I said I wasn’t going to do another “Back to the Past
Holocaust Book” blogpost, because it’s getting too predictable. But this one is so monumental, so
compelling, so filled with narrative desire, I decided I would go ahead
anyway. (And besides, it is my blog. . .
.)
The term “narrative desire” comes from Peter Brook’s Reading for the Plot in which he
presents a theory of reading narrative that is analogous to enacting sexual
desire. While reading a really
compelling novel, for example, one is drawn in—wanting to go forward to see
what happens, but delaying as much as possible to keep the pleasure alive. But the pleasure is only possible because of
the assurance that there will be an end.
(Most of his examples are long novels, but it works, as I will suggest,
for other kinds of stories as well.) So
narrative desire is a pleasurable process where one goes forward—propelled
along a path towards a promised pleasurable end, a climax as it were. (Oversimplification but moving on. . . .)
The Lost: The Search for Six of the Six Million by Daniel
Mendelsohn is a long (654 pages), complex history/memoir/reflection-on-storytelling
that created in me an extreme instance of narrative desire. The book famously begins with Mendelsohn
explaining that there was a time when he was young boy who could enter certain
rooms and the inhabitants would immediately begin to cry. The people in these rooms were elderly
Jewish relatives in Miami Beach who would, while crying, exclaim “He looks just
like Schmiel.”
Schmiel (Samuel) Jager was the brother of Mendelsohn’s maternal
grandfather Abraham Jaeger, and for much
of his childhood Mendelsohn only knew that Schmiel and his wife and their “four
beautiful daughters” had been "killed by the Nazis." As Mendelsohn grew up, he became more
interested in the history of his family, particularly the stories told by his grandfather. Abraham and his siblings were born in what
was then Bolechow Poland. He and all of
his siblings, except Schmiel, eventually landed in the US or Israel. Thus Schmiel (who had immigrated to the US in
1912 only to return to Bolechow the next year to build up the family business)
and his wife and daughters were the only ones of Abraham’s immediate family to die in the
Holocaust—and the only ones for whom most of the salient life and death details
were missing. Mendelsohn always wanted
to know more about them: who were the
daughters, what was the family like, where did they die, when did they die.
About 20 years after his grandfather’s death, Mendelsohn embarks on a series of
journeys to try to find out who these six people were--to rescue them from
anonyimity (lost not only in their deaths but also in any memories or remnants of
their lives). Like other books in the
genre, then, The Lost tells two
narratives: the story of the quest to
discover, and the story of the lives that are discovered.
I am not going to rehearse the details of the two
compelling narratives Mendelsohn creates.
The book has been well reviewed and there’s lots on-line about it. And
if you find this kind of thing interesting, then this, I say, is the book for
you. It is larger in its scope,
complexity, and ambition than the many other historical quest books I have been
recently reading (only some of which I have written about on the blog.). And it will probably be the last for a while,
because I cannot imagine another one compelling me as strongly as this one
did. Instead, I want to write briefly
about how Mendelsohn creates “narrative desire.” How he writes a book that is at once about
something as big as the Holocaust and at the same time as intimate as the fate
of one family, and in the process pulls the reader into this long and
complicated story that makes one read as quickly as possible (because it’s so
good) but also as slowly as possible (so that it will last as long as possible):
narrative desire.
The structure of The
Lost is quite complex, and Mendelsohn spends a lot of time writing about
how he has chosen to tell his stories.
At the beginning, he describes his grandfather’s stories as “vast
circling loops, so that each incident, each character. . . had its own
mini-history, a story within a story, a narrative inside a narrative, so that
the story he told was not (as he once explained it to me) like dominoes, one
thing happening just after the other, but instead like a set of Chinese boxes
or Russian dolls, so that each event turned out to contain another, which
contained another, and so forth” (39).
This looping narrative he associates with the Greeks, Homer and
Herodotus, as opposed, for instance, to Genesis which tells its story in a “straightforwardly chronological,
this-happened-then-this happened way” (41).
Mendelsohn preferred the looping Greek-like storytelling and became a
classicist, specializing in Greek tragedy.
However, he also had a (desultory) education in the Bible, particularly
the first five parashah (weekly readings) of Genesis (Creation, Cain and
Abel, Noah, the wanderings of Abraham, and the appearance of God to Abraham
demanding the sacrifice of his son Isaac) while he was preparing for his Bar
Mitzvah--a study he returned to years later.
The difference between the Greek and the Hebrew ways of narrating can be partially described by terms from narratology (the study
of how narratives are structured): story
and discourse. Story is the events that happened, the order
in which they happened and the causal links between them. Discourse is the way the story is told. In some texts, like Genesis, story and
discourse are structurally aligned, as the events are narrated in
chronological and causal order. In other
texts, like Mendelsohn’s grandfather’s tales of his family and the Old Country,
story and discourse are often divergent or oddly linked. Dominoes vs Russian dolls.
In first reading The
Lost, I thought it was going to be a primarily looping tale
(discourse). It starts several times. It goes back and forth. It digresses, regresses. But as I gradually realized, it also
progresses. It moves not just around and
about, but also forward towards a desired end (story). This progressive movement is signaled by the
five sections in which the book is organized, each corresponding to
one of the first five parashah of the Torah. And in fact along
with meditations on a variety of subjects—in the distant past, recent past, present—Mendelsohn
meditates on the first five sections of Genesis, using them as a skeleton for
his own two narratives. Thus Mendelsohn tells two looping tales that eventually tell us “what happened”: one the narrative of
his search to find the truth about what happened to Schmiel and his family, and
the other discovered “truth” about what happened to Schmiel and his
family. And it is this combination of
moving around (discourse) and moving forward (story), slowing down and speeding
up, that created for me narrative desire.
The best way I can explain this is to turn to one
literary device that Mendelsohn uses consistently in The Lost: foreshadowing.
Foreshadowing is a kind of “flash forward” which Mendelsohn uses to
remind us that there is more to know—a sort of rhetorical prolepsis. Just when he has found out something that
seems to solve at least a part of the mystery of what happened to Schmiel and
his family, Mendelsohn will remind us that this is “what we thought then," or “as
we so thought then,’ or “it wasn’t until later that we. . . ." In one of the most dramatic examples of
foreshadowing, appearing early in the book, Mendelsohn writes of his first trip
to interview Jewish people who had lived in Bolechow during World War II, “it
was in Australia, when we met with Jack Greene and the four other Bolechower
Jews who after the war had chosen to settle on that remote continent, as far as
it is geographically possible to get from Poland, that the contours of the
story came into focus at last, and we began to get the kind of concrete details
that we wanted, the specifics that can transform statistics and dates into a
story. What color the house was, how she
held her bag. And then Australia led to
Israel, where we met Reinharz and Heller, and Israel led to Stockholm, where we
met Mrs. Freilich, and Stockholm led to Israel again, and Israel led to
Denmark, where we met Kulberg, with his remarkable tale ” (182)
In The Lost, foreshadowing
is a major constituent of narrative desire. It reminds us that the story is not yet "over." (And indeed, in a way, narrative desire survives the end of the book, as the full history of Schmiel Jager and his family can never be completely known.) Moreover, foreshadowing has the virtue of reminding us that the Holocaust is a category
that is made up the lives and deaths of multiple individual people. As a category
it defies narrative in many ways because the ending is almost always the
same (or some variant of the same). But
the numbing sameness of the Holocaust events can be rescued (partially?) by the
specific details of the individuals whose unique stories make it up, details that are consistently foreshadowed in The Lost.
Narrative desire is built on details, specifics. Details provide the pleasure and pace of
engagement. They are what allow us into “what
happened” in a way statistics cannot. But they
are both powerful and powerless because they are always experienced at several
degrees remove. “[A]s I stood in this
most specific of places I knew that I was standing in the place where they had
died, where the life that I would never know had gone out of the bodies I had
never seen, and precisely because I had never known or seen them I was reminded
the more forcefully that they had been specific deaths, and those lives and deaths
belonged to them not me” (641). This, of
course, is one of the many ethical dilemmas that must be faced in narrating the
Holocaust. But the search to "rescue" to memory these six—to
make them at least to some degree knowable and identifiable—is not Mendelsohn’s
alone. By writing the book and creating the narrative desire that engages us so powerfully, Mendelssohn lets us as readers, in some sense, participate in the search as well.
#DanielMendelsohn
#TheLost
#NarrativeDesire
