Five Poems in the Midst Of the Second Plague Year

 

Someone in Paris Died: JG

It happens all too often, the news of death, from  some

forgotten location, a person who once helped

us out of a scrape, a nearly unknown name;

then when it is too late to write or mourn, like kelp

beyond the high tide mark, cracked and dried,

a bad smell of remembrance, it invades

your conscience and your consciousness. He died

with family, friends and those who knew him better,

longer and deeper, each of them like blades

that cut into my growing sense of guilt.

My loss: if only I had sent one letter

to remind him of my gratitude. Tears spilt

now will fade too soon into the sands of time,

silent stains that have no reason or rhyme.

 

 

PGB: In Memorium

We sat there is a small crowded patisserie,

As though we were those who did their best to find ideas

For generations in that same crowded space, and we

Had known each other all our lives, sharing fears

And hopes. You did so much, and I so little,

Yet like all those other fleeting conversations,

They changed my life, and saved my soul, brittle

Once and then made subtle, gave me patience

To press on with difficult questions. Just across

The little narrow street, in the building where

The Divine Sarah performed a century ago,

You made me feel someday I might belong

And write the books of verse we all would share,

But now you are beyond my voice, under moss

That softly filters out my urge to hear your wise advice.

 

 

KAIROS

It’s one thing to outlast your enemies and feel the earth

Grow lighter with their passing; another when friends

Depart and weigh you down with grief. Not worth

The contemplation, those you almost knew

But faded in the course of life, the dream that ends

Before you realize it was Kairos,  that single

Moment of opportunity, meeting when true

Attachments could be made, in a shady dingle

Or a distant dell, conjured out of nothing

But a spark of imagination, and when it blends

Into the darkness of despair, before it flew

Out of your reach, like a will’o’th’wisp. Grief bends

Into a bitter memory and echoes—then ends.

 

The Same Old Thing Again

They were always passing away, those who came first,

But no one told me for decades, and then no tears

Would spring to my eyes and grief was fleeting. The thirst

To drink in their wisdom had been quenched by miles

And years; then other interests came my way.

I never seemed to think of them when I was young.

Great scholars sat up front while notes were scribbled

And who they were was just the way things were,

Like rhymes hidden in rough lines or hung

Upon the structure of long epics. I quibbled

About words I was too lazy to search. Then year

Followed year, old figures disappeared, the voices

Of authority no longer commanded my respect,

And blurry dreams tugged at my deaf ear.

The distant details were no longer there to inspect.

Life skittered further down into the great abyss.

 

 

On the Edge of Murder

She said there was no Covid-19—I gulped—

and four million dead were a drop in the bucket:

but we were stuck and there was no way to answer back,

and I am too old to let my anger loose, as I did once,

when someone said, “The blecks hev not ivolved”

I felt a pall of unconsciousness descend;

then,  people were pulling my fists apart:

suddenly I saw her fear and rage,

and it was time to leave and never return.

The ugliness of stupidity is once again on the streets,

 like the brown shirts and the green shirts and the  black,

altogether formidable despite their cowardly countenances.

Don’t respond to their ugly words—But they ram their cars

and stab us in the back. No use calling the police.

No use looking to see who runs out of their house to help.

Once again, as always, we are on our own.

The best you get are some pious words

and maybe a few dollars thrown in charity.

Completely on our side, they say, but, after all

You don’t expect me to risk my family’s life or comfort.

No, my dear old friend, I expect nothing.

Well, then, no harm done, right? he says. No harm.

Holocaust Book Review: Meriel Schindler, The Lost Cafe

 

Meriel Schindler. The Lost Cafe  Schindler: One Family, Two Wars and the Search for Truth. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2021. pp. xxiii + 408. Many black and white illustrations.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

 

This is not quite a Holocaust book because there are no vivid descriptions of concentration camps or gas chambers, though there are brief episodes in which people are beaten up and news received of murders committed. What is at stake in the construction of the plot, rather, is the break-up of an extended family, the loss through Aryanization of a café, business premises associated with it and residential properties—and the confusion and transformation of individual identities. The narrative voice is that of a daughter of an eccentric and difficult father, whose boasts, complaints and lies alienate the daughter who, after his death, discovers letters, photograph albums and other documents which she works her way through to find the truth about her father, her family and the famous café in Innsbruck that disappeared from history but whose reputation is eventually resurrected. Rather than the author whose career in journalism guides the search to identify the people, places and events referred to in the cache of materials left after the passing of the father, Meriel Schindler is an investigative lawyer who uses her skills fit together the pieces of the puzzle, searches through newspaper and civic archives and interviews witnesses to her family’s affairs throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Her research also leads her to local and professional historians who both provide her with additional facts and teach her the methodology of writing history.

Eventually, she is able to prove that in much of her father’s boasting and self-defensive lying there are some grains of truth and enough data to contextualize and explain his obsessive behavior: that his family did have come connections to the famous people with whom they share names, blood and marital connections, as well as business contacts, the Schindlers were not directly related to Franz Kafka, Alert Einstein and many other famous and influential Jewish figures in the German-speaking lands and beyond, but rather to more distant branches of the families, mostly centred on the Tyrol and other rural towns in Austria and Germany. There is a family connection to the Dr.Bloch who looked after the mother and siblings of Adolf Hitler, and to whom there passed a bizarre loyalty and protection of the Führer, in such a way that protected Bloch and family from Nazi thuggery and allowed him to rescue a few Jews in the region from arrest and deportation.

What seems most unusual about the picture that emerges as the various missing pieces are found and put together into an almost coherent narrative of what happened during the 1930as and 1940s—and somewhat beyond into the 1950s—is how ordinary relationships seem between the Schindlers and their non-Jewish neighbors and business associates, and especially in their dealings with the Austrian and German Nazis with whom they had to interact. In the years just before and then after the Anschluss, when life became particularly dangerous and difficult for Jews in Austria, and even while the some of the Schindlers were desperate to sell-up and leave their homeland, wither for other parts of Europe (including in the beginning Germany) and Britain or America, the immediate family of Meriel’s father Kurt’s parents and grandparents still think of themselves as assimilated to Austrian life and especially as loyal to and defined by their residence in the Tyrol. They negotiate, bargain and complain to authorities when their ownership of the famous café that bears their name is alienated from them, their homes confiscated and their status as citizens and human beings is undermined. Even after the defeat of the Third Reich and the subsequent separation of Austria from Germany, Kurt Schindler attempts to regain what the family lost, but he never explains to his family what he is doing—his long absences, his intricate bureaucratic wrangles and financial entanglements, his moving the family back to Innsbruck from England, and his coldness towards his children.

There are thus two major directions in The Lost Café Schindler. One is the narrative of events in both world wars, the disposition of the extended family and the running of the café and associated brewing, jam-making and other businesses. The other interwoven direction is the account of the narrator’s engagement with the inherited texts and photographs, the travels to specific places to see what remains and what they look like, the meeting with various informants and experts, and the piecing together the diverse pieces of evidence to complete the history; as well as the author’s reflections and imaginings of how her father’s attitudes and personality came into being, and the impact of all this on the contours of her own life. Contextualization of these family, business and intimate matters provides what seems to be a vivid history of Jews in Tyrol from the late nineteenth to the close of the twentieth century.

Yet there are troubling aspects to these diverse goals. There is a sense that aside from a few nasty Nazi individuals, the people who were willing to join up with Germany, carry out the programme of aryanization and physically assault Jews, and then collude in their extermination. Most Austrians, and Tyrolians in particular, were probably not ruthless gangsters and thugs, and their Anti-Semitism was of the softer type defined as “not hating the Jews more than is absolutely necessary.”  Wherever possible during the German occupation of Austria and in a renewed independence the SS and police persecutions were carried out with Gemütlichkeit, an unctuous and ironically polite decorum. After all, it was often the same bureaucrats, civic officials and businessmen who collaborated with the Nazis and who afterwards remained in place in very much the same positions they had held during the Nazi regime. Meriel Schindler, using her skills as an investigative lawyer and playing with the still influential family name, seems able to find archivists, local historians and former neighbors of her grandparents who seem obliging and welcoming, although she does note a certain shared structural amnesia concerning the “bad things” that happened, which [polite people do not like to talk about; and, in general, who see themselves and Austria as the first victims of Hitler’s aggression. Having gone to school in Innsbruck, when her father moved back there after the war, she speaks and communicates well with the locals she encounters in her research for this book She, too, is finally proud of the reputation the café achieved, and she reflects happily in its renewed glory, albeit under new ownership and management.

Another of the stated goals of the book is to understand the actions of and words of Kurt Schindler. Why did her father as a young man claim to be a homeless orphan upon returning to Austria after the war when he had actually grown up in England with his parents and many relatives? Why did he in particular insist that he was at home in Innsbrook and witnessed the violence on Krystalnacht when at the time evidence proves that he was already safely in England? Why did he apply to the Jewish council in Vienna for a subvention to make aliyah to Israel/Palestine when he had never before shown any interest in Zionism or an inclination to leave Europe? The author’s investigations and speculations are based on her superficial observations and amateur psychology, not any real discussions of depth analyses “survivor guilt,” “identity crises”, or” post-traumatic stress”. She notes, for instance, the way Kurt and other relatives repeated posed in later photographs prior to the crises of the 1930s with those taken in the heyday of the family’s proud and happy life in the Tyrol; but she doesn’t deal with the implications of such attempts to reproduce their own and their ancestors’ commitments to Austria. She takes the photographic evidence at face value and interprets the pictures in a sentimental way.

Of course, though she adds a few of the key recipes at the end of the book so readers can taste the Gute Schmecken of the famous desserts and tartes that were served to customers, not everything in this book smells quite kosher.

Book Review: Vuillard, Order of the Day

 

Éric Vuillard. The Order of the Day, trans. Mark Polizzetti. New York: Other Press, 2018. pp. 84 ;  and London: Picador Press, 2018. pp. 129.

Éric Vuillart’s L’ordre du jour (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017) won the Prix Goncourt, France’s premier literary award, and has been praised again and again in its many translations. But, one may ask, to what genre does it belong, aside from the amorphous term novel, which by now means any work of fiction? Some say a récit, a kind of French mixture of brief narrative and essay, virtually a prose poem. Others see it a kind of sequence of brief impressionistic statements, with some historical facts, a few imaginary conversations and a meditation on “atmosphere” or “mood”.

It might also be seen as a mild Horatian satire (conversational and corrective) with touches of Lucanic satura (a mixture of incompatible elements, fragmented, farcical and mocking), with the Nazi bombast reduced to hot air, the aggressive poses of the military machine built up in defiance of the Versailles Treaty reduced to a comic opera series of breakdowns, confusion and internal misunderstandings, and the whole show of Anschluss stripped of its popularity and efficiency—but not of its anti-Jewish violence and public humiliations.

From the opening scene of German industrialists huffing and puffing their way up the steep stairs for a meeting with the newly-elected Nazi elite, on their way to taking power if only they could garner enough contributions from the these magnates, who are themselves  seen as rather ignorant snobs fearful of a Communist take-over of the Weimar Republic, all the way to another gathering of these captains of industry in the  idst of the war, now reduced to babbling old fools, who barely realize how much they have been bamboozled and manipulated into supporting a vicious thugocracy worse than anything they had imagined from the Soviet Union, and then, like old man Krupp, seeing visions of the enslaved, the dehumanized and the murdered Jews they worked to death in their factories.

If the restless Austrian mobs waiting their saviour and getting bored to tears by the failure of the Wehrmacht to roll into Vienna, the tanks and trucks of the German machine breaking down and losing their way, with their charismatic Leader seen through the fog of propaganda and anti-Semitism as something other than the bumbling idiot he was, the western nations, unable to rouse themselves from moral laxity and diplomatic stupidity, never realize until it is too late what a monster they have allowed to rise up in their midst. Meanwhile, the leaders of France, Britain, America, the whole lot of them, failed to come up to the basic standards of civilization and diplomacy, let alone common decency.

Published in 2017 and thus probably written a year or two before that, Vuillard’s short “novel” has an uncanny way of seeing the lies, conspiracy theories and duped millions who still in 2021 believe in Donald J. Trump. The words vomited out of Nazi mouths and spewed by their apologists in the 1930s and 1940s also come awfully close to those spouted forth by “your favorite president”, the calm genius” who believes in his own intuition rather than science, history or rationality, and the man who mesmerizes otherwise normal people into believing he is the only possible leader and saviour of the United States.

The whole pack of buffoons, then as now, and on either side, not only make a sorry picture of the grotesque and the preposterous, but the Fascist beasts perhaps could have been stopped, if only someone with authority and integrity had stood up with enough gumption and presence of mind to expose their idiocy. Comedians like Charlie Chaplin tried it in “The Great Dictator” as he spoofed Adenoid Hinkler, and before him the Three Stooges (Moe, Larry and Curly) in their 1940s knock-about farce “You Nazty Spy!" It was possible. In the 1950s Max Fergusson used his role as radio host on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to knock the wind out of Joe McCarthy and his ridiculously named House Un-American Affairs Committee. Later, Walt Kelley’s American newspaper cartoon strip “Pogo” made an attempt, too, especially with his tagline, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” The trouble, alas, is that the nasties don’t have a sense of humour, and the self-proclaimed good guys are, well, they are too smugly self-righteous.

Holocaust Review: Matarasso: Jewish Salonika

 

Isaac Matarasso. Talking Until Nightfall. Remembering Jewish Salonika, 1942-44, translated by Pauline Matarasso. London: Bloomsbury Continuum, 2020. pp. 269 + 8 black and white plates + 2 maps.

Reviewed by Norman Simms

 

More than twenty years ago I started to collect books, articles, and newspaper reports about Salonika, hoping to write books especially about young children experienced the awful events of the Shoah that befell the inhabitants of that once proud Jewish city in northern Greece. There were hundreds of pages of interviews available online and hundreds of articles dealing with the historical problem of what children could understand about what was happening to them and their families. Much of the documentation came from survivors who wrote down what they remembered long after the bulk of the Jewish population was transported to death camps to be murdered. These were traumatized memories.

The more I collected data and tried to give my projected book a shape, the more I realized that I could not write it. Not just because it was too painful to keep feeling and thinking through the stories these elderly people recalled of their disrupted childhoods. But there were too many people attempting to do the same thing, and they were children or other relatives of the survivors, and it was their story, their duty to tell what happened to their families, not mine, not the outsider’s. I could listen in and try to feel their pain.

When possible, I still collected information, and have dozens of ring-binders full of essays, interviews and formal histories printed out from the internet.  Recently, I found a book that seems to be very much what I wanted to put together. Not exactly about the experiences of young children, but the formal and informal; writings of one man and his family, and edited by someone who—I am astonished to say—says what I wanted to say about memory, trauma and contextualizing personal memories—and often uses the very expressions I would have wanted to write.  I am so glad that someone could write this book and that by some miracle it made its way to a bookshop here in Hamilton, New Zealand. It is the kind of book that will help me do the only thing I can possibly do, keep reading and writing about the Holocaust in various forms.  It stands as a model of clarity, accuracy, conviction and empathy.

Talking until Nightfall has Isaac Matarasso named on the book jacket as author, but only inside do we find that while his writings form the core of this book, three others bring those documents to a larger public as translator, editor, commentator and illustrator.  Part I “An Urgent Conversation” and “Note on the Texts” is by Isaac’s granddaughter Pauline Matarasso. Parts II, III and IV are the memoirs, chronicles and essays by Isaac Matarasso, each of which is introduced by a poignant and perceptive commentary by Pauline, who acts as the witness of the witness.  Part V, “During Your Lifetime and During Your Days” by Isaac’s son and Pauline’s father Robert Matarasso. Finally Part VI, “Listening to the Witnesses” by François Matarasso.

In other words, there are three generations of the Matarasso family who have made this collection of essays into one of the finest and most important witnesses to the destruction of Jewish Salonika. Salonika was a city with a long and honourable Sephardic past which disappeared in a matter of months, with barely any survivors, a city which had been looked up to as the model of what a modern, functioning Jewish civilization could look like when the first Zionists visited it at the start of the twentieth century: Jews not just as religious thinkers, intellectuals, professional people, artists and merchants, but also as longshoremen and other manual workers , all living in more or less harmony with Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims.

Salonika was thus a special place where what David Shasha and José Faur thought of as Religious Humanism, a Sephardi civilization that flourished in an openness to other civilizations. That all this came crashing down, beginning with the  take-over of the city by the Orthodox Greeks during the First World War and then by the ruthless actions of the German Nazis during the Holocaust, was a disaster not for the inhabitants of Salonika or for the Jews everywhere, but for the whole world.

Isaac Matarasso was the kind of cosmopolitan, sophisticated and yet humble European who represented everything the Nazis were not. What he wrote about his experiences stands witness to his sense and sensibility, his loyalty to family and culture. What his children and grandchildren say about him guives hope that, despite all that has been lost, not everything about Jewish and European civilization has been forgotten and may continue on into future generations.

It is hard to write a précis or summation of this book because the critic finds himself wanting to copy it all out again, wanting to use the same words and expressions which the Matarasso family here uses; and yet the reviewer would lose the closeness and the emotional intensity they have for their respected and beloved ancestor.