Book Review
Ruth Gabriele Sarah
Silten, Unravelling the Torments of my
Life: Unpublished Poetry and prose from the Years 2003 to 2011. Cover and colour illustrations by Bonnie
Roth, Black and white illustrations by Davi Cheng. Pomona, CA: Privately Published, 2012. 126 pp.
This latest book—a collection of stories, poems, reminiscences, as well
as personal photographs and paintings by her friends—by Gabriele Silten is at
its best when she recalls her experiences during the Holocaust. In these memories, some in prose, some in
verse, she adds new details as seen by a very small child of her life before
and during the ordeal of the Shoah, correcting some points, particularly about
which children in Thereseustadt (the ”model” concentration camp where the
Nazis tried to fool the world, especially the Red Cross, into believing Jews
were treated well and lived in happy, sanitary comfort) were allowed to draw
pictures, for instance, and giving new insight into the family dynamics of
those people who survived.
Some of the narratives were penned as exercises for writing classes the
then-76-year-old ex-teacher was taking in California, others inspired by those
classes, and still others created as occasions arose to remind general readers
and friends about what the Holocaust meant.
From the explanation of German words and the identification of people
and places, it is evident that Stilten assumes almost a blank on the part of
her audience about events that were so traumatic to her—and to all those who
suffered in the death camps and other facilities of the German Final Solution
to the Jewish Question; as well as to what it was and is like to live in Europe
rather than in contemporary bourgeois America.
This is important because the role of the survivor in telling her or his
own personal history not only has to provide witness to facts that are
increasingly denied by malicious and ignorant persons wishing ill to Israel and
the Jewish people everywhere, but also to make clear to all those young people
coming through an inadequate educational system and a superficial electronic
and digital entertainment industry that pretends to provide culture to its
audiences; even with the best will in the world, all too many folk have no
context and few skills to understand what the Holocaust was and what it still
means. For this reason Stilton honest
and an unpretentious work—and yet for all that, the product of an intelligent
and sensitive woman—presents a non-threatening account of things that happened
to very real and mostly very ordinary people during the horrible years of the
twentieth century.
When she offers midrashic commentaries on Scripture or retells them in
poetic form, she brings to bear her experience as a teacher in America to
provide wise reflections on current issues—children, wives, racial problems—and
to plumb the depths of her history as a survivor of the Holocaust, so that she
does more than wonder at God’s absence during such massive suffering or whisper
anguished complaints on the injustice of the universe—she gives a context to
all those petty, existential and neurotic difficulties that frame an otherwise
comfortable modern bourgeois America.
In addition to the perspective of the child who sees but does not understand
and who feels the tensions but cannot put them into context, Silten’s book
offers some discussion of what has become increasingly a main aspect of
Holocaust studies, the question of memory.
How does the memory of survivors process and articulate the experiences
of what is basically unspeakable and inconceivable? In one brief story, “Unconscious Memory,” she
recollects going to Amsterdam with a friend from California and discovering to
her own ands to her friend’s surprise that she knows where to go on streets she
has not been on since she was a toddler, and then finds a flood of memories
returning. The narrator asks herself
where these old memories have been hiding in her mind and how they could have
made her mind into what it is without her being aware of it. Unlike Proust’s search for lost time in the
long novel that carries that name (A la
recherche de temps perdu) which, when it begins to emerge and unfold itself
through tastes, smells and other seemingly trivial portals into the dark
corners of the mind, Silten cannot enjoy the return of the past: the images,
sensations and feelings that were forgotten do not give her any pleasure, do
not fill out her sense of life’s achievements, and provide understanding of
what everything means.
Instead, these resurfaced memories provide something for her to work out
with her analyst, so that she can learn to endure them, come to peace with her
past to some degree—but they only exacerbate her sense of loss, of pain, of
humiliation, of rage against the injustice of the world. Moreover, Silten in this story and in others,
sometimes explicitly but more often implicitly, goes beyond the apercus of
Alduos Huxley in Eyeless in Gaza. In the opening chapter to that novel, Huxley
argues against Proust’s notion of the need to search for lost memories in order
to feel fulfilled in life; but he also points out that. while looking at old
photographs that spark his recollections of childhood and his long-gone
parents, everything looks grotesque and comical, whereas at the time they were
normal and natural, so that if he were to regain the fullness of recollections
he would find them uncomfortable and disturbing. He cannot return himself to the past because
his present self has experienced too much and he would not fit the circumstances. Silten’s past cannot be evaded: the horrors
of the Holocaust are part of herself. If
she were to forget them completely, to destroy or lose them, and not just have
them sometimes at best out of conscious awareness, she would no longer be herself. The journey to Amsterdam, followed by the
long session with her analyst, however, has brought her to the point where
finally “I feel that I will be able to handle them, look at them, deal with
them.”
If at times it seems there are contradictions in the poetry, as when she
cries out the defiance of the survivors who must forever remain children who
live in the memory of their inexplicable ordeal and then demands of herself the
moral and spiritual duty of remembering so that all the others who are no
longer have a voice can have an identity:
Whatever we can do,
it will never be enough,
can’t ever be enough.
Yet we must go on trying…
(Holocaust Nightmare)
Yet those
nightmare visions of herself and other children, as painful as they remain,
because they are so unbearable, keep more than memory of alive of what must
never be forgotten:
They were part of me,
are still a part of me;
as long as I remember them,
they are not wholly dead;
carrying their memory,
I remain whole.
(Days of Awe II: Yom Kippur)
And later
still, when she imagines herself into the narrative of Exodus, Silten transforms
it into a history of her own life and longings:
When, at long last, our thraldom ended,
each of us, alone,
incognizant of others of our kind,
wandered for forty years
in a desert of hallucinations,
seeing family and friends,
dead long ago;
hearing their comforting voices,
stilled long ago…
(Passover Story)
Again, before her poetic mind looms up the powerful image of Moses, and
he becomes then an intercessor for a God who has seemed to abandon the Jewish
people into an eternal wandering for meaning and escape from the torments of
persecution:
Moses, man of vision,
Man of visions, were they the dreams of his childhood
When of reality,
As it did for our Hidden Children?
Were his visions born
Out of the pain of abandonment,
The pain of being a stranger?
(Moses, the First
Hidden Child)
These varying views are not logical inconsistencies or contradiction. Instead, they are the facets of memory and
consciousness refracting the experiences that go beyond ordinary experience,
sometimes illuminating for a moment all that is still dark and unfathomable,
sometimes blinding the illusions of comfort and rest after so many years of
waiting for peace and escape, sometimes darting out to prevent the return of
that painful silence and invisibility that can never be escaped from and comes
at us again and again in old uniforms and new disguises.
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