Survivors

For no very obvious reason, I have spent a lot of time lately reading about the politics of the mid-20^th century—the nexus being perhaps 1948, when I would have been 12. For even less obvious reasons, I’ve been pursuing a subset of what you might call “Jewish survival” literature, and I take it for granted that the theme of Jewish survival is a central theme of the period.

The keystone was surely Primo Levi’s Auschwitz memoir (link), which is in a class by itself. A companion piece Heda Margolius Kovály’s account of her life in and out of Prague (link)-not so elegant as literature, but an earnest, heartfelt tale by a woman who survived the death camps only to find herself thrust into the maw of the Soviet conquerors. I followed up on Kovaly with a memoir by her son, Ivan Margolius, born in a dark time, but surviving into personal and professional security, not to say recognition (link). I had high hopes for Ivan’s story because I like these “essays in retrieval,” and because Heda had left a lot of questions that I hoped he would answer. Indeed it is an okay book in its way, but it is full of a lot of rookie errors—sidetracks and space-fillers—that substantially impair its potential.

But then I moved on to two more which can be discussed somewhat as a matched set: Five Germanys I Have Known (link),and Amos Oz’ Tale of Love and Darkness (link). Each is the first person account of a boy who became a man amidst the turbulent politics of the time. And although neither experienced much directly in the way of political violence [Hah!--What was I thinking? Seen Afterthought II below], still each one found his life defined by it.

And that is the virtue they share: Stern and Oz both have a remarkable knack for uniting the personal and the political: of telling their own story, the stories of their dear ones, and to an extent the stories of their ancestors known and unknown, as part of the fabric of the times.

For Stern, it comes naturally: he’s an historian by trade. It is therefore not surprising that the best of his “Germanys” is no one of the five but rather a sixth—“it is the Germany of the years before World War I, that I think I understand the best.” He paints a vivid and compelling picture of the life of middle and upper-middle class Jews in the highly assimilated world of Wilhelmian Germany—indeed, I don’t know anyone who does a better job of setting the background for the Hitlerian cataclysm to follow.

Ironically, perhaps the happiest part of Stern’s book comes at its darkest hour. We’re talking about World War II, when the Stern family, emigrants at last, tries to scratch as place for itself in wartime New York City. Stern is not yet an adult—he was born in 1926—yet as the most mobile and the most adaptable of the clan, he finds himself thrust into an adult world. He is the manager, the fixer, even the housekeeper. It sounds like a much of a muchness, but in fact he thrives on it, juggling friends and connections on two continents, in half a dozen languages. He emerges almost like the Robert Mitchum Character in Herman Wouk’s Winds of War, or maybe Woody Allen’s Zelig, always on hand, always in the picture. We find him in a chat with Isaiah Berlin, then getting college advice from Albert Einsten. No wonder he went onto a distinguished career as an academic administrator and a member of the “invisible choir: of post-war German-American relations.

Sadly but perhaps inevitably, Stern’s book loses some of its force as he gains in eminence. It still has its merits, but more and more and more it becomes an essay in “and-so-I-told-the-Pope” (literally: see pp 339-42) which necessarily impels the reader into a snooze.

Oz’s life (and book) is the same only different. He’s about 12 years younger than Stern. He was born in Israel, the only child of two parents, each fighting his or her own disappointments, and in a vast network of relatives and neighbors, all with their own demons and aspirations. He’s a precocious child who seems to assimilate almost everything around him and so he is able from an early age to assemble a mosaic of Israel’s complicated place in a complicated world. Like Stern, Oz too has played a part in the public life of his time but unlike Stern, Oz doesn’t make much of it explicitly in the book. He’s a writer, not an historian. Perhaps by definition, then, his account is more inward and elegiac. Yet of all these, next only to Levi he does the best job of conveying what it is to be a person in these trying times.

Afterthought I: If you like the literature of survivorship, then for a total change of pace, read the biography of Judah P. Benjamin (link), the Confederate Secretary of War, who, after Apomattox, succeeded in reinventing himself as a lawyer and leading law scholar in London.

Afterthought II: Political violence? What was I thinking? I guess I was thinking of the Hitler wars in Europe. They missed that, alright, but Oz as a nine-year-old child underwent the Arab onslaught against Jerusalem after the partition in 1948. No day at the beach, let me tell you.