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April 13, 2012
Novelists tackle Holocaust
One of the authors, Daniel Kalla, will speak at Temple Sholom.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
In recent months, the Independent has received four novels that are about, or relate to, the Holocaust in some way. Incorporating historical research, varying from vast to minimal, the authors have used written records and/or oral testimony and their imaginations to create stories that explore human beings’ capacity for evil – as well as for love and kindness.
Of these works, one clearly stands out as phenomenal, though it is disturbing and demoralizing. Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies (Anansi International, 2011), translated with incredible skill from the Swedish by Sarah Death, draws readers in, despite a constant desire to “look away” or somehow hide from its contents.
Sem-Sandberg’s novel centres around Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the real-life autocrat of the Lodz ghetto. It gives readers a tangible idea of the impossible-to-understand reality of life in the ghetto, which existed for four years, imprisoning and enslaving some 200,000 Jews in an approximately 4.2-square-kilometre part of the Polish city (that the Nazis renamed Litzmannstadt) from 1940 to 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated.
The Emperor of Lies opens with a memorandum from the then-governor of the district, Friedrich Übelhör, to establish the ghetto, dated Dec. 10, 1939. “There are, at a reasonable estimate, some 320,000 Jews living in the city of Lodz today. This number cannot all be evacuated simultaneously,” it begins, then details how “the Jewish question will be solved,” concluding, “Naturally, the establishment of the ghetto is only a temporary measure. I reserve the right to decide when and how the City of Lodz is to be purged of Jews. The ultimate aim must be to burn away this infectious abscess entirely, once and for all.”
The novel then jumps ahead briefly to Sept. 1-4, 1942. Sept. 1, “That was the day, engraved forever in the memory of the ghetto, when the Chairman [Rumkowski] announced in front of everyone that he had no choice but to let the children and old people of the ghetto go.” In the first two paragraphs, the focus of the narrative is distressingly evident, with Rumkowski not contemplating the fatal consequences of the deportations for the deportees, but his own feelings. Having failed to convince the Nazis to not carry out their plans, Rumkowski thinks, “How then could he make it clear to them what an appalling loss this represented for him? For sixty-two years, I have lived and not yet been granted the happiness of being called Father, and now the authorities demand of me that I sacrifice all my children.
“Had any one of them an inkling of how he felt at this moment?”
The novel then returns to April 1940 and moves ahead chronologically to its tragic end. Sem-Sandberg portrays Rumkowski as a man who was bullied as a child and who turned into a ruthless bully himself, even before the war. It is hard to feel sympathy for him when his wife dies in 1937, or when he fails in business – prevented in one instance from success by the Bolshevik Revolution, which leads to his hatred of socialists and Bundists, and his own temper in another case. He becomes an insurance salesman, known as Mr. Death, because people who refuse his deals tend to mysteriously wind up dead the next day. Then, upon saving the life of an orphan girl, he “transforms,” starting his own orphanage, acquiring funds from the Joint Distribution Committee, and raising “the rest of the money the same way he sold life insurance. He had his methods.”
Sem-Sandberg deftly mixes fiction and fact in The Emperor of Lies. He spares no description of the brutality that took place, made all the more horrific by its mundaneness. He depicts the multiple motivations, the egomania and insecurities of Rumkowski, who convinced himself that, by making the Lodz ghetto into an efficient and integral supplier of goods for the German army, he was saving the lives of his people – and some do credit him with their survival.
Sem-Sandberg also introduces many other characters in The Emperor of Lies, both fictional and real, adding further complexity to this novel, which roughly “follows developments in the ghetto as described in the Ghetto Chronicle,” a document of some 3,000 pages, explains Sem-Sandberg in the afterword, “which was the collective work of a handful of employees in the ghetto’s archive section.” Among these characters are the few who share in the privileges of Rumkowski’s reign, the many who carry out his orders, and the multitude who suffer from them – Sem-Sandberg gives them all a voice in what really is a remarkable work.
Also the product of much research is Daniel Kalla’s The Far Side of the Sky (HarperCollins, 2011). And Kalla – a local emergency medicine doctor and author of numerous medical thrillers – ably navigates the historical fiction genre and shows himself to be a sensitive storyteller.
Kristallnacht (Nov. 9, 1938) in Vienna: “The shadow still swayed over the pavement. Franz Adler tried to blink way the memory of his brother’s dangling corpse and the silhouette it cast across the sidewalk, but the image looped over and over in his head.
“A pane of glass erupted at street level, startling Franz.
His hand slipped and he pierced her skin at the wrong angle.
‘Werdammt!’ Franz swore under his breath as he yanked back the needle’s tip.”
As the destruction continues, Kalla’s main character, a widower, surgeon Dr. Franz Adler, stitches up his sister-in-law’s wounded arm. While he does so, without the use of anesthetic, he and Esther discuss the need for him to get his daughter, Hannah, to safety.
“Franz nodded, ashamed of having resisted for so long. Until the Nazis set Vienna ablaze, he had clung to his naive belief that their reign of terror was a dark but passing phase in history.”
That belief shattered, Franz sets about planning his remaining family’s escape. He eventually manages to get himself, Esther and Hannah to Shanghai, where the Japanese Imperial Army is taking over China. There, at a refugee hospital, Franz meets nurse Soon Yi “Sunny” Mah, a young woman of mixed parentage (a Chinese father and an American mother, who died when Sunny was eight years old), with whom he eventually falls in love. Sunny has been raised by a progressive father, a doctor who taught her not only medicine, but the value of helping others.
There are many layers to The Far Side of the Sky, and Kalla tells several good stories against a complicated background that is, at times, didactic, but most often is fascinating. Readers will want to know what happens to the Adler family and their friends. As predictable as the various love stories are, their outcome is not as assured, and this will keep readers engaged to the end.
This will not be the case with The Things We Cherish (Doubleday, 2011) by Pam Jenoff, which starts strong, becomes annoying, then fizzles out.
Readers are introduced to attorney Charlotte Gold as an accomplished, hardworking public defender. Her “glorified closet” of an office was “a far cry from the marble and mahogany suite she’d had when she was a summer associate at a large New York firm. But it was all hers. It had taken two years just to get it, to fight her way out of the pit of rookie defenders who shared the sea of cubicles one floor below and have a door that closed so she could hear herself think.” And, we find out that she can think, having “spent three years in Eastern Europe on a Fulbright and other fellowships, researching the Holocaust. Her work, focusing on issues that had arisen after the war, like restitution of Jewish property and preservation of the concentration camps, was groundbreaking at the time, and she’d published some articles that had garnered a small amount of notoriety....” But her mother’s death and her boyfriend’s betrayal “came crashing down on her,” so she ended up a public defender in Philadelphia.
When that boyfriend, Brian Harrington, shows up again unexpectedly and asks for Charlotte’s help in defending Roger Dykmans, an alleged Second World War criminal, she can’t resist – the case or the boyfriend, even though he’s married the woman with whom he betrayed her. Not coincidentally, the lawyer handling the case in Munich, where Dykmans has been incarcerated, is Brian’s estranged brother, Jack.
Intertwined with the modern-day story, which takes place in 2009, is the story of a unique clock that was built by a poor farmer in Bavaria in 1903. Somehow, this timepiece holds proof of Dykmans’ innocence, but, initially, he won’t say what it is, so the lawyers must search out their own proof, which takes them to Poland and Italy, and their research and the sections having to do with the clock make for an interesting read.
The problem arises when the inevitable and predictable love affair comes between Charlotte and Jack. Her childish doubts over Jack’s every move belie her supposed intelligence and toughness. Not that strong women can’t get silly in love, but her incessant wondering, “Does he like me?” is out of place in a novel that has war crimes and the Holocaust as its other two main plotlines – not the usual backdrops for chick lit, which is, basically, what The Things We Cherish turns out to be.
Perhaps going into it knowing this fact would make it a more satisfying novel. Jenoff is a very good writer – the disappointment for this reviewer came in expecting something more thoughtful and significant, receiving it for a large portion of the book, then losing it.
Whereas The Things We Cherish might have been improved by concentrating more on the implications of the Holocaust, Paula Friedman’s The Rescuer’s Path (Plain View Press, 2012) would have benefited from leaving the Holocaust out of the story altogether.
At the heart of this tale of love and loss is Malca Bernovski who, as a 16-year-old living in Washington, D.C., in 1971, comes across an injured man while she’s riding a horse off-trail. Gavin Hareen, a leader in the antiwar movement at the time (against American involvement in Vietnam), is suspected of having bombed an army truck, killing three people. He was shot as he fled the scene, but readers are made to question whether or not he is guilty of the crime, despite the evidence implicating him, which adds a nice touch to the plot.
As the manhunt goes on, the young Malca nurses Gavin to health. The two fall in love and consummate their relationship, with later repercussions, as their daughter is put up for adoption; the third and last section of the book deals with this aspect.
It is a reasonably well-told love story, though Friedman’s style of writing is more suited to younger readers – within the first couple of pages, as soon as we read that Malca’s stallion is named Dragon, that he reared, “fought his tiny trainer,” who “let him plunge, her long hair flopping, and struggled to stay balanced,” it is hard to take The Rescuer’s Path as an adult-oriented book. Then again, its structure is somewhat complicated, as the narrative travels back and forth in time and alternates between different characters, mainly Gavin and Malca, but then their daughter, too. And, in the early stages of his injury, Gavin’s narrative is quite representative of his fever-induced delusional state.
The fact that Gavin is the son of an Arab refugee from Syria and Malca is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor adds to the uniqueness of their circumstances, but not much to the immediacy of their story. While appropriate parallels may be drawn between the experiences of Gavin’s father, who came to America as a refugee – his own father, first children and first wife having been killed in war – and those of Malca’s mother, Malca’s experience with Gavin cannot be compared to that of her mother.
Malca’s mother and grandmother managed to survive because someone took the risk of hiding them. In making her decision whether to help Gavin, Malca tries to confide in her mother more than once, apparently feeling that her situation – aiding and abetting a possible murderer (albeit with the naive/noble intent of somehow stopping the Vietnam War by his actions) – is comparable to that of the righteous gentiles who tried to help Jews during the Holocaust, in which Jews were hunted and murdered simply because they were Jews.
If this aspect of Friedman’s book had been left out, then The Rescuer’s Path would have been a fine, if a bit confused, romance novel with a message of peace and the power of love to transcend all boundaries, even those between life and death.
On Monday, April 16, 7 p.m., Daniel Kalla will speak at Temple Sholom, hosted by Temple Sholom Sisterhood and National Council of Jewish Women, Vancouver section. An RSVP is required to 604-266-7190 or [email protected] by Thursday, April 12, if at all possible.
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