off, though he thinks he doesn’t, and he’s never sure how much anyone knows about him, his thoughts, or secrets that may or may not belong to him alone. Gradually, he comes to sense that the ground may give way any moment, which is how his feelings about Elsa change from revulsion to desire, and more.

But that’s where the novel falters, I think. Their relationship raises several questions, and if Leunens has answered them the way I infer she has, I have my doubts. Is she trying to say that the Jews’ murderers actually love them? Or is it the lust of possession, in which complete power over someone, enough to allow you to dispose of them, makes you feel in love with yourself? I’d sooner believe the second, but in Johannes’s case, he appears to go further — to the extent that he can love anyone.

In reverse, the relationship makes even less sense. To an extent, I understand identifying with the aggressor, but some of what happens tests credulity. And if Leunens is trying to have Elsa stand in for all Jews, that representation feels grotesque and unearned.

But there’s no denying that Caging Skies is an extraordinary novel, and that its author has ranged widely within a contained physical space to tell a penetrating story.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the publisher via Historical Novels Review, in which this post appeared in shorter, different form.