I Truly Lament: Working Through the Holocaust by Mathias Freese

In this anthology, Mathias Freese has composed twenty-seven short stories about the Holocaust. They're an attempt to gain some form of understanding about it. In the Preface, Freese states: "All literary depictions of the Holocaust end as failures..." and "Every artist who struggles with the Holocaust must begin with an acceptance of failure, and that must be worked through before art begins." If I'm interpreting him correctly, the reason why all attempts end as failures is because no mere words on a page can ever truly convey what it was like to have been there. But nothing short of a fully immersive virtual reality program (and none has been created yet) ever could, so why set the bar so high?

I'm not sure why Mr. Freese wrote this book. A tribute to the dead? The survivors? He states that: "No piece of art...can ever expunge the Holocaust." To which I rather flippantly say, "Well, duh." If this was ever his intent, it's a fool's errand. But no, this is an attempt to "work through it" despite his insistence that: "We will never work it through."

So it was after reading this conflicted preface, written by a man who so desperately wants answers to the questions he poses, that I read this book.

Obviously, this was no beach read. Rather than compose these stories as entertainment (Can the Holocaust, or any genocide for that matter, ever be formed into entertainment?), they're more like twenty-seven fictional biographies. Alas, they're repetitive. There were three stories involving golems. There were several stories each about Jews fleeing Nazi pursuers, life in the camps, and survivors trying to eke out some kind of life afterwards. While each was slightly different, too many elements were the same. For instance, all but one survivor story took place in Tuscon, Arizona.

But there were stories that broke out of the mold. "Max Weber, Holocaust Revisionist" was more of an essay. Freese explains that when he was writing a story he was derailed by a historian's contention that the Nazis did not make soap out of Jews. Freese researched the historian and learned that the man was a historical revisionist. Freese submitted his The i Tertralogy to him for a book review and published it herein as "Sincerely, Max Weber". I'm assuming both are true. Freese skewers the man in a story entitled "Soap", one of the best stories in the collection.

There are two fictional interviews: "Herr Doktor" and "Der Fuhrer Likes Plain". Both of these were among the better stories. The first one is an interview between an American doctor and a camp doctor. The interviewer is trying to determine at what point the camp doctor lost his ability to follow his Hippocratic Oath. The latter story is a fictional interview with Eva Braun just a few days before her death in Hitler's bunker. While it got off to a good start, it veered off into details about Hitler's sex life that have been gossiped about but never substantiated.

"The Disenchanted Golem" starts out with a golem discussing a few events over the course of his incarnations and what it's like to be a golem. But midway through his conversation with the reader, he tells us about the one he has with a rabbi. It has a bit of a Pinocchio quality to it, but without the Disney effect.

My favorite story was "Cantor Matyas Balogh". The titular character meets a woman in a sweets shop, and the two strike up a conversation. The conversation leads to tea and then to romance. It's a story about finding love when the world is going to hell. Both are aware of the dangers around them, but continue on because love has a power all its own.

In summary, I Truly Lament is a collection of stories centered on the Holocaust. While there are many repetitive story elements, individually, they offer poetic glimpses into the brutality endured. There are standout stories that rise from the miasma of the subject matter. It is a difficult read at times, for the subject matter and the associated suffering can be a bit much. If you can separate the entertaining tales from the pseudo-biographical cathartic soliloquies, then this book could be for you.

For more information about I Truly Lament and Mathias Freese, please visit his website.

Broken Birds: The Story of My Momila

This book has been getting a lot of attention online, so I was eager to read it. It is the story of a dysfunctional family, the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. Although it purports to be the story of the matriarch, information about her is relatively sparse and leaves the reader with many questions.

The mother, Channa, and her brother, Isaac, grew up in a small town in Poland. When the German army took over, they suffered the depredations visited upon the resident Jews and soon wound up in a ghetto. When Channa was twelve, shortly after the death of their aunt and Isaac's wife and children in a pogrom, Isaac took Channa with him into the forest, where they joined the partisans, remaining with them until the end of the war. They snipped telephone and telegraph lines, blew up bridges, killed solitary German soldiers, lived off the land and off food they demanded from farmers. When the Red Army liberated Poland two years later, they returned to their hometown to find the rest of their family had perished and their home was occupied by strangers, who reluctantly let them move in and then relinquished the house.

That is the first ten percent of the book. The reader is then treated to a rather rushed narrative of Katzir's father, who grew up in a town in Czechoslovakia that later became part of Hungary. Only a few pages are devoted to the difficult years of 1939-1944; then he and his family were deported to Auschwitz. Nathan managed to survive the selections for the gas chambers, and wound up later on a hellish work detail cleaning up the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto (which she calls “only a shell of its former self”). As the Allies drew closer, he was deported to the German camp, Dachau. The reader encounters the tired phrases of concentration-camp existence: “packed like sardines,” “living skeletons,” etc. Then, astonishingly, only after he gets to Dachau, Nathan gets lice! Now, Dachau was a disgusting camp; they all were. But Auschwitz was the worst of the worst, with its gas chambers and crematoria going day and night (there is still controversy as to whether the gas chambers at Dachau were ever used to exterminate Jews, while there is no question about the ones at Auschwitz). I don't ever recall reading that Auschwitz had a lot of hand sanitizer stations. You couldn't spend more than five minutes there without getting lice.

Here is where the narrator misses rich opportunities to delve into the experiences of Channa and Nathan, and how their later behaviors were shaped. Channa was in the partisans for two years; why do we get so few pages? Is Nathan's memory of events skewed so that he remembers the lice at Dachau and forgets the lice at Auschwitz? Was Auschwitz too horrible to remember? Or is this just sloppy editing?

At one point, as Nathan was trying to outwit the Germans (always referred to as “Nazis” in this book, although many of the most brutal soldiers never joined the Nazi Party), he and some friends jumped into a ditch. The author takes great pains to point out that “The ditch still held water mixed with sludge and dead bugs, but they did not care.” Eww! Dead bugs! These were people who would often wake to find their bedmate a corpse, who were often forced to spend days in railroad cattle cars shitting on the floor!

Nathan and Channa eventually made their way to America separately, met, and married. Five children were born, and their story takes up most of the book. We really never understand fully how Channa's and Nathan's backgrounds molded their parenting style, and how (or if) it turned the kids into such quarrelsome, greedy bastards. There is one scene where Nathan dances too much, in Channa's estimation, with a niece at a party, and Katzir seems to see this as a seminal event in her mother's behavioral slide. Much more narrative energy is lavished upon all the times one sibling signed a contract with another and then reneged, or one sibling borrowed money and never returned it, than on the behavior of, say, the other partisans or the camp guards. We are treated to a long description of the author's love of horseback riding, and of how an unscrupulous dealer sold her her first horse, a bad match. She feels entitled to use a sister's address to allow her kids to go to school in a town they don't reside in, and goes ballistic when the sister abruptly puts a stop to it. The quarreling over the mother's will after her death is too much to take. All the siblings are scandalized by their father's quick remarriage, though one could hardly blame him, since his wife wrote him out of the will! There is really very little more about Channa until her death, just some quotes showing that she wasn't June Cleaver.

After the Holocaust, the victims (and the perpetrators who avoided arrest) mostly worked hard to establish some kind of normal life. The everyday problems of fighting siblings, financial strain, obnoxious neighbors, etc. don't go away because you were part of one of the most tragic and momentous events in history. Your way of dealing with those issues may be greatly affected, though, but we are not given much information about this in the story, most of which is devoted to the five children of Channa and Nathan (Channa called them “My five fingers”).

When do people whose parents went through hell stop blaming those parents for all the behaviors of their siblings? This is another interesting question that goes unaddressed. Perhaps their parents really DID screw them up; what difference does it make? When do you start taking responsibility for your own problems, since blaming does nothing to solve them?

Broken Birds is like a sandwich: a long list of familial acrimonies between two slices of narrative. With some editing of the filling, and enrichment of the bread, it would be a much more interesting read.

The Book Thief

The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
584 pages
Picador (2005)

"Five hundred souls. I carried them in my fingers, like suitcases. Or I'd throw them over my shoulder. It was only the children I carried in my arms."

This is a novel narrated by Death. It’s January 1939, and nine year-old Liesel Meminger and her young brother, Werner, are being taken by their mother to live with a foster family in Molching, a small town outside Munich. Liesel’s father was arrested as a Kommunist, and Liesel’s mother fears a similar fate. During the train journey, Death takes six year-old Werner, but not without noticing Liesel, too. It will be the first of many such encounters. By her brother’s graveside, Liesel’s life is changed when she finds a mysterious object, partially hidden in the snow: it’s a book, The Gravedigger’s Handbook, left there by accident. It’s the first of many she will steal.

So begins a fascination with books and words as Liesel, with the help of her foster father, learns to read. Soon she is stealing books from Nazi pyres. With the help of her new friend Rudy Steiner, she liberates several from the personal library of the mayor’s wife. As years pass, Death watches. Life with the Hubermann’s on Himmel Street is punctuated by the terror of the Allied bombings, but is otherwise as tolerable as a wartime childhood can be. Then her foster father repays an old debt by allowing a Jewish fist-fighter to hide out in their cellar, and Liesel’s life is changed in more ways than she could’ve imagined.

Does the world really need another Holocaust novel? Yes, if it's as good as this one. No, it’s not some German inversion of The Diary of a Young Girl despite what the synopsis might suggest. Nor is it Harry Potter and The Holocaust as more than one critic has quipped. Young Australian writer Markus Zusak is a prize-winning writer of children’s fiction, but The Book Thief is his daring adult debut.

And what a debut it is. The Book Thief is one of those extremely rare novels: an absolute page-turner as well as a serious work of art. It’s unsettling, provocative, triumphant and tragic, at times fanciful and at others relentlessly grim. It’s beautiful and harrowing in almost equal measure. More than anything, it’s emotionally gripping in a way that few novels are. I stayed up one night, determined to finish it, and brushed away tears for the last fifty pages.

Zusak says he was inspired by two real-life events related to him by his German parents: the bombing of Munich, and a teenage boy offering bread to an emaciated Jew being marched through the streets, ending with both boy and Jewish prisoner being whipped by a soldier. As Philip Ardagh in The Guardian noted, it’s the way in which Zusak combines such terrible events with such believable characters and the minutiae of everyday life in Nazi Germany that makes this book so special.

The genius, too, is in the voice. Death is arch, wry, and given to bad jokes about his profession, but he’s also moved by the plight of humans and amused by our attitudes to him. "By the way – I like this human idea of the grim reaper. I like the scythe. It amuses me." Death is closely involved with what’s happening in wartime Europe – and obviously very busy – but he’s also, for the most part, emotionally detached from it. This allows him to comment on man’s inhumanity to man without ever being ponderous or moralistic, and without taking sides. This is important. The novel could be painfully sappy or irritatingly didactic without such a detached perspective driving it.

Zusak uses a plain style, punctuated only occasionally by vivid images. The moments of joy and violence, when they come, are all the more striking for the economy with which they’re depicted. It’s an object lesson to writers who want to deal with complex moral issues or powerful themes. And the lesson is this: just get the hell out of the way. Your language doesn’t need to be dazzling and ornate; your plotting doesn’t need to trick and surprise; you don't need to lecture or berate. Carefully choose your narrative point of view. Then put the right characters in the right situation and describe what happens as clearly as you can. The rest will take care of itself.

This is an important indirect lesson in a book that takes as its subtext the power of reading and writing. As Janet Maslin in The New York Times commented: "It will be widely read and admired because it tells a story in which books become treasures. And because there's no arguing with a sentiment like that."

The Reader

The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
224 pages
Vintage (1999)

Michael Berg, 15, is on his way home from school in post-World War II Germany when he falls ill and is befriended by the 36-year-old Hanna who takes him home. When he recovers many weeks later, he dutifully brings her flowers in appreciation, and the two become lovers. The relationship, at first purely physical, deepens when Hanna takes an interest in Michael’s education, insisting that he study hard and attend classes. Soon, their meetings take on a more meaningful routine in which after lovemaking Michael reads aloud from the classics. There are hints of Hanna's darker side: one inexplicable moment of violence over a minor misunderstanding, and the fact that Michael knows nothing of her life other than that she collects tickets on the streetcar. Hanna leaves the city abruptly and mysteriously, and Michael does not see her again until years later, as a law student, he sits in on her case when she is being tried as a Nazi criminal.

The Reader explores Germany's guilt-ridden relationship with its own past by objectifying it in the sexual and emotional coupling of a 15-year-old boy and a 36-year-old woman. On the face of it, that doesn't sound like the premise for one of the most engaging pieces of Holocaust fiction available, but it is. Far from eroticizing Nazism or trivializing the Holocaust, using the metaphor of a human relationship makes them both more accessible. Schlink provides a way into the unique postwar experience of the German people by relating it to things we have all experienced: guilt and romantic love. Issues and events which usually repel or dismay us with their enormity are taken out of the zones of History and Philosophy and reconfigured on a human, interpersonal scale - the scale on which they actually happened, and on which they must be confronted if we are ever to understand them fully.

I was surprised and moved to find a novel that treats the Holocaust in this way; a novel that risks being misunderstood in order to foster understanding. The erotic aspect of the novel is, in the end, a minor one and hardly the point: it's about so much more than that. Through careful characterization and plot development, Schlink manages not only to make plain the ease with which German civilians were drawn into unspeakable roles, but also to explore the difference between a legal conviction and real justice, between retribution and recompense, and, most importantly, the almost insoluble situation in which Germans born postwar find themselves - laden with guilt for things they did not do and for which they cannot possibly atone.

Interestingly, Schlink's book also becomes a sustained yet subtle commentary on the function of literature and literacy as ways of recording and recovering the past. Those interested in this subtext might like to read next W. G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction which explores the historical unwillingness, and therefore the contemporary inability, of German literature to deal with the terrorist victimization of German civilians at the hands of the Allies, e.g. the bombing of Dresden. Anyone unfamiliar with W. G. Sebald’s work should read all of it. Immediately.

For all its high intent, and equally high achievement, The Reader is almost an easy read. Schlink's language (or Carol Brown Janeway's translation, at least) is smooth, spare and precise. Schlink's subject is dignified by such straightforwardness.