A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

Tadeusz Borowski and the Gift a Writer Can Give

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this way for the gas ladies and gentlemen tadeusz borowskiIn terms of historical importance, little more can be said of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. It, like Night, is a testament to the Nazis’ atrocities at Auschwitz. While contemporary novels wink at us with wit and an ironic tone, Tadeusz Borowski’s work floats above like a wise parent whose wrenching past overwhelms the smallness of our daily distractions and grievances. To say it’s one of the most valuable books of the twentieth century is a meager compliment.

How Borowski Came to Write This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

In 1943, Borowski was arrested for participating in the underground education in Poland, a network of students and professors who privately continued university studies despite the Nazis ban on secondary schooling. Education had been outlawed in an effort to dumb down and enslave the Poles. Borowski was taken to Auschwitz where he worked as a laborer, unloading the cattle cars and other tasks assigned to him. He, already a journalism student, documented his experience, but this book isn’t just a memoir of events by a well-meaning but clumsy writer. It’s brilliant for its craft as well.

Discovering the Meaning in the Details

Borowski renders the inhumane events he witnessed with a removed, sometimes cynical, tone. This seems to be an act of self-preservation, compartmentalizing the horror in order to preserve his sanity and therefore his life. And so, his commentary is in how he chooses to portray what he sees. For instance, Tadek, Borowski’s literary self, describes a young German guard as having “corn coloured hair and dreamy blue eyes.” This creates a chilling portrait of the guard when the guard sells Tadek’s co-laborer a drink of water. Borowski notes the railway station is “surrounded by trees” and “a cheerful little station, very much like any other provincial railway stop,” and therefore, contrasts the regular outside world with the unspeakably violent one inside Auschwitz’s gates. By stringing together events like, “They throw her on the truck on top of the corpses. She will burn alive along with them,” and then opening the next paragraph: “The evening has come, cool and clear. The stars are out. We lie against the rails. It is incredibly quiet,” we understand in achingly vivid terms how the only solace these survivors have in the hellish world of Auschwitz are the moments of rest and cool air in between the exterminations.

Similarly in the story, “The People Who Walked On,” we see Tadek playing goalkeeper in a soccer game and how in between two throw-ins, three thousand people are put to death. When he runs to retrieve a ball, he catches sight of the newly arrived train: “People were emerging from the cattle cars … bright splashes of colour. The women were … already wearing summer dresses. The men had taken off their coats, and their white shirts stood out sharply against the green of the trees…” Later, when he runs back to retrieve the ball again, the ramp is empty: “Out of the whole colourful procession, not one person remained.” Borowski’s choice to describe how beautiful the crowd looked in the warm evening starkly lays out for us the price of life that was lost and how, when the train ramp is empty, the sublimity of their humanity has been annihilated by the Nazi’s efficient, organized terror that leaves no one behind.

At the war’s end, the Allies arrive and liberation is clear. But Borowski frames the story as one about revenge, rather than rescue. There are no melodramatic descriptions of the Allies arriving or the Nazis fleeing, only a brief tale about how the prisoners hid “our man,” presumably an S.S. officer or guard, while the American soldiers spoke to him in a larger group about upholding the law, then pulled him out and beat him to death. It’s an exemplary case of how straight depiction is far more powerful than editorializing.

How to Write After Reading Such Strength

Reading Borowski made me question what I write about. Next to This Way for The Gas, my work feels insignificant and erasable. But though my life has been blessed with peace and been free of ongoing oppression, I have faced serious challenges and wrenching, painful moments. Borowski taught me that those experiences may be the most important for me as a writer. They will enlarge and deepen my work. The trick is to keep them in my mind and heart each day that I write.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

The Methods in Jakov Lind’s Madness

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lind-soul-of-woodMost stories don’t smash me to bits. As I read them, I’m moved, enchanted, worried, dismayed, relieved, sometimes annoyed. But Jakov Lind’s Soul of Wood and Other Stories just left me flattened, feeling empty, and as if I were stranded in a strange shapeless place. The question “Wow, what was that all about?” kept looping in my head like a song, and I was unable to find an answer.

But I think the answer lies in not only the mad brilliance of the story itself, but more so, for me as a writer, in the craft of how Lind created the story. By story I mean the novella, Soul of Wood, which opens the collection. The later short stories are also impressive in their own way, but Soul of Wood is the masterpiece. It’s set in Austria in the 1940s and follows Wohlbrecht, a crippled Austrian soldier, who works to hide Anton Barth, a mostly paralyzed Jewish boy, in a mountain cabin. He enlists the help of Alois, his brother-in-law, and the first half of the book centers on the two’s endeavors of dragging Barth up through the woods while trying to avoid the Nazis and their random air attacks.

Shot from all Sides by Point of View

Lind’s voice is somehow casual, witty, romantic and brusquely masculine all at once. It doesn’t just blast its way through the narrative, but rather tumbles with a clear urgency. This was probably the first technique that I’d love to emulate (oh, if I could.) But what’s crazier and even more unattainable is how the point of view wanders. It, at times, becomes dreamy and surreal before landing flatly in stark reality. Take, for instance, the following passage occurring early in the story, which by the way could be a spoiler, depending on how you view the narrative. Read at your own risk.

As Wohlbrecht and Alois return from the cabin, they stop at the side of the road. Wohlbrecht lays and dozes in the hay as Alois talks of his post-war plans. Alois plans to visit Rumania in an effort to cure his epilepsy. In one paragraph, Alois talks about a renowned doctor and his treatment that Alois believes will mend all aspects of his life. In another, the grand wealth that he and all of Vienna will enjoy after the war. As readers we are relaxed at this point in the passage, imagining hopeful situations and feeling a tender intimacy with Alois.

Then: “The loud engine sounds woke up Wohlbrecht.” This kicks off a random rotation of omniscient narration, stream of consciousness and Wohlbrecht’s spoken words. There’s little punctuation to help us distinguish between what’s happening, what’s being said and what’s being thought.

“Jumping Jesus, he cried, they’ll fly right up my ass. A burst of machine-gun fire beat down like rain on the tin roof and by the time Wohlbrecht cried ‘Cover!’ Alois was dead. Hit right in the back of the head. The blood gushed like a geyser. Alois, Alois, Wohlbrecht yelled thinking he was still asleep. Alois, where’d it get you? Alois didn’t move. Alois, don’t pretend, say something. Alois said nothing. It was so still he could hear a beetle scratching in the hay.”

Here, this mishmash of point of view hits us in the gut. We’re dealing with the sudden chaos of the moment, which poetically reflects the sudden chaos of the entire war experience. It also shows the contrast between life and death, the potential of the future and the negation of it in how Alois is dreaming of better years to come when he is suddenly killed. By the end of these few paragraphs, we’re jarred, upset, and left processing what just happened – as Wohlbrecht is. Lind doesn’t just describe trauma, he hurls us into it so we experience it first hand. That he does this by manipulating point of view is amazing.

There are other amazing aspects to Soul of Wood as well. The plot of the book later bends back on itself and we discover that much of the seemingly random events, forgotten images and off-hand mentions of names and people actually come together in a larger symbolic coherence. That coherence makes this novella one of the most under-appreciated of our time.

The Shorter Works

The Other Stories in the title are mostly outlandish, grotesque short stories rooted in the trauma of World War II. In one, a piano teacher is haunted by his past as an S.S. officer. A traveler stumbles upon a family of cannibals. A man follows his neighbor to a kind of speakeasy only to find a featureless woman who somehow sets him free. A killer about to be executed dreams of killing his father in revenge. Two men, a Jew and a Catholic-converted-Jew, share a snug hole as they hide from the Nazis. Somehow these shorter pieces unfold with a tongue-in-cheek wit. They’re also somewhat allegorical though what they represent is too complex and hidden to explore here. Suffice to say they embody Lind’s seemingly unstable spirit, macabre wit and clever narrative arcs, which leave writers like me both horrified and smiling.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Soul of Wood from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business.

Bringing Light to Characters in In Darkness

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Writing rich characters can be difficult. I’ve been told I should take a stereotype then add something unexpected—as though two dimensions plus one quirk equals a round character. But humanity is more than two layers deep and your audience can tell the difference. Agnieszka Holland’s film In Darkness, written by David Shamoon, displays some of the richest characters I’ve seen in a while.

I will admit to Holocaust fatigue and I was leery of this film for that reason. I’ve been reading various memoirs and histories of the horrors for over two decades. While there is no end to the human suffering that the Nazis inflicted, there is a limit to the nuance I can absorb from these stories. It was daring to try and tell a new story. But the movie succeeded.

I don’t normally review movies (though I might start doing more) but this one is related to TWO books: In the Sewers of Lvov by Robert Marshall and The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow Krystyna Chiger.

Our Hero

The protagonist, Pan Socha, is a Polish sewer worker during WWII who makes extra money on the side by looting the homes of recently relocated Jews in Lvov. When he hears some Jews trying to escape the ghetto by breaking into the sewer, he could make the obvious choice—the one that is “in character,” but his character is richer than that. Throughout the movie he continues to wrestle between his selfish motivations (greed, not getting shot by Nazis) and his need to do the human thing and help save those lives.

Socha continues to wrestle with his base greed throughout the film, but he also displays growth. There is a moment where he defends Jews as a people (a very dangerous thing to do) while lecturing his friend in a public place. At another time, he steps from the shadows to save the life of a Jew who had given him nothing but trouble.

Socha made Spielberg’s Oskar Schindler look two dimensional. Yes, there is the moment at the end when Schindler cries because he could have saved more Jews, but it felt like a tacked on emotion rather than a breakdown. Socha evolves and grows throughout the film, and though he is imperfect, I loved him for it.

Other characters

Socha’s wife has a central conflict that is very simple, but the way it manifests is beautiful and rich. She initially teaches her husband that Jews are just like everyone else and gives him a lesson on religion to prove it. But when she finds out he is helping Jews, she is livid. You can see her wrestling between her humanity and her need to preserve her family. She does this over and over throughout the film.

Klara Keller also has conflicting desires—she is trying to keep alive the sister she never really liked. Yanek is forced to choose between his wife and his lover and even then can’t find peace. In fact, every character in this film seems torn which befits a movie about such a turbulent time.

Perhaps that’s where some Holocaust portrayals fail—they turn into tales of good and evil. Holland and Shamoon forced me to examine the good and evil within myself. Perhaps the best reason to create robust, lifelike characters is to encourage your readers to examine that complexity within themselves.

Note: I completely failed to credit the writer in the original post. This has been revised to reflect the exemplary work of David Shamoon.

If this review made you want to watch the movie, pick up a copy of In Darkness from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Regarding the Bosnian War with Susan Sontag

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Dubrovnik
Most of the roofs in Dubrovnik are bright red–a sign that they have been recently replaced.

Of the Bosnian War, I remember only images on CNN of the bombing of Sarajevo. My excuse is that I was a teenager, though I lived for a year in Eastern Europe during the height of the war and should have been more aware. I later studied it in Political Science, but I could never find an entry point to start to relate to it on a human rather than academic scale. Even Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Ministry of Pain felt abstract despite her incredible depiction of the war’ effects on one person. Reading more relatable books by Ismet Prcic and Saša Stanišić in preparation for our trip humanized the war, but the former Yugoslavia still seemed like a far off place. As Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others, “The memory of war…is mostly local.”

Flying from Paris to Zagreb, I wondered at the large, orderly collections of dark rectangles on the ground. They were too small to be cars. As the plane descended, I realized they were all near churches and that they must be graves. They looked so fresh and plentiful. I started to feel leaden.

regarding the pain of others - susan sontagI tried to forget about the graves as we flew to Dubrovnik and entered the beautiful, walled old Town. For a couple of days I was a right good tourist exploring the sights and spending money. But I kept looking for signs of the war. The guidebook said the only evidence we would see of the bombing of Dubrovnik was the new red tile roofs. It wasn’t until walked the walls that I saw that most of the roofs were the bright red of new tile. Almost no building was left untouched. I wanted to think that there were other reasons for some of the new roofs, but there were so many of them…I was curious and I wanted to know more, but I didn’t know who to ask and I didn’t want to be rude. I wanted to see the place for more than its war experiences, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

On our final day in Dubrovnik, we turned from sunny Stradun street with its masses of tourists down a narrow side street and stepped into War Photo Limited. There were three main exhibits that day: Blood & Honey by Ron Haviv, Srebrenica Genocide 11/07/95 by Tarik Samarah, and Bosnians by Paul Lowe. Wandering though those exhibits, I saw images of the aftermath of the Bosnian War: mass graves, survivors being DNA tested to identify corpses, and bones that no one bothered to bury. Sontag had seen these photos. She wrote broadly about images from the Bosnian War and specifically about Ron Haviv’s image of a Serb kicking a Muslim woman’s corpse.

There are images that recur in conflict and thus war photography—starving people and mass graves are all too common. Sontag writes “shock can become familiar” and this exhibit contained some images familiar from conflicts past, including images of dolls as a metaphor for the loss of innocence. I had seen images like these from World War II and Viet Nam but they didn’t speak to the unique character of the conflict and I wished I could have learned more from them. In contrast, one of the more affecting images was of a decomposing corpse and the Koran that had fallen from his hand. The image spoke specifically to this one conflict and to the young man who was torn from his home and who was likely praying when he was murdered. I thought of the families detailed in Prcic and Stanišić’s books who had been forced out of their homes and then murdered. One of my favorite photographs showed people congregating for water outside bombed out buildings. I thought of Prcic’s hero and the lengths he went to in order to shower to impress a girl and how Prcic found a way to marry the perfect detail in a story with something that spoke to the larger condition.

When I saw an image of an American law enforcement agent searching a field for graves, I found my connection to this story. Madeleine Albright wrote in her autobiography about her disappointment with the way the US handled the Bosnian War—with how long it took us to get involved. I don’t advocate for widespread US intervention, but I do think the world community has a moral imperative to intervene when civilians are being killed. When genocide is being committed. After all the time I spent reading about the Holocaust as a child, I thought it couldn’t happen again, that we knew better. Part of what I was experiencing in Croatia was disbelief that it did. In Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria, and so many more places.

Sontag writes, “One should feel obliged to think about what it means to look at” war photography and I have been thinking about my motives. The exhibit did not quell my curiosity. I still examined buildings for bullet holes and wondered about the story and family behind each burned out house. In fact the exhibit made me more curious, but it also framed that curiosity. Instead of worrying about the base nature of humans, I am focusing on the history. I am learning where places like Vukovar, Tuzla and Srebrenica are on the map. I am thinking about the wonderful, friendly people we met throughout Croatia and Slovenia and about how they are like people everywhere. It’s far too easy to watch war on the TV or even to change the channel. Somewhere inside I have always been terrified that war could happen to me and I think that is the real reason I have disengaged. But the Bosnian War is no longer a war that happened somewhere to someone else. War can happen anywhere to anyone. I hope never to experience it, but I’m no longer going to pretend it couldn’t happen to me. I’m not going to let my fear be an excuse for ignoring what is happening in the world.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Regarding the Pain of Others from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

The Structure of Secrets in The Informers

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’s novel, The Informers, is a collection of three stories wrapped together in a brilliant structure. Rather than three consecutive books forming a trilogy, the action of the second book (the one we are reading) takes place after the first has been published. Vasquez reveals little of the text of the first book, the story of the exile of a family friend from Germany in Colombia during and after World War II, to the reader. Instead, its action is revealed in counterpoint to the action of the second book, which deals with the reaction of the narrator’s father to his first book and the aftermath of this reaction.

It is this reaction by Gabriel Santoro Sr. to his son’s book that hints at the underlying link between these three stories. Without revealing too much of the plot, it is enough to say a theme of informing develops and it is not until the third book, which forms a postscript to the second, that I truly understood the nature of the writer as informer.

I highly recommend this book to anyone writing memoir or anyone grappling with the ways in which writing reveals greater truths about its author than we sometimes intend. It is also a good book for anyone looking for a completely fresh way of looking at World War II and how it affected more than just Europe.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of The Informers from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.