Ariana Neumann, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains.
London, New York, Sydney, Toronto and New Delhi: Scribner, 2020. x +
353 pp.
Part One: The
Search for the Father
At
a certain point in the history of the Holocaust, the actual voices of the
survivors are replaced by those of their children and others who take on the
task of preserving memories, and one of the key new genres in this phase is the
book of historical detection. Like Sherlock Holmes and his followers, the
survivor’s child or other relative inherits a small number of clues—a few vague
words, a hidden box of fragmentary documents, a sense of incompleteness—and an
increasing number of mysterious gaps that open up once the search begins.
Sometimes the investigating narrator does not even know they or their parents
are or were Jewish, let alone victims of the Holocaust.
This
new kind of author is also editor of someone else’s words, whether written or
spoken, and an interpreter of those words—often confused, fragmentary and
locked into the incoherence of a horrible time—whether through acts of great
empathy and imagination, almost to the point of fictionalization as a novel at
one or two removes from the reality, or objectified into quotation and
paraphrase within a mesh of scholarly or journalistic discourse, generating a
virtual microhistory of several sequential events or a biography of one or more
people whose lives were broken, distorted and transformed by their ordeal. Certainly,
the driving force of the narrative is the search for clues and then the working
out of interpretations.
My father left the world of which he seldom spoke
a riddle for me to unlock, the answer perhaps being the key to his complex and
hermetic personality (p. 35).
Neumann’s
search for further clues and ways to fill the gaps leads also to the discovery
of distant, virtually unknown members of the family, who also have
incomprehensible memories, unidentified people in photographs and a desire to
find out who they really are and, in time, whether any other members of their
family are still alive. She is young and naïve, never-doubting that what she
was is Catholic and Venezuelan, and yet, as she inherits something in her
personality she does not for many years recognize, a sense that the world is
not only full of mysteries to be solved, but of deceptive gaps that are dangerous
and treacherous places, as well as to be played in and with.
The truth of his [her father’s] past, for him. Was
a horror that could be barely even glimpsed and then only through the cracks
between his fingers. (p. 35)
About
half way through the book, however, the narrator discovers long narratives written
by her father explaining how he transformed himself from a flighty,
irresponsible adolescent into an imaginative, crafty, cunning adult: how he
changed his name, sneaked from Prague and the transports that were to take him
and hundreds of thousands of other Jews to the death camps in Poland, and lived
and worked as an industrial chemist in Berlin right under the eyes of the Nazis.
In
the course of the process of writing the book, there are chance meetings,
unexpected encounters, uncanny scenes of recognition. In a variation of Marcel
Proust’s special moments when the obscurities of memory open up like a
madeleine in a cup of tea, Ariana starts to fit together the hints of terrible
dangers along with little flashes of beauty.
Perhaps all remembrance is a process
of compilation and creation. Every day we absorb what is around us and assemble
observations of a specific time: sounds, smells, textures, words, images and
feelings. (p. 44)
Thus
“a mosaic of impressions” is formed (p. 45) and a gestalt gradually fills out
both through discovery and external research.
But for most of her childhood, they are only impressions and vague
clues, since no one prompts her into crossing the divide between her
unidentified self doing the search and the efforts of her father and others to
mask the reality of the past. In her
detective work, on her own with occasional help from others, she senses that
something very important is missing, not only further clues, but also a way of
processing the information she is gathering.
Yet, growing up in Venezuela in a firmly Roman Catholic
culture, attending a school run by Ursuline nuns, I felt out of place but never
quite understood why …. I was different because my mother and father defied
Venezuelan religious mores. I had unconventional parents. This both irked me
and made me love them even more. (p. 129)
Only
into her early adulthood and departure from home in Caracas is the
differentness and discomfort recognized insofar as it leads towards closure in
her quest and satisfaction to the creator of the book; but then, it seems, the
discovery has to be smoothed out so as to please herself, her editors, her reviewers,
and ordinary readers. However, there’s the rub: the more persuasive the prose,
the more other questions arise about the roughness and painfulness of the
memories that stimulated the search in the first place—and the reasons for the
irritation, repression, censorship and resistance.
There
are times of crisis for her, such as a passing statement from a fellow Latin
American student at Brown University that she looks like a Jew and has a Jewish
name, something she never imagined; or a trip to Prague with her father to see
where he grew up, and the shocking observations of where and how he responded
to sites and objects that seem to be without meaning to her, such as the
railway station where he said goodbye forever to his parents.
At that stage I knew nothing of their [his
parents’ and other relatives and friends’] fate during the war. More
importantly, I also did not know who or how many they were. I imagined that he
would show me the places where he had lived, tell me stories of his youth and
finally open up to me about his family and his past. (p. 135)
Her
reasoning powers of detection—though she calls it imagining or envisaging—does
not spark shards of insight across the divide of time and deeper sensibilities.
Her Jewish imagination has not yet awakened and lit up the dark places in her
soul.
That
kind of paradigm shift begins during the visit to Prague, but it only starts to
reassemble the facets of her personality and intellectual abilities.
It was not until we were left alone on the afternoon
of the second day that I realised there was more to my father’s behaviour than
just obduracy. He simply could not remember the streets of his old city. This
amazed me. (p. 136)
But
his memory failed not because of his age or of a simple denial of reality. Much
more was going on in his mind, and what it was that was leading her towards
recognition of something also hidden and denied in her own experiences. At the nearly
derelict railway station, her father begins to tremble—to show an emotion he
had never let her see before; and he mentioned a new name, Zdenêk, he had never
mentioned before (pp. 138, 140). Here is a moment that starts to explode away
the old ways of thinking and shatter the pretty mosaic she was piecing
together. She starts to see the
inexpressible memories locked away in her father’s memory.
I have nothing to reveal about how the hours passed
beyond my own horror in contemplating them [at the time the Jews were taken
away to the concentration and extermination camps in the East]. No one spoke or
wrote of it afterwards. I can only imagine then relentless and mounting
trepidation that must have filled the house in Libčice that night. (p. 145)
Then
she begins to imagine still further and in so doing her imagination starts to metamorphose:
…the trepidation that must have filled the house…would
have been palpable…must have been devastated…would have had to wrestle with the
desperate fear….must have felt… (p. 145)
This
change in perspective lets her go back to the photographs and documents her father
left for her to find. She examines with a new depth of mental acuity, a new
sense of the imaginative making what is blurry clear, and reading between the lines,
filling in the gaps, and creating historical contexts. And then, when the new
clarity starts to emerge, she feels both with and for the people she recognizes
as part of her father’s—and therefore her own—life.
Part Two: The Jewish Imagination
Leslie
Donald Epstein wrote the following in relation to Roberto Begnini’s controversial
1997 film Life is Beautiful:
The war against the Jews was in many ways a war
against the imagination (and at bottom the Jewish conception of God): to
suppress the workings of that imagination to deny the sufferings of the Jews
any sort of symbolic representation—would make that a war that Hitler had won.
This
is a very complicated statement and yet worth careful parsing to show how it is
relevant to our reading of Ariana Neumann’s When
Time Stopped. The first point is that the Jewish imagination (which we
shall discuss shortly) is an integral part of the Rabbinical conception of God. The second point is that a
suppression of this sense of the Jewish imagination stands in the way of
understanding what the victims and survivors—and their children and other
relatives—of the Holocaust experienced and how it could exist within the idea
of a just and merciful God. The third point is that when such a suppression,
misunderstanding and indifference to the Jewishness of the imagination—in this
special sense—means that we allow Hitler to have succeeded in his genocidal aim
to annihilate the Jewish people and cultural destruction of their historical achievements
in history.
Epstein
elsewhere expands on this thought:
In an age when the belief [in heaven, hell and a
supervening god] was no longer tenable, when the supreme fiction, which was
that everything was possible, then the extermination of the Jews, who in their
infinite minds conceived of the infinite, becomes an attack on the imagination
itself.
Unlike
the Romantic notion of imagination wherein the term imagination becomes almost synonymous with fantasy, on the one
hand, and refers to all poetic creativity, on the other, the Jewish sense of
the term has a wider and more complex definition. Instead of pointing towards
the non- or even pre-verbal dynamic of the mind’s playful means of generating thoughts
packed with emotional intensity, it designates the fraught relationship between
words and ideas, words expressed in visible characters and energetic thoughts
invisibly generated beyond verbal expression. The Jewish imagination is always
exploring, generating and exploding the confines of verbal language. The deity
has neither visible form nor substance, cannot be seen or heard, but creates
the grounds of perception, understanding and realization in historical acts of
justice and morality by which it known. Through diligent study, active and
ongoing discussion and endless debate the specifics of the Law may be
performed, without leaving painful shadows and echoes of its presence. God is
actualized, made virtual and experienced in the performance of mitzvoth, including loving kindness,
charity and forgiveness. Just as breath is needed to read aloud the texts of
Torah and Talmud, so the truth and justice of God’s role in history—of the
individual, of the Jewish people and of the created cosmos—requires active participatory
thinking and practical deeds of justice. Any attack on this collective and
historical intellectual process not only prevents Jews from experiencing their
imagination as something that gives power and truth to the reality of God in
their historical existence; that something being, as Epstein expresses it, “the
greatest imaginative leap of all, that of comprehending, out of nothingness, a
burning bush, an empty whirlwind, the ‘I am that I am’,” and thus “in their
finite minds conceived of the infinite.”
The Nazi Endlősung or Final Solution sought
to undermine the Jews’ active role in the continuing creation and moral
continuity of the world. Dolgopolski shows how the word talmud functions as a verb in generating performative rituals of
debate that keep affirming and authorizing the nature of Judaism as an extended
moment in history without definiteness—an always open and creative starting
point to being in the world as agents of truth, justice and lovingkindness.
Based on rabbinical philology, rhetoric and philosophy, the Talmudic event
plays out like a film of montage, split screen and stop-action technology: the
words embody ideas, the ideas explode into sparks, the sparks cohere into
images, and the imagery is embodied in persons, places and actions. The horizontal
stage on which this history transpires allows for no hierarchical, oppressive
and obscurantist claims to power.
The Jewish imagination is not only embodied by divine wisdom—to reveal the
truths of Scripture and Talmud through rational inquiry; but dynamically
recreates the illusions and delusions of certainty and enduring rule to keep
witty discussions constantly adjusting to the historical changes in the world
and undercutting cruel pretentiousness and oppressive institutions. John
Milton, spokesman for the mid-seventeenth-century English Puritan Commonwealth
and well-studied in the Hebrew texts, understood this in Paradise Lost
when, the deity on his throne learns of rebellion among the wicked angels:
“Nearly they threaten my omnipotence.” Finally getting the joke the figure of
Jesus replies: “Justly Thou holdest them in derision.”
The
Holocaust, more than any other churban
(disaster) in Jewish experience, tested their strength of character,
individually and collectively, and intelligent engagement with the world to the
very limits. More than the Destruction of the Second Temple and the great
dispersion following the loss sovereignty in the Holy Land and the ending of
the laws of the priestly cult pertaining to a national territory. More than the
Expulsion from Iberia at the close of the fifteenth century and the new
wandering, suffering and forgetting of the mission to be a Light unto the
Nations. More than the repeated pogroms and forced migrations of the nineteenth
century. So enormous was the unspeakable crime of the Shoah that for many Jews
their imaginations failed: they lapsed into silence, denial and indifference;
they tried never to speak of what happened, they denied their identities to
themselves and to their children, and they seemed not to care.
Thus
with Ariana Neumann, even as she plays girl-detective in searching for clues,
interviewing witnesses, and compiling an apparently coherent picture of
everything her father and other relatives tried to suppress. She identifies
persons, dates events and matches them with documentary history. But she may do
more, although the pressure of completing her search makes it seem she has
missed out on interpreting the most poignant clues of all. Without
interpretation, and all the playfulness of the Jewish imagination, the
Holocaust becomes normalized, and thus trivialized, just another event in human
history.
Part Three: Intergenerational Trauma of the Holocaust
Yet perhaps not. Look at the title of the book, something like
a variant on Dita Kraus’s memoirs, A Delayed
Life, a hint at the nature of time in the Jewish imagination:
experiences midrashed, as it were,
from specific moments into transcendent moments of insight and understanding.
The darkened room where Ariana’s father repairs clocks and watches, not only
referring to the time when he was hiding in a narrow shelf waiting to escape
from the Gestapo, or alluding to the miracle of the sun standing still at noon for
Joshua’s victory to be achieved, but to a sense of affirming the time of life
over that of unimaginable darkness of non-being that was the goal of the
Holocaust. The repairs do more than fill
up missing, empty time; they perform little acts of tikkun ha’olam, restoring, correcting and re-imagining time as the
space for creation. The father’s explanation to the young Ariana is a
diversion, but also a provocation for her to think beyond the moment and the
ordinary sense of space:
He
explained to me that he had become enthralled by watch mechanisms in Prague.
When he was a young man. He said that it was during a period when he had so
much time on his hands that he felt that time had stopped.(p. 207)
She doesn’t
understand and asked herself “How could time have stopped?” She will later
learn about the stratagem of being hidden in the wall and waiting for a time to
escape from the trains transporting the rest of the family to certain death in
the gas chambers.
I
realise now that this must have happened while her was hiding in the dark and
narrow chamber at the factory. His days alone, caged in the cramped stillness,
were a void of timelessness. (p. 207)
That, however, is not
enough. The mechanisms of the clock-work universe do not open her understanding
to what was going on in her father’s mind, more than the cramped void of his
waiting, his transformation not from a thoughtless adolescent into a mature and
cunning adult view. More and other than Spinoza’s rational universe, more and
other than Newton’s clock-work deity.
Hans
Neumann from Prague had absconded rather than submitting to transportation. He
had hidden and assumed a false identity. This was not unusual; thousands of
those persecuted had survived by doing the same. (p. 224)
How different? He
chooses the ridiculous name Jan Šebasta, a trickster in Czech folklore,
familiar in children’s books. He runs away to the centre of Nazi power, Berlin,
not away to the peripheries where crossing the border might become possible as
the Allies and the Russians advance on the collapsing Third Reich. He does not
lurk in cellars and secret houses, but works openly in the chemical factory,
obtains official permits to live among the German people, consorts with a Nazi
widow. No one suspects the ruse. Ariana later identifies him as “[t]he
practical joker from Prague.” Even as she comes across the long narrative her
father wrote
about his experiences in Berlin living under the assumed name of a famous
fictional character and brazening out his forbidden lie before the eyes of Nazi
officialdom, she doesn’t go beyond the surface. He warns his reader, that is, his
daughter Ariana, for whom he writes his own story:
Nietzsche wrote that what separates
human from animals is the ability to find one’s condition risible. Nazis tended
to solemnity and humourlessness. They always showed what Nietzsche called “Tierischer
Ernst,” a certain “animal earnestness,” a complete inability to laugh at
themselves. (p. 263)
Had
she been more alert to the context of these shenanigans, had she been familiar
with the performers on the popular Yiddish
stage in Prague that Franz Kafka
became intimate with and from he learned to hone his unique version of the
Jewish imagination, she would have realized that such oral and written
literature abounds in various kinds of tricksters, practical jokers, eirons of
many sorts (shlemiels, shlemazels,
shmegeggees)
and traditional entertainers whose music, dances, and story-telling have provided
the means for a persecuted and scorned people to rise their way through
history. By
preventing public ridicule by presenting the individual and group as fallible,
weak and powerless, Jewish purveyors of Witzen
(which Sigmund Freud saw as a parallel royal road to the unconscious along with
dreams) appeared in the death camps and, until the final moments, offered an
intellectual and emotional release from the terrors pressing in on the victims
of the Holocaust.
A good example of this kind of transformational Witz is found in Leo Rosten’s The
Joys of Yiddish:
"What is it that hangs on the wall,
is green, wet -- and whistles?" I knit my brow and thought and thought,
and in final perplexity gave up. "A herring," said my father. "A
herring," I echoed. "A herring doesn't hang on the wall!"
"So hang it there." "But a herring isn't green!" I
protested. "Paint it." "But a herring isn't wet." "If
it's just painted it's still wet." "But -- " I sputtered,
summoning all my outrage, "-- a herring doesn't whistle!!" “So I put
that in to make it harder for you.”
As the putative Jan
Šebesta, Ariana’s father Hans Neumann insinuated his way into the very core of
Nazi power and arrogance, playing with the inability of the Party and its dupes
to distinguish illusion from reality. He was a nobody (a nebesh) with the name of a famous fool, a supposed naĩf albeit with technical knowledge the
National Socialists needed to keep fighting the war, just surprisingly naughty
enough to keep away suspicion of a disguised trickster, he outlasts those who
would murder him:
I
figured that by acting in an unexpected manner or in anyway that ran contrary
to expectations, I could increase my chances of survival. (p. 264)
By the final sections
of the book, Ariana feels she has completed her quest and achieved her goal of
figuring out who and what her father and his family went through during the
war. Has she? She now knows people, places, things and events that she could
not remember or recognize at the start of her journey of discovery; she can
retell objectively the terrible murders committed by the Nazis and the
traumatic suffering undergone by those who managed to survive. However, she
refuses to go to Auschwitz to be in the place where so much evil inflicted
itself on her people. “I simply cannot go to the place where they died” (p.
313).
She also speaks of
trauma, as though she could understand it, as though she could get into the
skin and minds of the people who endured things no rational, ordinary person
should ever have to see and feel. Yet her own children disagree.
They
firmly believe that we each decide and shape who we are, that we learn from our
own experiences and from observing others, that unspoken traumas and lessons
are not somehow imprinted in our cells. How we behave and who we become is up
to us. (p. 334).
But
while they sound like those apologists, as it were, for the suffering of the
Jews, those who, though they themselves endured the horrors of the Holocaust,
nevertheless preach a pretentious sentimentality and transcendent inner
strength to forget and forgive—because all people are alike, and who is to say
you wouldn’t have acted like the Nazis had your places been reversed, and so on
and so forth ad nauseum. Her version
of the argument is a kind of compromise position, one taken from her Catholic
upbringing and education. Then she juxtaposes some incompatible ideas: the
notion of trauma being passed on through the mechanisms by which genes are
expressed in each individual according to their specific circumstances; and the
contrary notion that by sheer force of will one can override these genetic
expressions, alter patterns of emotional response, and arrive at a better place
where there is hope.
I
like to believe that life lessons are etched into us and passed on. We choose
who we are, but our choices are always moulded by where we come from, even when
we do not know where that is. (p. 334)
She does not consider
that her children’s views come not only from their milieu and opinions that are
current in environments where the nice middle-class comfortable idea that
everyone has a choice in virtually everything, but also because—like her father—she
failed to prepare to live in a world where being Jewish is set by millennial
experiences and traditions, where previous generations have worked out ways to
endure inevitable tribulations, and where childrearing practices have set up
triggering mechanisms to be set in motion when collective troubles begin.
I
look at my three children as they chatter and laugh, and I pray that, in addition
to the timekeeping and tenacity, they also have my father’s boldness, his
poetry and his strength. And hopefully[,] too[,] a little of his luck. (p. 334)
Ariana
can certainly see that in her other relatives and in their children:
She never
spoke of the war to Victor’s children or grandchildren…they had no idea that
they had any Jewish heritage or that their step-grandmother had ever been in a
camp. (p. 329)
The most revealing moment comes
when Ariana tells her father that she had examined the memorial plaque in the
great synagogue in Prague listing thousands of names and their dates of birth,
transport and death by gassing, starvation or disease. Next to his name there
is a question mark.
“What does it mean, Papi?” I asked. “If
your name is on the wall, they must think you are dead.”
He paused for a brief moment.
“What does it mean?” he said, chuckling
quietly. “It means that I tricked them. That is exactly what it means.
“I
tricked them. I lived.” (p. 326)
The
big mystery Ariana does not solve is what her father means by “them”. He has tricked the Germans, of course, by
surviving the war and the Holocaust, and all the post-traumatic stress symptoms
that he displayed throughout the rest of his life. But he has also tricked the
Jewish community, its official way of calculating who perished and who
survived. He showed them what was needed to escape and endure was the many
imaginative tricks he played.
Sergey Dolgopolski, What is
Talmud? The Art of Disagreement (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009)
and The
Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2013).
José Faur, The Horizontal Society, Vol. 1 and 2 “Understanding the
Covenant and Alphabetic Judaism” (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2008)
