Category: Poland

Amos Oz, Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, holocaust, Israel, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Vintage, war

‘Touch the Water, Touch the Wind’ by Amos Oz (translated by Nicholas de Lange)

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Fiction – paperback; Vintage; 158 pages; 1992. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange in collaboration with the author.

It’s not often a book goes over my head, but I’m afraid this 1973 novella by Amos Oz was a bit lost on me.

Touch the Water, Touch the Wind was the author’s fourth work of fiction.

The story arc traces what happens to a married couple after they are separated in 1939 during the Second World War and then reunited on the eve of the Six Day War in 1967.

When the Nazis advance into Poland, Elisha Pomeranz, a Jewish watchmaker and mathematician, evades capture by hiding in the woods not far from his home, reinventing himself as a magician and woodcutter. His wife, Stepha, stays behind, using her beauty and intelligence to survive.

When the war ends, Stepha moves to Moscow and becomes a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, Elisha makes his way to the Jewish homeland, via Austria, Hungary, Romania and Greece.

A master of reinvention

The story is mainly focused on Elisha’s experience, for when he arrives in Palestine he sets up a watchmaker’s shop and settles into a fairly routine, mundane life but one in which he is happy.

Later, after a sordid affair with an American woman who turns up on his doorstep, he worries that he is being watched by forces unknown. To become invisible, he reinvents himself as a shepherd tending a small flock on a kibbutz in the northern part of the country, where he tutors science to local schoolchildren to get by.

Later, he writes an important research paper that is published in a scientific periodical, attracting the attention of the world’s press and scientific community.

The article is by no means modest or insignificant : according to the headlines in the evening newspaper he has succeeded in solving one of the most baffling paradoxes connected with the mathematical concept of infinity.

But while some doubt the authenticity of Elisha’s discovery, his fame offers a form of protection.

Eventually, things come to a head on the kibbutz for even those in a position of power, while cognizant of the fact that they have a “mathematical genius” living amongst them, doubt his commitment to the cause.

A collage of prose styles

There’s a lot in this short novella that went over my head, perhaps because I just don’t know enough about the different aspects to Jewish life and history, but more likely because it’s written in an unusual style that I found hard to like.

The first third in particular reads like a Gothic fairytale with elements of magic realism thrown in for good measure making for pretty heavy going. There are later sections that feel like reportage, while others are lyrical and dotted with beautiful descriptions of landscapes and scenery. This constant switching in style made it hard to get a handle on the story as a whole.

That said, I suspect this collage of prose styles is deliberate. Because if I got anything out of this difficult novella it is that Jewish people have survived for centuries by using all kinds of techniques, whether that be assimilating, going to ground or pretending to be something that they are not in order to get by. For instance, Elisha’s constant reinvention of himself, first to evade the horrors of the Holocaust and later to avoid those pursuing him for nefarious purposes, is mirrored by the author’s constant change in prose style and tempo.

The text is also heavy with religious and sexual metaphors that began to wear very thin.

Not having read anything by Amos Oz before, I’m not sure how this book fits into his oeuvre and whether it’s indicative of his work as a whole. I’d be interested in hearing from others who have read his books and can perhaps suggest another novel that may be more suited to my tastes.

I read this book for Novellas in November (#NovNov), which is hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck 

Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Olga Tokarczuk, Poland, Publisher, Setting, TBR40

‘Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead’ by Olga Tokarczuk

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Fitzcarraldo Editions; 215 pages; 2018. Translated from the Polish by  Antonia Lloyd-Jones

This morning I awoke to the news that Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead has been longlisted for this year’s Man Booker International Prize. (You can see the entire longlist on Tony’s blog.)

I read this excellent Polish novel last week because it had made the shortlist for the EBRD Literature Prize and I had been invited to the award ceremony and wanted to be up to speed with the nominations. (I had already read one of the other shortlisted titles, Soviet Milk by Nora Ikstena, translated from Latvian by Margita Gaelitis, which I absolutely adored, but ran out of time to read the winning book — Hamid Ismailov’s The Devils’ Dance — but hope to get to it soon.)

Tokarczuk actually won the Man Booker International Prize last year for her novel Flights, which earned her and her translator £25,000 apiece.  If she wins it again, I suspect she’ll be the first author to take the prize two years in a row.

An eccentric narrator

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead — the title comes from a book  by William Blake — stars an eccentric woman in her sixties who is an expert in astrology, loves William Blake and champions animal rights.

‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,’ I said. ‘Its attitude towards Animals. If people behave brutally towards Animals, no form of democracy is ever going help them, in fact nothing will at all.’

Janina Duszejko is the kind of woman who lives alone, preferring animals to people, and writes letters to those in authority when she sees something she doesn’t like or agree with.

A former construction engineer, she now works at a school teaching young children — “I always did my best to capture their attention fully, to have them remember important things not out of fear of a bad mark but out of genuine passion” — and her spare time keeping an eye on her neighbour’s second homes, which are locked up during the winter months, and translating the work of William Blake with a former student.

Set in a remote village in Poland, just across the border from the Czech Republic, the story is a deft mix of Janina’s subversive interior monologue combined with a criminal investigation into the deaths of several of her neighbours, who all died in mysterious circumstances. Janina’s theory, which she is keen to share with everyone, including the police, is that the murders were committed by animals as an act of vengeance: each victim is a hunter and the footprints of deer are always nearby.

A noirish book with a sense of humour

Lest you think the book is overly dark and noirish, I can assure you that it’s not. Yes, Janina is a bit crazy and yes, she admits she’s pessimistic — “I see everything as if in a dark mirror, as if through smoked glass. […]  I interpret everything as abnormal, terrible and threatening. I see nothing but Catastrophes” — but there’s a lot of humour in this book and Janina is wonderful company.

It was hard to have a conversation with Oddball. He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding. I think Oddball was suffering from this Ailment.

It’s a wonderfully atmospheric read, too, because Tokarczuk’s prose somehow captures the feeling of cold and snow and the beauty of nature during the winter. It feels very Eastern European in mood and setting, dripping as it does with melancholy and a kind of intellectual strangeness.

I’ve seen some descriptions of Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead as a crime novel, but I’m not sure I agree that’s the best way to sum up a story that refuses to be boxed in as such. This is a highly original novel, one that is as much about compassion and equality between humans and animals as it is about a string of mysterious deaths in a snowy setting. It’s not a police procedural, nor is it a straight philosophical anti-hunting text but it is an intriguing mix of both, with a lot of other stuff thrown in for good measure including themes of loneliness, independence and growing old.

It won’t be for everyone, but for me it was a rather thought-provoking read and has made me keen to try more by this best-selling Polish author.

This is my 9th book for #TBR40. I bought it on Kindle late last year, although I can’t quite remember what prompted me to buy it. I suspect it might have been off the back of her Man Booker International win…

Australian Women Writers Challenge, Author, AWW2018, Book review, Fiction, Heather Morris, historical fiction, holocaust, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Zaffre

‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ by Heather Morris

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The Tattooist of Auschwitz

Fiction – hardcover; Zaffre; 288 pages; 2018.

I’ve read a lot of Holocaust novels in my time (and quite a few this year, it would seem), but The Tattooist of Auschwitz, by Heather Morris, is a rarity: it’s about finding love in the most hellish of places and ends on such a joyous note it’s hard not to be deeply affected by it.

It is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov, a Jew from Slovakia, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942.

Here, Lale is ordered by SS officers to tattoo numbers on the arms of his fellow prisoners, a horrid task he finds deeply upsetting to carry out. But the privileged position of Tätowierer — the tattooist —  affords him specific “luxuries” (a room of his own, for instance, and extra rations) and gives him access to certain areas of the camp, which means he can exchange money and jewels stolen from Jews for much-needed food to keep others alive.

Love affair behind the razor wire

Lale, it seems, is a bit of a wheeler and dealer, a cheeky chap with a ready smile and a willingness to help others, but he’s also a romantic. One day, in the queue of new arrivals waiting to be tattooed, stands a frail young woman called Gita. Lale scratches ink into her arm and falls quietly in love.

The novel traces Lale’s courtship of Gita, who was sent to nearby Birkenau, and their subsequent love affair conducted via smuggled letters and clandestine visits outside her block.

Some two years later, when Gita is shipped out of the camp, Lale thinks he will never see her again, but events conspire otherwise. The circumstances of their coming together in the immediate aftermath of the war are nothing short of miraculous — and it would be a hard-hearted reader indeed who did not feel deeply moved by their reunion. I finished this book with tears coursing down my face — not from sadness, but from joy.

A secret brought out into the open

The circumstances in which The Tattooist of Auschwitz was written are no less miraculous. Lale’s son Gary wanted someone to tell his parent’s story. He introduced writer Heather Morris to his father, who was then in his late 80s and living in Melbourne, Australia, where he and Gita had married and settled down to start a family and run their own business.

Over the course of three years, Morris visited Lale two or three times a week to hear his tale, which he’d kept secret for more than 50 years. When Lale died in 2006, Morris hoped to turn his story into a film. More than a decade later, she transformed the screenplay into a novel, and it’s been a bestseller ever since.

It’s not a perfect novel, but it’s heartfelt and the writing style, simple and to the point, moves the story along at a good pace. There are vivid descriptions of the horror and misery of the camps, but this is juxtaposed by small acts of kindness and resistance. It’s a story that shows that even in the darkest of places good things can happen and, as clichéd as this sounds, love can conquer all.

You can read more about the book and Lale’s life in this article on the BBC News website.

This is my 5th book for #AWW2018

Author, Book review, Fiction, holocaust, literary fiction, New York, Poland, Publisher, Setting, USA, Vintage, William Styron

‘Sophie’s Choice’ by William Styron

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Fiction – paperback; Vintage Classics; 635 pages; 2004.

First published in 1979, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron is often regarded as a landmark of holocaust fiction, not least because of the controversy it stirred up at the time of publication: Styron was accused of revisionism, because he presents the view that the Holocaust was not solely or exclusively directed at the Jews and that the camps were merely an initiative to secure labour for the German war effort; and the book was banned in several countries because of its explicit sexual content.

I read it because I was looking for something meaty and compelling to get me through a long-haul flight to Australia, so I packed it in my hand luggage and then spent the next three weeks carting it around with me, reading it on planes, in quiet moments before lights out, in the sun on a succession of balconies and decks — always in places where my surroundings seemed vastly more pleasant than the contents of the book.

I didn’t actually finish it until I was back in the UK. And even though it’s a rather brilliant novel, intimate in tone, languid in its storytelling and with a breadth and scope to far outweigh many contemporary novels, I was rather relieved to get to the end. I have very mixed feelings about the book as a whole.

The plot

Before I explain what I did and didn’t like about Sophie’s Choice, let me give you a brief recap of the plot. If you have seen the 1982 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep (for which she won an Academy Award for Best Actress) this might already be familiar, but I haven’t seen the movie and am unsure how faithful it remained to the book. Forgive me, then, if I repeat stuff you know already.

The story is told from the point of view of a writer named Stingo looking back on a seminal year in his life some 30 years earlier. In 1947, fired from his job working for a big book publisher in Manhattan, he moves into a cheap boarding house in Brooklyn to begin working on a novel. Here he befriends two boarders living in the rooms above his — Nathan Landau, a Jewish American, who is a biochemist, and Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Catholic, an Auschwitz survivor. Both Nathan and Sophie are in a rather tempestuous relationship, which becomes increasingly more violent as the novel progresses.

Stingo becomes a close friend of the couple, especially Sophie with whom he is secretly in love. She trusts him enough to tell him about her troubled life in Poland and confesses a series of shameful secrets that continue to plague her. One of these secrets — and this is where I’d advise you skip ahead to the next paragraph if you haven’t yet read the book — is the fact that upon arrival at Auschwitz, a cruel camp doctor forced her to decide which of her two children should be sent to the gas chamber immediately and which should be allowed to live on in the camp. It is this horrendous decision upon which the entire plot of the novel hinges, because after this confession Sophie plunges into a deep alcoholic depression from which there is no return.

Here’s what I liked about the story:

1. The prose style is intimate and feels confessional. The sentences are long and often overly verbose, but there’s a lot of heart in the story-telling. It’s almost as if Stingo has pulled up a chair by the fire to tell you — and only you — how a single year of his life left a marked impression on everything that followed. This style helps avoid the story plunging into a pit of despair. While the bits about Auschwitz and Sophie’s life in Poland — which are told flashback style — are heavy going and morbid, on the whole the book has a light, floaty feel because the prose doesn’t take itself too seriously. And there are some quite funny moments too — especially the early chapters about Stingo’s job.

2. The structure is non-linear, so the morbid bits (Auschwitz) are interleaved with more exciting elements (Brooklyn). A succession of major revelations being dropped in when the reader last expects it also helps maintain interest and intrigue over the course of more than 600 (long) pages.

3. The characterisation is superb. The main trio of characters are incredibly well drawn — you expect them to walk off the page — and even the subsidiary characters, such as Stingo’s father and his landlady, feel vibrant and real.

Here’s what I didn’t like about the story:

1. It’s too long. There’s quite a lot of repetition — about slavery, about Sophie’s beauty, about Nathan’s increasingly chaotic and unpredictable behaviour — so could easily have lost a couple of hundred pages in a ruthless edit and the book would not be the poorer for it.

2. There’s too much explicit sex in it. I get that it’s written from the point of view of a sex-craved 22-year-old male virgin, but do we need to read about it on every second page? And, yes, it’s the late 1940s before the ready availability of contraception, but it seems unfair to portray every woman as being frigid or — excuse the language — cockteasers because they won’t put out. This point of view is so overtly male (and sexist) I could barely contain my rage reading it!

3. There’s too much emphasis on Sophie’s beauty. As per point 2, I understand that Stingo is obsessed by Sophie, but constant reference to her bust, her backside, her pouty lips and her sexual exploits with Nathan wears thin very quickly. This sexual objectification shifts the emphasis from Sophie’s psychological trauma towards her physical attributes so that we never get a real handle on how her experience affected her mentally. The idea that she was far too beautiful to deserve the Nazi’s cruel treatment begs the question, did only ugly people deserve to be exterminated?

And don’t get me started on the way her sexual appetite is depicted.

Those negative points aside, there’s no doubt that Sophie’s Choice is a 20th century classic. It’s ambitious — in scope, in structure, in storytelling — and tells a horrific story in a compassionate, compelling way. It’s slightly unweildly and not without its faults, but as an examination of human failings, of racism, of religion, of politics and American life in aftermath of World War Two it feels authentic, important — and powerful.

Australia, Author, AWW2016, Book review, Magda Szubanski, memoir, Non-fiction, Poland, Publisher, Reading Australia 2016, Scotland, Setting, Text

‘Reckoning’ by Magda Szubanksi

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Reckoning by Magda Szubanski

Non-fiction – paperback; Text Publishing; 400 pages; 2016. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

If you had met my father you would never, not for an instant, have thought he was an assassin.

So begins Magda Szubanksi’s extraordinary memoir Reckoning, which is as much a love letter to her dad as it is an autobiography of her own life.

Most British readers will know Magda from the Australian sit-com Kath & Kim, where she plays the sports-obsessed unlucky-in-love Sharon Strzelecki. But she also starred in the 1995 Hollywood film Babe, the story of a pig who wants to be a sheepdog, and appeared in a slew of comedy shows from the late 1980s onwards. She first came to my attention in 1986 when she was in The D Generation, a comedy sketch show created and written by a group of Melbourne University students, and later Fast-Forward, another comedy sketch show that went on to become Australia’s highest rating TV production of that type.

Not your usual celebrity memoir

That aside, you don’t need to know who Magda is to appreciate this book. It may be billed as a memoir, but it’s so much more than that. Yes, it tells the story of Magda’s life, but it’s got an intellectual rigour to it that you don’t often find in your usual run-of-the-mill celebrity autobiography.

It covers some very hard-hitting topics including relationships between fathers and daughters, what it is to be an immigrant (Magda was born in Liverpool, England, to a Scottish mother and Polish father, and they immigrated to Australia when she was five years old), intergenerational guilt, survivor’s guilt and “genetic memory”, the Holocaust and the Polish resistance, politics, feminism, mental health and repressed sexuality.

The latter is a major part of Magda’s story, for she kept her own sexuality a secret for much of her adult life, frightened not only of being rejected by her loved ones but by the Australian public and the film and television industry in which she’d forged such a successful career. Her struggle with this element of herself  is threaded throughout the narrative and her inability to come to terms with it publicly manifested itself in anxiety, depression and over-eating. She eventually came out live on TV in 2012 when she realised it was time to finally stand up and “do the right thing”:

It was possibly the most nervous I have ever been. My breathing was constricted but I could still make a sentence and even a joke. When the guys [the hosts of the TV show The Project] asked me how I identified I replied, “I am absolutely not straight. I wouldn’t define myself as bisexual either. I would say I am gay-gay-gay-gay-gay-gay-a-little-bit-not-gay-gay-gay-gay. Unfortunately, there’s not actually a word to describe me, so I have to express myself through the medium of dance.”

Bearing witness

Another thread running throughout Magda’s life is her father’s dark history. He was just 15 when the Nazi’s invaded his home town of Warsaw. Most Poles fled, but the Szubanskis stayed put. Magda’s father formed his own “private army” — “a vagrant bunch of childhood friends roaming around doing whatever damage they could, especially killing Germans” — before he was properly recruited, aged 19, to become a non-commissioned officer of the Polish execution squad known as Unit 993/W Revenge Company. This top-secret unit was tasked with assassinating agents of the Gestapo and Polish traitors. “It sounds like a movie,” writes Magda, “It wasn’t.”

In a city where everyone had something to be afraid of, those who aided the Nazis lived in fear of people like my father. His unit comprised both men and women. […] They targeted collaborators who gave the names of resistance members to the Gestapo. Unit 993/W also assassinated Poles who told the Gestapo where Jews were hiding. And so the Nazi collaborators were sentenced to death by the Polish underground courts. Despite the chaos of war, due legal process was followed. The traitor would be tried in absentia in a court of law and the sentence would be carried out by my father’s unit. Then, when the time was right, they would run in, read them the list of crimes of which they had been found guilty, and shoot them.

During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, Magda’s father was captured and sent to a POW camp. He escaped while on the notorious Lamsdorf Death March, but was recaptured and sent to two more POW camps. Eventually, he was liberated by the Russians and made his way to Scotland, where he reinvented himself as an Englishman, married Magda’s mother, a Scot of Irish extraction, and tried to forget his past. He never saw his parents again.

Clearly a man of courage, who had a strong instinct for survival, Magda describes him as:

… warmhearted, friendly, engaging, intelligent, generous, humorous, honourable, affectionate, arrogant, blunt, loyal. He was a family man. He was handsome, although he did not have heroic stature. He was five foot four. He was stylish, fashion-conscious; a dandy even. […] He loved tennis, he loved ballet, he loved good conversation. Out there in the Melbourne suburbs […] you would never have guessed that he was capable of killing in cold blood. But he was. Poor bastard.

For Magda, the struggle is to reconcile in her own head (and heart) the man she loved with the man who was capable of shooting people dead, and much of this book explores that murky territory, trying to put events into some kind of context and fleshing out the ambiguities and moral complexities of what it was to live through the Second World War. Was it okay to kill people if you were on the “right” side?

An intimate read

Reckoning is a deeply personal read — sometimes uncomfortably so — but Magda is an honest, forthright guide, and her love for her parents (and her siblings, especially older sister Barbara) shine through. This is not a sentimental read, nor is it a self-pitying one, but it’s a warm, intelligent, brave and occasionally eye-opening one. I found it utterly captivating and came away from it feeling as if Magda had somehow exonerated the ghosts of her family’s past — or at least come to terms with them.

Unsurprisingly, Reckoning has won a slew of awards in Australia, including ABIA Book of the Year, ABIA Biography of the Year, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, Indie Award for Non-Fiction, and Nielsen BookData Booksellers’ Choice Award.

It has just been published in the UK and will be released in the US and Canada next month.

As an aside, do watch this clip of one of Magda’s most ingenious creations, Lynne Postlewaite, whose catch-phrase “I said pet, I said love…” still makes me laugh:


This is my 45th book for #ReadingAustralia2016 and my 30th for #AWW2016.

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, Germany, Haus Publishing, holocaust, literary fiction, Monika Held, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘This Place Holds No Fear’ by Monika Held

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Fiction – hardcover; Haus Publishing; 277 pages; 2015. Translated from the German by Anne Posten. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Monika Held’s This Place Holds No Fear is an extraordinarily beautiful novel — about survival, the power of love and the strength of one exceptional marriage.

It’s also about the Holocaust (fittingly, it was published on Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz just six weeks ago), but it’s quite unlike any Holocaust novel that I have read. That’s because it’s not so much about what happens to those who are sent to the death camps while they are there but explores what happens to the survivors afterwards — how do they get on with their lives after such unfathomable horror and trauma?

A love story

The novel is essentially a love story between Heiner, a Viennese man, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1942 as a Communist, and Lena, a translator from Germany, who is 10 years his junior.

They meet by accident when Heiner is called to give evidence as a witness at the Auschwitz trials, held in Frankfurt in 1964, in which former SS officials and guards were tried for war crimes.

Lena is working in the court, translating evidence from Polish into German. On the 52nd day of the hearings, Heiner collapses in the hallway of the courthouse, where Lena rescues him — she wipes his brow, helps him to a chair and gets him a glass of water — forging the beginning of a love affair that endures for the next 30-plus years.

The Auschwitz legacy

As the couple’s story unfolds we learn that Heiner’s experiences at Auschwitz will forever mark him.  As prisoner 63,387,  he worked as a typist in the prisoner’s infirmary typing death records for those internees who had died.

Several times a day the SS man brings us a list with names and numbers of the dead. We don’t know how these people died. We can choose from thirty different illnesses. According to my typewriter people die of heart failure, phlegmons, pneumonia, spotted fever and typhus, embolisms, influenza, circulatory collapse, stroke, cirrhosis of the liver, scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and kidney failure. Under no circumstances is anyone tortured, beaten to death or shot at Auschwitz. No one starves, dies of thirst; no one is hanged, no one is gassed.

On a daily basis, Heiner witnessed great brutality and unspeakable acts of cruelty and inhumanity by the SS officers and guards, but he knew that he had to survive in order to be a witness. But life was cheap and at any point he could be the next to die:

That was the first lesson he’d learned: You can die. For looking too curious, too horrified, too bold, too submissive or not submissive enough. For walking. Too fast, too slow, too casually. You can die for saying your number wrong. Too softly, too loudly, too hesitantly, too slowly, or too fast. You can be killed for not knowing the words to a song. If a person wants to kill, any reason will do.

But after liberation there were new challenges to overcome— “He’d survived — but what was the point? The perpetrators were convicted and would serve their sentences without remorse, without understanding, without any shock over what they’d done” — and no one understood what he had gone through:

 At home people had looked at him mistrustfully: How come you’re still alive? We thought there was only one way to freedom at Auschwitz: through the chimney. Their eyes asked: What did you do? Were you a Nazi stooge? At whose cost did you survive? If only they had asked him directly. He found their secretive looks repugnant.

His first marriage, which is mentioned only in passing, falls apart when his wife and young child are unable to cope with Heiner’s ongoing suffering and his inability to escape from the shadow of Auschwitz that continues to loom over him.

By the time Lena meets him — almost 20 years after liberation — Heiner is still in the grip of that shadow. Their marriage works, not because Lena helps Heiner to overcome his pain — he can never overcome it — but because she accepts that it is part of his character, part of his being. As she tells Heiner’s friend, Tadek, who is also a Holocaust survivor, “it’s like living with a singer who can’t stop singing the song of his life”:

He sings it in the morning, he sings it at noon and in the afternoon, evening and night. It has many verses. You have to like the song or you’ll go crazy.

Marriage governed by trauma

This Place Holds No Fear offers a poignant, often moving but never sentimental, glimpse into a marriage that is governed by trauma. It’s never maudlin, however, but it distills in clear, eloquent prose (beautifully translated by Anne Posten), an unconditional love that knows no bounds.

It particularly comes into its own in the second half of the novel when the couple travel to Poland, now under Communist rule, to deliver relief supplies to other Holocaust survivors. Here, Lena listens into conversations that deeply move her, because in meeting Heiner’s comrades she comes to understand that they all share a deep need to tell their (disturbing) stories. Yes, they are psychologically damaged men, but they have managed to stay sane not by forgetting what happened to them but by remembering their unnatural pasts.

The novel is based on a true story — the author interviewed and spent time with Auschwitz survivors — so it feels incredibly authentic. It’s certainly powerful and compelling. And when I finished it, the first word that sprang to mind was not “depressing” or “traumatic” but quite simply this: “beautiful”.

Austria, Author, Book review, Books in translation, Fiction, Hanna Krall, holocaust, literary fiction, Peirene Press, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘Chasing the King of Hearts’ by Hanna Krall

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Chasing-the-king-of-hearts

Fiction – paperback; Peirene Press; 176 pages; 2013. Translated from the Polish by Philip Boehm.

Last Christmas I treated myself to all the Peirene Press titles that I did not currently own. My plan was to work my way through them over the course of this year. Alas, with so many books — and other obligations — vying for my attention, it was only last week that I managed to pull one from the pile: Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts.

This book is not your usual Peirene fare in the sense that it’s a little too long to be classed as a novella (it certainly took me far longer than two hours to read it), but I’m not sure that really matters. The book is a tribute to one woman’s amazing ability to survive everything that World War Two throws at her, including the execution of various family members, life in the Warsaw Ghetto, several stints in jail, torture by a cruel Gestapo officer (was there any other kind?)  and  internment in Auschwitz. And that’s only the half of it.

A woman’s love for her husband

The story is framed around a love affair between a woman, Izolda Regensberg, and her husband, Shayek, the “King of Hearts” of the title, who is taken away by force to a concentration camp. Over the next few years, Izolda does everything in her power to be reunited with him — indeed, she becomes the “Queen of Chameleons”: she changes her name, her hair, her occupation and her religion. She finds new ways to make money — selling goods on the blackmarket and acting as a secret message courier — in order to fund her journey to find her beloved.

Her life is constantly in danger as she passes herself off as a blonde-haired Catholic — and for much of the time she gets away with it. But every now and then she doesn’t:

When the train stops at Radom the German takes her to the police station.
Evidently you look like a Jew, says the policeman.
She’s genuinely surprised: I look like a Jew? I’ve never heard that before.
Can you say your Hail Mary? the policeman asks.
Of course. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with the… […] Blessed art thou among women… Because she is addressing the Mother of God, who is full of grace, she goes slowly, making every word count, to show respect.
Listen to you, the policeman laughs out loud. What normal person says Hail Mary like that? Usually it’s hailmaryfullofgracethelordiswiththee… You really are a Jew!

But despite this little “hiccup” she remains steely, determined and astonishingly resilient. Nothing ever seems to faze her: not even broken shoulders and a knocked out tooth. She simply dusts herself off and continues her quest.

And it is a quest in the truest sense of the word, for Izolda comes across so many challenges and obstacles and tests of courage, yet she never gives in. Not even the horrors of Auschwitz can dent her perseverance or enthusiasm. Indeed, she’s so self-assured she approaches Dr Mengele for a job!

Fast-paced adventure story

As you might imagine for a book that covers so much geographical territory —Vienna, Warsaw and countless other towns — the narrative has a rather fast pace. Sometimes events move so quickly it’s hard to keep up —  it’s a catalogue of train journeys, some taken on purpose, others by force  — and reads like a woman’s own adventure story.

The prose style is neat and clipped. It’s written in the third person but in the present tense, which lends the story a sense of immediacy, and it brims with tension throughout. It’s not sensational in the Hollywood sense, but it is a magnificent story told with exceptional restraint. Despite being set during the Holocaust, there’s not a shred of sentimentality or pity in it.

And yet it’s never quite clear whether Izolda’s love is truly reciprocated, and her inner life, along with Shayek himself, is frustratingly unknowable because she’s so stoic and self-contained. But on the whole Chasing the King of Hearts is the kind of story that makes you marvel at humankind’s ability to adapt and survive in the face of so much adversity. It’s also the kind of story that I know will remain with me for a long time to come…

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Faber and Faber, Fiction, holocaust, literary fiction, Poland, Publisher, Setting, Steve Sem-Sandberg

‘The Emperor of Lies’ by Steve Sem-Sandberg

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Emperor-of-lies

Fiction – paperback; Faber and Faber; 664 pages; 2012. Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death.

Steve Sem-Sandberg’s The Emperor of Lies won the August Prize — the Swedish equivalent of the Booker Prize — in 2009 and was longlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2012.

It is a dense behemoth of a book, with nary a chink of light in its dark fictionalised account of the Holocaust, but I read it at a time when I was looking for something substantial to get my teeth into. At more than 650 tiny print-filled pages, it certainly fit the bill. It is by no means a light or easy read, but it is one that rewards the patient reader.

Based on a true story

The book is based on the factual story of Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a 63-year-old Jewish businessman, who was the leader of the Jewish ghetto in Łódź. The ghetto — the second largest in Poland — was established by the Nazis in February 1940. Its 200,000 inhabitants were forced to work gruelling hours  — and in impoverished conditions marked by constant hunger, cold and fear — to provide supplies for the German military.

Chaim, who was also known as “Eldest of the Jews” after the Nazis appointed him to the role, was a mysterious figure with murky morals: was he, as many believed, a Nazi pawn, content to do as the Germans wanted in order to save his own skin and fulfil his quest for power? Or was he acting in the misguided belief that if he turned the ghetto into a well-oiled machine for military production he would not only save the lives of those Jews who worked for him but convince the Third Reich that Jews were not the vermin they were thought to be. In other words, was he a sinner or a saint?

The book, which explores this question in exacting, sometimes overwhelming, always meticulous, detail, fictionalises Chaim’s life and the lives of those who lived among him, but it does not provide a definitive answer (although the title might hint at the author’s opinion). What it does is make the reader see the man in all his many facets — some of it good, much of it bad — and leaves you to come to your own conclusions.

Problematic but still powerful

The problem I have with a book of this nature is not knowing what is real and what is not. If it is based on fact and historical research — and the appendices suggest Sem-Sandberg has devoted considerable time in this pursuit — why not write a straight non-fiction book so it’s perfectly clear? Why fictionalise something and then write it in such a way — very dry, prosaic and “journalistic” — that it reads like authoritative non-fiction reportage?

The answer, I suspect, is that the author would find it difficult to bring in the view points of the vast array of characters at the heart of this novel, all of whom were based on real people. (The book is littered with eye witness accounts.) Indeed, there are so many characters that it’s hard to keep track of them (though the guide at the back is helpful), and because it is written from so many perspectives it’s difficult to identify with any one person. I often felt like I’d just got to “know” someone, and then the story switched to a different character and I would have to start afresh, as it were.

This might sound like I am being negative, but I have to admit that I found The Emperor of Lies a truly fascinating and absorbing read. It tends to plod along, but I appreciated the detail and the way in which Sem-Sandberg examines Chaim’s moral culpability. It’s crammed with information but is also very nuanced and moving, so that the weight of the emotion builds slowly and by the final page you feel absolutely shattered. When Chaim sacrifices the elderly and the children of the ghetto to save the working population, it comes as quite a shock. And when you know the fate of those that are disappearing — many were murdered in Auschwitz and Chelmo — when they do not, it is extremely distressing.

Although The Emperor of Lies is a problematic novel, it is also one of the most powerful I have ever read.

You can read more about the real life Chaim Rumkowski on wikipedia (though the articles seems almost as contentious as the person it’s about). And there’s a terrific review — or should I say hatchet job — on the Financial Times website. There’s a more positive take on it in The Independent.

Author, Book review, Books in translation, Corsair, Fiction, holocaust, Maria Angels Anglada, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘The Auschwitz Violin’ by Maria Àngels Anglada

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Auschwitz-violin

Fiction – paperback; Corsair; 109 pages; 2010. Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Any book set in a Nazi death camp brings with it a certain kind of foreboding. But there’s something quite uplifting about Maria Àngels Anglada’s tale of survival set in Auschwitz.

Here, amid the death and brutality, a Jewish prisoner and former luthier is charged with a special task: he must make a violin for the camp’s Commandant using a limited palette of materials and tools. What Daniel doe not know is that if he fails to make the instrument to a high enough standard he will be handed over to the camp’s doctor, a man who conducts terrible experiments on his patients. But if he does build a suitable violin the doctor must hand over a case of wine to the Commandant.

This secret wager is no doubt a cruel one, but because the knowledge of it is kept from Daniel until well into the task (a fellow prisoner lets it slip), it does not affect the way he carries out the job. Indeed, Daniel is already living in fear — mainly because the Commandant’s behaviour is vindictive and unpredictable — so making the violin comes as a welcome distraction.

The story is an incredibly poignant one, especially as it shows how Daniel’s dedication to his craft gives him a reason to continue living when all around him lie starvation, disease and death. The very thought that his hand-crafted violin could be used to make beautiful music provides much-needed hope at a time of great despair.

While the book is far too slim to flesh out characters or provide important background detail, it tells the story in a simple, straightforward prose style reminiscent of short-story writing. And while it might be just over 100 pages long, it’s power should not be under-estimated. The author’s inclusion of real-life extracts from Nazi documents, which are detailed at the beginning of each chapter, only add to the weight of this novella.

The Auschwitz Violin will be published in the UK on November 4.

Author, Book review, Children/YA, Fiction, holocaust, Morris Gleitzman, Penguin, Poland, Publisher, Setting

‘Once & Then’ by Morris Gleitzman

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Once&Then

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 249 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Morris Gleitzman is an English-born Australian-based writer with more than 20 childrens’ books to his name. This book, packaged as an “adult edition” brings together his two Holocaust novels — Once, first published in 2005, and Then, first published in 2008 — for the first time. Fittingly, it’s released today (August 6) to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War.

I’ll have to admit that when this one arrived on my doorstep a month or so back I was a little skeptical: surely it was just jumping on the Holocaust bandwagon already set in place by John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (both of which I loved)? What could yet another childrens’ novel tell us about the Jewish experience during the Second World War? Hadn’t it all been said before? And why wasn’t Penguin re-issuing Esther Hautzig’s true life story The Endless Steppe instead, a book I adored when I was a pre-teen and still remember with an aching fondness?

Casting my cynicism aside and holed up in my sick bed bed, I decided to give this one a go because it probably wouldn’t tax the brain matter too much. I figured I’d probably read the first 50 pages and then make a judgement call. I got so swept up in the story about a 10-year-old Jewish orphan, Felix, and his gutsy little non-Jewish friend, Zelda, that I read the book cover-to-cover in a matter of hours. And then wished I hadn’t ploughed through it so furiously because I wanted to spend more time in the company of these wonderful, inspiring characters.

A fresh perspective on the Holocaust

The beauty of Once & Then is its ability to present the Holocaust in a fresh way — that is, from the perspective of a young boy who fails to comprehend the violence and brutality around him. Of course, Boyne does this in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, but Gleitzman tackles it from a slightly different angle: a Jewish boy who doesn’t even remotely understand that it is his very religion that puts him in danger.

Indeed, when the book opens Felix’s naivety is crystal clear: he truly believes he is only residing in a Catholic orphanage, not because his parents are dead, but because they are trying to sort out their problems as Jewish booksellers before coming back to rescue him.

There were two reasons Mum and Dad chose this orphanage, because it was the closest and because of Mother Minka’s goodness. When they were bringing me here, they told me how in all the years Mother Minka was a customer of their bookshop, back before things got difficult for Jewish booksellers, she never once criticised a single book.

His innocence is all the more apparent when you realise he’s being carrying this false hope with him for three years and eight months, and yet it remains undiminished. His only fear is that when his parents return they won’t recognise him because he’s changed so much in that time.

But the tables are turned when a group of Nazis arrive one day to burn all the Jewish books in the orphanage’s library. Felix suddenly realises that he needs to rescue his parents, not the other way around.

There’s a gang of thugs going round the country burning Jewish books. Mum and Dad, wherever in Europe they are, probably don’t even know their books are in danger.
I have to try and find Mum and Dad and tell them what’s going on.
But first I must get to the shop and hide the books.

This sets Felix off on an amazing voyage of discovery in which he escapes the orphanage and begins a new life on the run. Along the way, he collects a sidekick, a six-year-old girl, whom he rescues from a burning farm. Together Felix and Zelda form a formidable duo, a kind of brother-sister act that endures all kinds of highs and lows as they try to survive everything the Nazi regime has to throw at them.

A page-turning adventure

To supply any more detail would spoil the plot, because the enjoyment of reading Once & Then is letting the adventure unfurl page by page, and experiencing the adrenalin rushes, the shocks and the tears that this brings. There’s plenty of laughs in the book, too, a delightfully naive child-like humour that softens the blows of what would otherwise be a terribly dark and depressing story.

But the best part, especially for book lovers, is the infectious enthusiasm for storytelling that exists within Felix and his undying love for British writer Richmal Crompton and her humorous Just William stories.

I clamber over the beds and squeeze onto the floor and take a book from the shelf. Just William by Richmal Crompton. It’s still one of my favourite books in the whole world. As I open it I try not to remember Mum and Dad reading it to me.
Instead, I read a bit to myself. About William’s dog. He’s called Jumble and he’s a mixture of about a hundred different dogs and William loves him even when he pees in William’s new boots.
Mum and Dad said I can have a dog like Jumble one day.
Stop it.
Stop thinking about them.
William is training Jumble to be a pirate. That’s what I love about William. He always stays hopeful, and no matter how bad things get, no matter how much the world turns upside down, his mum and dad never die.
Not ever.
I know I should be getting back, but I can’t get up at the moment. All I can do is stay here on the floor, with Just William and Zelda’s carrot, thinking about Mum and Dad and crying.

Once & Then is a powerful story about the strength and resilience of the human spirit. It’s about courage and hope, and surviving against the odds. And while it tackles one of the darkest times in 20th century history, Gleitzman does it sensitively without losing any of the important detail. There’s plenty of death here, and cruelty, but it’s not sensationalist or gratuitous. “This story is my imagination trying to grasp the unimaginable,” he writes in his afterward. I think he’s achieved it.