Learning to Cry

  

Sophie’s Choice 

 by William Styron

  “I have learned to cry again and I think perhaps that means I am a human being again. Perhaps that at least. A piece of human being but yes, a human being.”   ― William Styron, Sophie’s Choice

 

 

 

 Sophie's Choice is largely regarded favorably, despite criticism for its intricacy and examination of challenging subjects, such as the novel's examination of survivor guilt and the decisions made by survivors to safeguard themselves. The reader is better able to comprehend Sophie's experiences because the story is told from the viewpoint of an outsider, Stingo. The reader cannot dispute Styron's dedication to comprehending the horrors of American history and the Holocaust. Although Styron is a talented storyteller, she also points out certain problems with the story, like awkward transitions between the elaborate dialogue and the Auschwitz flashbacks. The book looks at issues including love, guilt, and the lingering effects of trauma.
Sophie Zawistowski, a Polish Holocaust survivor, and her relationship with a young writer named Stingo are the subjects of the 1979 novel Sophie's Choice, which is set in Brooklyn in 1947. In 1983, Meryl Streep played Sophie Zawistowski in the film adaptation of the novel.

The significant—and unquestionably underrepresented—question of what becomes of the Holocaust survivors is addressed in Sophie's Choice. Such comprehensive, self-admitted immorality ought to absolve a man, and it does, sort of.

Sunday Poetry Selection

Paul Celan

Paul Celan was not an easy man—why would he be?—and his poetry, as his translator Michael Hamburger writes, is not easy either. Celan, Hamburger says, “calls for an application and effort so intense that it may have to be broken off and resumed over the years.” That is definitely true of “Death Fugue.” It is hard to take in without a break. But to take in even a portion of it is to have taken in something unforgettable. Celan wrote almost exclusively in German, so it makes sense that his most successful poem, "Todesfuge," or “Death Fugue," is in the language of the Nazi death machine. Here is a selection:

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night

we drink you at noon in the morning we drink you at sundown

we drink and we drink you

a man lives in the house your golden hair Margarete

your ashen hair Shulamith he plays with the serpents

He calls out more sweetly play death death is a master from 

            Germany

he calls out more darkly now stroke your strings then as smoke

            you will rise into air

then a grave you will have in the clouds there one lies unconfined

(from "Death Fugue" by Paul Celan)

If This is a Man

Survival in Auschwitz 
by Primo Levi



"Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses:  he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself.  He will be a man whose life or death can be lightly decided with no sense of human affinity, in the most fortunate of cases, on the basis of a pure judgement of utility.  It is in this way that one can understand the double sense of the term 'extermination camp', and it is now clear what we seek to express with the phrase: 'to lie on the bottom'." (p 27)



Captured in December of 1943 by the Fascist Militia, a young twenty-five year old Primo Levi was drawn out of his life as an "Italian citizen of the Jewish race" into a nightmare that could only compare to the depths of Dante's Inferno. This book is his story of the capture, journey to, and life in the Buna section of Auschwitz. This was a "work" camp that provided slave labor for a rubber factory built for the I. G. Farben company.

Levi describes his experiences with vignettes from his period of internment. These vignettes are interspersed with his commentary on his own feelings, relations with other "haftlings" (prisoners), all of whom have become identified with a number tattooed on their arm. Primo Levi was number 174517.

One of the themes of Levi's memoir is language; its meaning and importance for life in the camp. Early on he becomes "aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man." The difficulty of being understood when you do not speak the language of your captors heightens the misery of daily activities making life more tortuous than it already was. At the end of the eighth chapter Levi observes that theft among the prisoners (a daily reality) " is generally punished , but the punishment strikes the thief and the victim with equal gravity." Further, he comments directly to the reader:
"We now invite the reader to contemplate the possible meaning in the Lager of the words 'good' and 'evil', 'just' and 'unjust'; let everybody judge, on the basis of the picture we have outlined and of the examples given above, how much of our ordinary moral world could survive on this side of the barbed wire." (p 86)

Each chapter is named and these names signal the emphasis and direction of the book, if at times only metaphorically. Thus the descent of Levi includes a discussion of "The Drowned and the Saved" and encompasses "The Work" and "A Good Day". Of course a good day for Levi is one in which he can merely revel in the smile of one other person -- never matter the hunger!

In these moments he considers the meaning of his experiences and asks "if it is necessary or good to retain any memory of this exceptional human state." He replies affirmatively, saying:
"We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing." (p 87)

In the chapter "The Canto of Ulysses" (a reference to Dante's Inferno) he quotes part of the Canto from memory, sharing with his fellow workers in the Chemical hut where he had fortunately been transferred. It is during this episode that "For a moment I forget who I am and where I am." He repeats a few lines for his friend Pikolo, but later bemoans the fact that he cannot remember the whole Canto, claiming he would give up his daily soup to remember the missing lines. His action can be seen as an attempt to maintain his humanity in the face of tremendous difficulties, thinking that:
"I must explain to him about the Middle Ages, about the so human and so necessary and yet unexpected anachronism, but still more, something gigantic that I myself have only just seen, in a flash of intuition, perhaps the reason for our fate, for our being here today . . ." (p 115)

Levi eventually survives the camp and lives to share his story and write even more after returning to his native home. However, it is not until after he has experienced a multitude of tortures and indignities. Not the least of which was the hanging of one inmate who made an unsuccessful attempt to escape. Of this episode Levi writes:
"To destroy a man is difficult, almost as difficult as to create one: it has not been easy, nor quick, but you Germans have succeeded. Here we are, docile under your gaze; from our side you have nothing more to fear; no acts of violence, no words of defiance, not even a look of judgement.: (p 150) 
In January, 1945, the Russians arrived and Primo Levi began his journey home.

An Unconventional Childhood

The Spirit of Prague: And Other Essays 
by Ivan Klíma



"A city is like a person:  if we don't establish a genuine realationship with it, it remains a name, an external form that soon fades from our minds.  To create this relationship, we must be able to observe the city and understand its peculiar personality, its'I', its spirit, its identity, the circumstances of its life as they evolved through space and time." (p 39, "The Spirit of Prague")




I read Ivan Klíma’s wonderful collection of essays The Spirit of Prague, in connection for a Basic Program class on the literature of Prague. Klima has a simple style of writing, with a wonderful clarity and quiet authority. 

The book is divided into five sections of essays.  The first section includes the titular essay but the longest one opens the book.  In this essay, entitled with characteristic understated irony "A Rather Unconventional Childhood", Klima writes of his childhood which coincided, in Eastern Europe, with the triumph of Nazism and his confinement (as a Jew) in the transit camp of Terezin. From an early age he was a reader:

"I read. Of all the books I owned, I was most excited by a prose retelling of Homer's two epics. I read them over and over again, until I knew whole pages by heart."(p. 15)

Later, when he has been transported to the camp he uses a wry, observational tone to devastating effect:

‘I also experienced my first real friendships at this time which , as I later came to understand, were really only prefigurations of the adolescent infatuations that transform every encounter, every casual conversation into an experience of singular importance. All those friendships ended tragically; my friends, boys and girls, went to the gas chamber, all except one, the one I truly loved, Arieh, a son of the chairman of the camp prisoners’ self-management committee, who was shot at the age of twelve.’(p. 20)

His experiences in the camp, and later under the communist regimes of the post-war years, lead him to the conclusion that "if we don't learn from catastrophes and if we don't accept these simple principles, the moment when we might have done something to decide the fate of mankind will pass us by."(p. 27)

Klima's observations in this essay are telling and are reminiscent of other books, including: Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl; Night by Elie Weisel; Fatelessness by  Imre Kertész; Speak You Also by Paul Steinberg; The Long Voyage by Jorge Semprun;  and Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.

The remainder of the collection includes further excursions into reading and literature, a commentary on Kafka as a source of inspiration, and a discussion of totalitarianism as seen from the perspective of Czech culture.  The erudition and intensity of these essays along with Klima's lucid style made this collection a joy to read.  I would recommend it to fans of Joseph Roth and other astute observers of mitteleuropean culture.

A Surprising Discovery

The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. 
in The Deeps of the Sea and Other Fiction 
by George Steiner


"Yes,  I know they've been hunting for him.  They've never stopped.  Started almost immediately after the war.  Small parties sworn to get him.  To give their lives.  Never to rest until he was found." (p 19)

In 1981 George Steiner wrote a literary and philosophical novella, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.. In it Jewish Nazi hunters find Adolf Hitler (A.H.) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II. It is a daring fictional endeavor that is as much a philosophical rumination as it is a political thriller. It is the longest work in this compilation of short fiction by George Steiner.

From his base in Tel Aviv, Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Lieber directs a group of Jewish Nazi hunters in search of Adolf Hitler. The hunters believe that the former Führer is still alive, and following rumors and hearsay, they track Hitler's movements through the jungles of South America, until after months of wading through swamps, a search party finds the 90-year-old alive in a clearing. Lieber flies to San Cristóbal where he awaits the group's return with their captive. But getting the old man out of the jungle alive is more difficult than getting in, and their progress is further hampered by heavy thunderstorms.
Meanwhile, broken and incoherent radio messages between Lieber and the search party are intercepted by intelligence agents tracking their progress, and rumors begin to spread across the world of Hitler's capture. Debates flare up over his impending trial, where it will be held and under whose jurisdiction. Orosso is identified as the nearest airfield to the last known location of the search party, and aircraft begin arriving at the hitherto unknown town. But when the search party loses radio contact with Lieber, they must make a decision: do they sit out the storms and deliver their captive to Lieber later, or do they try Hitler in the jungle before their prize is snatched from them by the world at large, who they know will be waiting? Lieber warns "You must not let him speak ... his tongue is like no other". A trial is prepared and surprisingly the attention Hitler is receiving, however, renews his strength, and when the trial begins, he brushes aside his "defense attorney" and begins a long speech in four parts in his own defense.

Hitler claims he took his doctrines from the Jews and copied the notion of the master race from the Chosen people and their need to separate themselves from the "unclean". "My racism is a parody of yours, a hungry imitation." Hitler justifies the Final Solution by maintaining that the Jews' God, purer than any other, enslaves its subjects, continually demanding more than they can give. He claims that he was not the originator of evil and his atrocities were dwarfed by those of others. He even maintains that Zion owes its existence to the Reich. Throughout the rant there runs an underlying theme of the persecution of the Jews in history.

Steiner demonstrates both insights and an imagination of major proportions in a small space.  In an interview he told New York Times editor D. J. R. Bruckner that this book arose out of his lifelong work on language. "Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment ... that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate." *   The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. was a 1983 finalist in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

*Bruckner, D. J. R. (2 May 1982). "Talk With George Steiner". The New York Times.

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A Story About Two Brothers

Once We Were Brothers 
by Ronald H. Balson


“Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture, to denigrate a people because they are different, and it's not such a giant leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter”   ― Ronald H. Balson, Once We Were Brothers

This novel is as exciting and interesting as historical fiction can be. With a very public opening confrontation between a retired Chicago holocaust victim and one of the most powerful philanthropists in the city, Once We Were Brothers provides a level of suspense that continues through to the last pages of the novel. The story of why the former Park District employee, Ben Solomon, engages in this confrontation leads back to Poland in 1929 and through Ben's experience of the holocaust during the War.  It is his fervent belief that his story is true that leads him to seek out an attorney, Catherine Lockhart, and her story in turn and her own discovery of why she needed to help Ben is as inspirational as Ben's own journey from Poland to Chicago.

The novel narrates Ben's journey through flashbacks to Ben's life in Zamosc Poland that begins when he was growing up in a family that had taken in a young German boy, Otto Piatek, who would become as close to Ben as any real brother could have been.  In between episodes of this story are interspersed events in current day Chicago, 2004, where we meet Catherine Lockhart and Liam Taggart, her friend, who assists in finding evidence to support Ben's claim that the wealthy philanthropist, Elliot Rosenzweig, is actually the former Nazi SS officer, Otto Piatek.  How these narratives come together and whether Ben is able to prove his claim provide for great reading.

This is not a typical story of the holocaust nor is it just about an old man identified as a former Nazi. It is much more and I would encourage anyone interested in what it means to be human and care about another human to read this novel. It is a fictional portrayal but it has aspects that impressed me as much as the best non-fiction I have read about the holocaust. In the end it was not the history that moved me as much as the character of Catherine and how she changed and grew to know herself in a way that made her a better person.

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