The narrator of the book is a boy. The focus is on his
development: how he learns about
his town and its present reality, his family, his teachers, and what he should
think about the many strange and quirky characters he encounters. For most of
the book, the narrator and his sister do everything jointly and share a growing
awareness as they emerge from childhood, so instead of “I” he writes mainly
about “we” – adding to the strangeness. At a certain point late in the novel,
he switches to “I” – when he and his sister are severed from having a sort of
common identity.
The boy struggles to grasp reality. He writes: “we sensed that
nothing we might ever encounter … would frighten us more than what Herr
Tarangolin called the horror of the
literary existence – the void that engulfs us when we have too little
actual experience.” (p. 50 or Kindle location 997)
The narrator’s town, his family, his teachers, and the
people around him are so strange that the focus often shifts to them. Some
reviewers, in fact, see the central character as Tildy, a “Hussar,” displaced
by the break up of the Austrian Empire. Tildy’s story and that of other
aristocrats is important to the boy as he learns the values of his elders, but I think that it's only one of the key themes of the novel.
The family of the brother and sister is complicated. His
parents are poor but high status, and have a number of servants; his mother’s three
sisters live with them. All play a major role in the family and in the
lives of the children. The parents hire one governess and two tutors who are
very important as well. The earliest Jewish character in the novel is the
governess, whose pretense is that she is not Jewish, but who clearly is – to
the children’s confusion. The children eventually go to school, where they
learn about the headmistress, the teachers, and their fellow pupils, many also Jewish.
Earlier in the novel, descriptions of people and events are
often incomplete because the children are protected. Often, their mother sends them
out of the room when the adults discuss or learn about things she doesn’t want children
to hear. Thus the narrator is fascinated by adults who do tell him lurid
things, like an elderly woman who loves to retell the story of her husband’s
suicide and how she and her children watched it through a keyhole. He also realizes
how women and men in his society have very different rights and possibilities
(a very interesting theme that I’m not going to pursue here).
Above all, he becomes conscious of two types of people:
aristocrats like Tildy and Jews like two school friends who are very important
to him. The focus of the book slowly shifts to how he sees these groups.
From Tildy, the lesson the narrator learned is about
destiny: “Destinies have become as rare as people with character,” he wrote,
“and they are becoming harder and harder to find, the more we insist on
replacing the concept of character
with that of personality. Major
Tildy, however, was a man of character ….” (p. 29 or Kindle location 620)
His two Jewish friends taught him many things, which he
described in detail; early in his narrative about them he says “We have these
two Jewish children to thank for the realization that the seat of the soul is
found in the forehead and not the stomach, although we didn’t quite know at the
time they were Jewish.” Not knowing and finding out that they were Jewish, and
what that meant, is a key part of the story right up to the end; he writes“Only
later … did we find out that they were Jews. So we didn’t make the usual
discovery that Jews are also people,
but rather the reverse, that people are
sometimes also Jews. … in other words that there were no ‘typically Jewish’
traits, but rather a characteristically Jewish way of expressing traits that
were simply human.” (p. 223-224 or Kindle location 4245 and 4273)
The way the narrator learns to think about other people is
the most interesting part of the book. The other people in the parents’ lives
are mostly from the upper classes of the town, along with some of the
shopkeepers – mainly Jewish -- and a lot of military men or retired military
men. People speak Russian, German, Hungarian, Romanian, Yiddish, and various
local dialects, and bring many points of view and self interests into the
story.
The parents and their friends belong to various Christian
denominations (which are numerous, thanks to the complex legacy of the town,
which includes its Austrian, Russian, and Hungarian populations and
influences). But the shopkeepers, teachers, and other children include many
Jews. The most unusual thing about the book is that it describes the
relationship of Christians and Jews, the persecution of Jews, and the
anti-Jewish sentiments of Christians all from a Christian point of view. In my
reading experience, I have rarely read this much about Eastern European
Jewish-Christian relations seen from any but a highly self-aware Jewish perspective. This is the most interesting part of the learning
experience: the discovery of how people’s attitudes towards Jews varies, and
how the children’s natural reaction that Jews are like other people isn’t
shared by the adults in their lives.
The fictitious town, Czernopol, is in Romaina or Ukraine –
it may be based on the “real” town of Czernowitz where the author grew up, but
that’s not important because it’s clearly meant to be iconic. The town’s
present, though also not identified specifically, seems to be in the 1920s or
maybe 1930s – World War I is the important past, which has separated the town
from the Austrian Empire, but has left its legacy. And one important part of
the present is the looming threat of Germans and Nazis.
Recent reviews that doesn’t see the book quite as I do:
- The nation that disappeared by Michael LaPointe, April 9, 2012
- Changing of the Guard by John Wray, March 2, 2012
These reviews see Tildy as the center of the
story. I see Tildy as one of the object lessons through which the boy narrator
learns about humans and about how they form their ideas. Tildy’s nutty idealism
leads him to challenge his military superiors to a duel, so they have him
committed to an insane asylum. This is one side of human nature. Another side
of human nature leads the townspeople to engage in a furious riot or pogrom,
where the Jews’ shops and homes – including those of the children’s schoolmates
– are destroyed. Idealism or furious antisemitism: these seem to be primary
choices in this decaying remnant of Austrian Empire.
The epigraph and contributor to the title of the novel is “The ermine will die should her coat become
soiled. – from the Physiologus.”
Reviews interpret the quote to apply to Tildy; I think it resonates with the
theme of antisemitic violence as well, though perhaps more subtly.
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