 |  |
Click for Contents
|
P.O. Box 1805,Jerusalem 91017 Tel. 972-2-531-5440, Fax: 972-2-537-9489 Advertising Fax: 972-2-531-5425, Email Editorial: [email protected] Subscriptions: [email protected] Web site: http://www.jrep.com |
Desperate Emigrations
Lev Raphael
AVI KATZ |
Baudelaire wrote, in the middle of the 19th century, that travel brought us bitter knowledge ("Amer savoir celui qu'en tire de voyage") - so what would he have said about the forced dislocations that were too horribly common in the century that followed? The flights from a homeland in the stranglehold of a murderous regime?
Prolific novelist Nicholas Delbanco's latest book - a novel drawing from personal experience - is a deeply affecting meditation on just such desperate emigrations. Set primarily in London during World War II and just after, it weaves together the memories and reflections of three generations of an unnamed clan of privileged, cultured German Jews who flee Hitler's Germany for England and, later, America.
But not all of them manage to escape. One relative dies of cancer, whose onset may have been triggered by the juggernaut of Hitler's campaign to delegitimize the existence of German Jews and place them outside German society. Another poisons himself after being removed from his position as a hospital director, a third leaps to her death from a window rather than be taken away by the Gestapo, and many others are murdered in Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz.
Even for those who do get away, escape is only physical, for the loss of their homeland imbues even quotidian details of the life that was in effect stolen from them with the magical gleam of a fairy tale. Whether describing a family home large enough to have a music room; a mother's diamonds that outshone a chandelier; the ride to school in a chauffeured car; or a 16th birthday party with "champagne and caviar and an orchestra in the rear garden," these fragments gleam like shards of some wonderful broken vase, both beautiful and dangerous.
Even the pleasure of listening to a recording of Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" elides into misery as Julia, the main narrator's mother, wonders without answer how the culture that produced so many great musicians produced Hitler too. She broods over knowing "that where you once belonged is a country you will never see and cannot dream of visiting again... when a whole country is evil like that, it's madness to think of returning." Being steeped in German art, music and literature did not serve to protect the family here in any way, but has become a painful sign of their shockingly ambivalent status in Germany. They thought they belonged, but they did not. Bitter knowledge, indeed - and the irony is that the family didn't identify particularly strongly with Judaism, celebrating Christmas with a tree and everything that goes with it.
Near the novel's opening the author describes Julia's husband, Karl, an artist-turned-businessman, carefully and thoughtfully constructing a self-portrait to map the landscape he finds most familiar: his face. This is like Delbanco's own method, as he adds one well-chosen brush stroke after another. The novel is rich with small, telling details, lovingly brought to life: the custom-made oaken cupboard for silver with its green velvet lining that holds a vast array of cutlery; the "Himbersaft," delec-table raspberry syrup served as a beverage in three different ways; or the Airedale terrier that kills a neighbor's chicken during the era of Germany's epic inflation, and the wheelbarrow full of marks that's brought next door to make good the loss.
The writing in "What Remains" is perfectly pitched and evocative throughout, as in this reflection on a 92-year-old mourning all his dead friends: "In the long sonata of the dead - the learned and the winsome and the cultured and vivacious - there is now only this diminishing reprise."
With its dead-on portrayal of a child's perspective of adults and its intimate focus on someone in the process of painting, "What Remains" is reminiscent of another paean to longing, loss and memory: "To The Lighthouse." In that novel the painter Lily reflects "nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint," which could just as well be the epigram for this book as the line from Ezra Pound that Delbanco has chosen: "What thou lovest well remains,/the rest is dross."
More than once Julia tells her son Ben - whose first-person narrative frames the book - "when they take away your house and kill the people that you love they can't take what you carry in your head," but this defiance rings hollow. After all, for a fam-ily that has known "departures enough," the Holocaust is as much a presence in their lives as a pack of wolves outside the circle of a dwindling wilderness campfire.
A small-scale story of a larger tragedy, "What Remains" is a short novel, but it's a powerful one, written with the shimmering and confident grace of a Chopin nocturne.
Lev Raphael is the book critic for National Public Radio's "The Todd Mundt Show."
Books
|
 |
|
© The Jerusalem Report 1999-2004 |  |