Reviewed by Shira Yael Klein
This is a Holocaust memoir that
is very different from other books of the genre, in that it does not tell a chronological
story about what happened to the author’s father. It really explores how
different people relate to Holocaust memories, i.e., how the father related to
his own memories and how the son and the mother related to his father's
memories. Instead of being organized in a sequential, chronological order, this
book is presented as a swirl of memories and flashbacks. The
narrative is structured by juxtaposing different scenes and images with others that
are thematically similar — all the while jumping back and forth across history.
Basically, this book is a sort of postmodern reflection on the memory of
memory.
The author’s
father grew up in a little town next to Munkatch (in Czechoslovakia) and then
moved to Munkatch, and later, perhaps as a young adult, spent some time in Budapest.
As far as I can reconstruct the history, the family was Orthodox and quite
impoverished. The father's mother had been previously married and there were
step-siblings from that marriage, most notably a brother Harry, who survived
the Holocaust and features fairly prominently in the book. The father’s mother remarried
to an alcoholic no-goodnik type, who, at some point, left her as a single
mother raising her children. I'm not quite sure how many children were in the
family, because at one point the book mentions many step-siblings in passing.
When
the Holocaust reached Hungary, the author’s father and his siblings were young
adults. The older brother Harry was sent to forced labor. There was also a
younger brother named Shmiel/Shmuel who figures prominently in the book. When
Shmuel was 17 years old, he was deported to Auschwitz. But on the way, he realized
that nothing good was waiting for him at the end of that train ride, so he
jumped out the train’s window while the train was passing over a bridge. Although
Shmuel managed to escape through the window, jump into the river, and run to
the shore, he was shot by the SS guards and died there in the field.
For the
author of this book, Shmuel was particularly significant. Apparently, the
author had some sort of resemblance to Shmuel both physically and in his
mannerisms. The bulk of the book reflects on a trip to Poland that that the
author took with his father, where the author embarked on a quest to find the
exact bridge where Shmuel had jumped out of the train and been shot.
In this
book, the author was trying to give us the experience of different pieces of
the past floating around and trying to connect them. I am used to reading a
finished product after all the research has been done and the author has done
their best to fit the pieces together. But here, the author wanted us to share
in his experience of memory, as opposed to just telling us the facts.
In
fact, a lot of the facts are actually omitted, like exactly what happened with
the mother's previous marriage. Although the author’s father clearly survived
the war and this is a Holocaust story, the exact circumstances about how he
survived are not fully fleshed out, because the author is not trying to present
us with a chronological narrative; he's trying to present us with the
experience of memory.
Interestingly,
the book makes this whole dramatic buildup to the fact that Sommer is not
really the author’s original surname. The author’s uncle lets it slip that that
Sommer is not really his name, but is somebody else's name. But then the book never
explains what was going on. Throughout the narrative, it casually uses the name
Steinberger as the father's last name, but never explains how Steinberger
turned into Sommer.
The
author engages quite frequently in psychoanalysis. There is a lot of description,
with painstaking detail of where he and his father went, and what exactly
happened at each juncture, along with what the author was thinking and what he
thinks his father was doing and thinking and why the author thinks that the
father was acting that way.
There
are various themes that comes up as undertones that the book discussed in a
muted way but did not expand upon, like how the Holocaust was a pretty
miserable experience for anybody who was in the region, Jewish or non-Jewish.
Another theme that was not focused on but does come up is the author’s father
being bothered that his son is not as observant as he would like him to be.
And, conversely, the author wondering how his father could still trust in a God
that betrayed him.
All in
all, these different memories, scenes, and thoughts are presented very
deliberately; they are artfully juxtaposed to elicit a certain connection
between them. This is quite unlike the typical chronological front-to-back
prose that readers might be used to. It more closely reflects real life, a
person's real-life experience as a medley of different memories, different
flashbacks, free stream of consciousness. The author of this novel is an
accomplished poet, so it’s no wonder that the tapestry of memories that this
book presents is almost poetic in nature.
Shira
Yael Klein (nee Deifik) is a freelance ghostwriter and editor, who lives with her family in the
West Bank city of Beitar Illit. She can be reached via email at
songbeat@sbcglobal.net
