Reading Claudius

FOREWORD

Shortly after the death of my father in 2001, I felt compelled to craft my family’s story into words on the page. Initially, I tried writing the chapters out of chronological sequence. These would be the easier chapters, I thought. As fallible as memory is, at least I was there, a witnessing narrator, already part of the story. From the very beginning of embarking on the research that led to Reading Claudius, I agonized over how I would write about events that took place before I was born. Despite immersing myself in archives, interviews, letters, and books, when I turned to writing the chapters that focus on my parents’ and uncle’s early lives, I became paralyzed. Rich with information from research, I still had no way of knowing how the light looked through a window, what someone wore, the inflection of someone’s voice—­what the philosopher Michel de Certeau refers to as the immense remainder that makes lives real and a story about those lives larger than a compilation of facts.

I experimented with different possibilities. I tried to enter the narrative at certain junctures, dispersing phrases like: I think they told me . . . , I don’t know with certainty, but . . . , There is a good chance that . . . But the insertions created a nervous glancing-­over-­the-shoulder feeling in the text, an awkwardness that seemed to diminish the possibility of immersion in my parents’ and uncle’s early world—­both for me and, I thought, for my audience.

That strategy failing, I turned to other writers. There isn’t a self-­evident way of going about it, says W. G. Sebald in an interview about his efforts to narrate history. You gather things up like a person who leaves a burning house . . . You adulterate the truth as you try to write it. Alice Munro seemed to agree, describing the process of writing her own family’s story, The View from Castle Rock, as one of sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life. And because he brought such sly sad humor to the question of narrating a family’s past, I felt particularly close to Delmore Schwartz. In my favorite of his stories, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, the protagonist goes to a movie theater and inexplicably finds himself watching a film about his parents’ lives before he was born, rather than the movie he came to see. He starts to talk back to the screen, trying to insert himself into the narrative so that he can fashion the story into the one he wants it to be. "What are you doing?! a theater usher shouts, running down the aisle toward where the man sits. Don’t you know you can’t do whatever you want to do? he scolds as he grabs the man’s arm and ejects him from the theater. You can’t carry on like this!"

But how does any writer avoid carrying on like this as she summons the presumption and temerity to cross the border between present and past, living and dead? If she inserts herself into the story, as I tried to do, the reader will rightly ask, "What are you doing here? But if she aims to be an omniscient narrator, her reader will just as rightly ask, Where are you?"

I eventually made the decision to allow myself to imagine some of the historical details—­the expressions and clothing, the dialogue and gestures, thoughts, and emotions, as they may have occurred in the holes left empty by those letters, interviews, and archives, and to provide detailed source notes that describe the research that contributed to the rendering of each chapter.

In The Human Condition, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, a dear friend of my uncle Erich who frequently visited my parents’ home when I was a child, wrote that compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life . . . lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and until they are transformed, deprivatized . . . into a shape to fit them for public appearance. She calls such stories the subjective in-­between.

Though the contours of each historical chapter comprising Part I are fundamentally factual, in the everyday details I evoke, I called on my parents and uncle to subtly deputize me to be their chronicler, allowing myself to enter the subjective in-­between. I did so not because I believe a writer accomplishes higher artistry or truth when she lets her imagination enter in, but because doing so seemed necessary to capture as closely as possible the spirit of what Claire Messud calls life being lived. At the heart of things, Messud writes, whatever the ideas and ideologies, the violations and violence, the peculiarities of culture—­always at the heart are ordinary people, and there is just life being lived: tables and bread and toilets and scissors and cigarettes and kisses. Unable to know my parents’ and uncle’s early world in its fullness, I tried in this way to approximate a representation of its wholeness. Doing so was my way of fulfilling a lifelong yearning to literally make my parents’ world whole again, to bring back that dense mingling of the intellectual, the artistic, the social, and the political that defined their early lives—­their lost Atlantis of prewar Central Europe.

I had no need to wrestle with a narrative style for the Prologue or for Part II of Reading Claudius. My challenge here was of a different nature: overcoming my resistance to adding my own story to that of my parents and uncle. Like many heirs of the Holocaust, I carry a sense that the drama and losses of the past eclipse what seem like (and often are) the more prosaic dramas of our more immediate present. Thus, I originally intended Reading Claudius to be solely about my parents’ and uncle’s lives, not about my own. But a price is paid for survival, and indeed keeps getting paid generationally, though not in the exact same coin. Writing the Prologue and Part II necessitated varieties of self-­scrutiny that I hadn’t anticipated having to undertake, transforming Reading Claudius into a more urgently personal undertaking, closer to my own bone. My parents’ history has multiple implications for how I’ve been formed. But while I was shaped by my parents’ darkness and carry its meanings, the darkness itself is only a part of me. It isn’t synonymous with my fuller essence, which belongs to me as a creature of my own place and time. In gaining access to the past’s secrets, I gained access to my own. It is from this full, complicated panorama that I wrote Reading Claudius.

READING CLAUDIUS

How can it be that all that is in us dies with us? How can it be that those memories . . . simply ceased to be? . . . This seems to me the greatest weakness of any supposed divine plan, the primary reason to doubt.

Claire Messud, The Road to Damascus,

Granta, Winter 2012

PROLOGUE

And That New Thing Is Life

In the summer of 1954, when I was four years old, my family moved from Omaha, Nebraska, where my father had completed his medical residency, to the west side of Chicago, near his new job as staff hematologist at the VA hospital. The Third Unitarian Church was a block from our apartment, and my parents joined it. On Sunday mornings, I’d sit enfolded in my mother’s lap for the adult service, led by the gentle, grandfatherly minister, E. T. Buehrer, while my brother, Tom, who was six, attended Sunday school. On our way home, Tom performed new songs he’d learned—­this little liberal light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.

Occasionally, after services, my father declared a holiday from his medical research, which he rarely abandoned, even on weekends. We’d pick up rolls and cold cuts from Steve’s Grocery, near our apartment, and drive to a nature preserve on the outskirts of Chicago. It had meandering trails bordered by wetlands and prairie grasses and, in spring and summer, bursts of wildflowers of every imaginable color. The long paths, visited by chipmunks and rabbits, which we fed with the fluffy insides of our sandwich rolls, were connected by arched wooden footbridges over small streams. Each bridge had a glass-­enclosed display case fastened to its railing that contained drawings and photographs of the native wildlife and plants as well as short descriptions and, at the bottom, a line or two from a nature poem by Robert Frost, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson.

Carrying our picnic, we’d set out along the trails, where my father, an assortment of Zim’s Golden Nature Guides in his back pockets, had the habit of stopping at each display case and, in his serious, schoolmasterly way, reading every bit of information out loud, then looking down at Tom and me with an expression that implied a quiz might follow.

But by the time we got to the third or fourth wooden bridge, the muscles of my father’s mouth and cheeks would relax. The dark mood that pressed heavily on our family life fell away like a mask, and a softness came over my father as his voice transitioned from the lines of the American nature poems to recitations of German poems he’d memorized long ago.

My parents had always peppered their English with fragments of German. In later years, when my uncle Erich, my father’s older brother, moved to the United States and came to visit us on weekends, they often spoke German together. But here, on the nature trails, the German words flowed out in streams of joy. Our sad, stern father, our Bau (when my brother was a toddler, his efforts to say Paul produced only Bau, and we referred to him as that all our lives), transformed into someone impish and lighthearted. He even did a little dance. I didn’t want this Bau ever to leave.

The finale to the afternoon was poems by Goethe, which Bau sang—­Is not the world still left? . . . Doth not the wondrous arch of heaven still rise, / Now rich in shape, now shapeless to the eyes? Hearing my father speak Goethe’s name with such warmth and happiness, I imagined someone who smelled like a grandfather might smell, a combination of Reverend Buehrer and Jingles from the Saturday-­morning television show Wild Bill Hickok. Bau swept the air with his make-­believe conductor’s baton and stretched his arms out toward my mother, who stood on the sidelines of the stream of his activity. Though he’d tease himself—­Only people who have a talent for singing ought to sing—­Bau’s voice sounded as if it were meant for just these words, as though in them he’d finally found a ration of the world’s store of happiness, which on other days eluded him.

While my father sang Goethe, my mother pulled my brother and me close in front of her and wrapped her arms around us, facing Bau. It was hard to stay still for as long as she held us, but I felt that she needed us to. It was as though she were displaying us to the world, a little sanctuary of us.

In 1958, a few weeks before Christmas vacation—­by then we’d moved to a suburb called Riverside, and I was in third grade—­ninety-­two children and three teachers died in a fire at Our Lady of Angels, a Catholic elementary school on Chicago’s northwest side. In the days that followed, the victims’ photographs filled the front pages of the Chicago Sun-­Times, which arrived at my parents’ doorstep every morning. Each evening I cut out the photos, laid them on my bedspread, and stared at the children’s faces, scrutinizing their expressions for signs of their impending doom like a lookout sentry alert for shadows or noises in the night. I recall the photograph of one little girl in particular. She looked about my age, eight years old, had dark hair, a slightly protruding upper lip that gave her a mischievous look, deep-­set, watchful eyes, and a knowing, eager expression, as if she wanted to talk to me.

I made myself look at the photos of the children each night before I went to bed, especially the face of this little girl, whose features, I realized much later, reminded me of a photograph of my mother as a child, one of the few she’d managed to take out of Germany. I was convinced that another terrible tragedy would ensue if I didn’t hold the image of the girl with me as I drifted off to sleep, so I thought of her with such concentration that sometimes in dreams I watched her fall from the sky in a light brown dress, somersaulting as she fell, all the while looking at me, talking to me, trying to tell me something.

After the fire, every evening before my mother came into my room to say good night, I lined up my stuffed animals two by two, arms around each other, paws touching. Each was with a best friend in case something terrifying happened while I slept. I won’t die during the night. Tommy won’t die during the night. You won’t die during the night. Bau won’t die during the night. Night after night, I needed my mother to sit with me at bedtime and repeat these words as if they could cancel the imagined ones the little girl might be trying to tell me. The ritual begun after the fire went on for several years, interrupted only when Uncle Erich, who didn’t approve of babying children, visited. Still I dreamed of the little girl, who sometimes transformed into the image of my mother in the photo of her as a child. Then she’d be the little girl again, coming so close to my face I could feel her breath.

That Christmas season, while the lights of Riverside glowed outside, Bau read aloud to Tom and me from the English translation of Doctor Zhivago, which had just come out in the United States. After dinner, Bau, his head thrust a little forward from his body, as was his habit, hurried to the shelf to retrieve the book, which he kept next to his weathered copy of War and Peace. As I listened to the sounds of my mother cleaning up in the kitchen and through the windows watched the snow diffuse the beams of the cars and the lights of the houses on Herrick Road, my father turned the pages with a moistened index finger, looking for the exact passage where the previous reading had left off. He pulled out the silver mechanical pencil always clipped to the pocket of his jacket or shirt and carefully bracketed a section or drew a double line in the margin of the book. Zis is something to remember, he murmured, as Tom and I ate the Scottie dog- and star-­shaped Christmas cookies we’d helped my mother bake. Riverside had its Christmas pageants, and we had Doctor Zhivago.

The book, with its pencil marks, is in front of me now. I’ve opened to an early scene in which Yurii Zhivago explains his beliefs about consciousness, religion, and the meaning of memory and eternity to a dying and frightened Anna Ivanovna Gromeko, the woman who raised him. Bracketed in faded pencil is this passage: And now listen carefully. You in others—­this is your soul. This is what you are, what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life, your soul, your immortality in others.

Bau’s purpose in reading to us from Doctor Zhivago may have had nothing to do with trying to relieve my agony over the deaths of the children, but sitting next to him, I felt as though, in a feat of uncommon empathy, he was addressing the words directly to me. I identified the children’s faces, their eyes, mouths, noses, hair, with these words from the book and with my father’s voice, which, though more serious, expressed something similar to what it conveyed when he stood on the footbridges of the nature preserve singing Goethe—­that these words and what could be found in them, certainly what he found in them, might connect me to something even more real than the world that surrounded me.

So, what will happen to your consciousness? Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else’s? Yurii Zhivago asks Anna Ivanovna in another passage bracketed by Bau’s pencil strokes. What are you conscious of in yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestations of yourself that you come across your identity—­in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people . . . There will be no death because the past is over. It is already done with. What we need is something new, and that new thing is life, Bau read in his deep, heavily accented voice, the book cradled in his lap, Tom and I seated on either side of him, our hands clasped around our knees.

And that new thing is life, my father repeated, tapping his knee, then each of ours, with his soft fist, and nodding as if renewing a bargain he’d made with himself long ago.

On a brilliant, sunny afternoon, fall 1966, I sat at my desk in my American history class, staring longingly out the tall windows, opened just a crack, that overlooked the athletic field. In the heat of early afternoon, the room smelled of formaldehyde from the biology class down the hall and grease from the cafeteria below. Grunts from boys in gym class outside pushed through the windows. I was sixteen years old, a junior at Riverside Brookfield High School. My teacher, Mr. Dombrowski, a slender, sweaty man with regal posture, pursed lips, and perfectly parted brown hair tamed with scented pomade, had a high-­pitched voice that became nasal and tinny when he lectured. Even on warm days he wore a dark suit, dress shirt, and bow tie, and when he moved around our classroom, he smelled of menthol and body odor.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve established that the colonists wanted their freedom from King George. What else? What else brought the colonies to war? Mr. Dombrowski hoisted himself out of the chair behind his desk and grabbed a piece of chalk to begin one of his famous lists. NUMBER 1, he wrote, as always, in big well-­formed letters and numerals, as if the very fact of the list were more important than its content. In-­dee-­pen-­dence! he said as he wrote it out, adding in a vertical column underneath #2, #3, #4, #5. In Mr. Dombrowski’s view, all historical events should have at least five clear causes. Number two? Anyone?

To keep another country from taking your land away, said David Doemland, sitting to my left. Different from the robust, crew-­cut boys who presided over the halls of RB, David was slight, with wispy blond curls, serious pale blue eyes, and a kind of melancholy and intelligence that inspired my fondness and loyalty. We were in several classes together.

Ah, Mr. Doemland, you take the viewpoint of England! Mr. Dombrowski said. How diplomatic of you. Yes, England didn’t want to lose its fine piece of property across the Atlantic. Correct, Mr. Doemland. Good! He added David’s contribution to the list. #2: LAND OWNERSHIP.

Like Syria blowing up the Jews, David went on. I remember him leaning back in his seat and stretching his slender legs in the aisle. The Jews took Syria’s land. War is justified to get it back, to hold the Jews back. He crossed his arms with self-­satisfaction.

Okay, Mr. Doemland. You offer an example from current events to make a point, Mr. Dombrowski said, alluding to Syria’s recent attacks on Israeli border towns that had filled the news that fall. But since you’re making a comparison, he went on, "let’s define what we’re talking about. For one thing, who are ‘the Jews’?"

In little trumpet blasts of contempt, yet in the matter-­of-­fact tone of someone who saw himself as a spokesperson for accepted truths, David answered: You know, kinky black hair. Hooked noses. His chest puffed with vanity. He glanced around the room as though we were all in on this, as though he hadn’t a doubt that we all agreed.

Heat spread down my legs and arms and suffused my face. In high school, I was known for being shy, soft-­spoken, and smart. My comments in class were careful, measured. I raised my hand to speak. At first nothing came out. Then I began to speak loudly, emphatically, as if a calling to meet this moment had lived inside me forever. Israel is a tiny country. I might have shouted it. Jews couldn’t go anywhere else. Jews were being murdered . . . I lost my way as my voice stuck in my throat.

Before we proceed with our discussion, Mr. Dombrowski said in a cool and dispassionate voice, I should ask if anyone in the class is Jewish.

His question felt intimate and perilous. David fiddled with his pencil. I didn’t want anyone to look at me. In the room, which suddenly felt motionless and silent, Mr. Dombrowski’s near-­suffocating fragrance settled around me. I had the sensation of floating above myself, my body hidden in a shapeless brown dress. I felt my arm go up, propelled by a will of its own, then stop halfway, extended out to my right like that of a crossing guard stopping traffic. I couldn’t raise it farther. I couldn’t put it down.

Into the blank space of my mind—­for seconds, minutes, years—­nothing entered and yet, as if for the very first time, everything did. What was once confused, formless, and partial now cohered, like a primordial threat. Haughtily blond David Doemland had declared his hatred for Jews, and I knew: He was talking about me.

I don’t believe my parents made a conscious decision to hide our Jewishness from my brother and me as we were growing up. Nor do I believe they made a deliberate decision not to tell us about the losses that formed their lives before we were born. Maybe it was a second’s hesitancy that kept them from telling us. Perhaps more seconds accumulated until the silence became more a surrender to habit than a thought or plan. They’d filled our house with symbols of intellectual curiosity and openness—­shelves crammed with books, including the old tattered ones they’d managed to take out of Europe, heady progressive journals and program notes from concerts, lectures, and plays. But that openness and curiosity had limits. However it had been forged, there was a tacit family agreement not to ask certain questions. Tom and I fell into step with the prohibition, tiptoeing around those questions as if avoiding broken glass. Little by little, without our noticing, tiptoeing became our natural gait.

A truth that had little to do with our daily lives in Riverside, Illinois, hovered over everything but never landed quite long enough for us to touch it. I felt confounded by feelings of incompleteness. We were strangers to our parents’ darkness, yet wholly formed from it. Though the losses our parents knew before we were born lay behind them, I sensed that everything else that held meaning and importance was behind them, too—­behind all of us. The real narrative had already been lived, and we were its tiny afterlife.

After the war, my parents, like many Holocaust