Ronald Suresh Roberts SHTETL: A HISTORY OF A SMALL TOWN AND AN EXTINGUISHED WORLD by Eva Hoffman (Chatto &Windus, R135) ECHOES OF A NATIVE LAND by Serge Schmemann (Little, Brown, R160)
In her poetic autobiography Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language (1989), Eva Hoffman tells of her Jewish familys flight from wartime Poland to Canada. She reveals the emotional interior of her new country, language and self.
In Canada, Hoffmans own Polish tongue becomes remote to her, like Latin or Greek; yet English remains disturbingly new: Nostalgia is a source of poetry, and a form of fidelity. It is also a species of melancholia, which used to be thought of as an illness. As I walk the streets of Vancouver, I am pregnant with the images of Poland, pregnant and sick … The largest presence within me is the welling up of an absence, of what I have lost. This pregnancy is also a phantom pain.
In a wonderful paradox, Hoffman embarks on a diary, written in English, as an earnest attempt to create that part of my persona that I imagine I would have grown into in Polish. Thus separate selves come to express each other.
Since Hoffmans memoir leaves few superlatives unearned, one turns eagerly to her latest offering on the themes of change and loss. Shtetl: A History of a Small Town and an Extinguished World. But whereas the memoir embodied Hoffmans own innermost identity, the new book the story of small-town Bransk, in eastern Poland – came to her while watching a television documentary.
In the pedestrian voice of the historian, Hoffman sees the book as a kind of counterpoint to Harvard Professor Daniel Goldhagens treatise, Hitlers Willing Executioners. The poetic prose-maker disappears and the clichs of cultural studies abound: Hoffman wants to historicise the story of the shtetl, presenting it in all its complexity, as a site of pre-Holocaust multi-cultural experiment, caught between affinity and otherness.
Yet Hoffman adopts this deadening scholastic idiom without its customary upside: thorough research. Hoffman never quite abandons the impressionistic methods of the memoirist. She over-relies, for instance, on a single text, the Bransk Yizkor Book, or Book Of Memory, compiled by dozens of survivors in 1947, as a collective act of commemoration.
The Hoffman of Shtetl offers trite declamations: The conclusions to be drawn from [the Holocaust] are stark and clear: racist prejudice is an unacceptable form of feeling against which we must constantly guard and educate ourselves. Contrast this with the brilliant analysis of rage, language and violence, in her earlier work: In my New York apartment, I listen almost nightly to fights that erupt like brushfire on the street below and in their escalating fury of repetitious phrases (Dont do this to me, man, you fucking bastard, Ill fucking kill you), I hear not the pleasures of macho toughness but an infuriated beating against wordlessness, against the incapacity to make oneself understood, seen … If all therapy is speaking therapy a talking cure then perhaps all neurosis is a speech disease.
At her best, Hoffman makes you want to quote and quote; but not in Shtetl.
Serge Schmemanns family lost their ancestral seat at Sergievskoye, near Moscow, to the Bolsheviks and lost their Russian homeland to exile. Echoes of a Native Land is more the story of Schmemanns deposed aristocratic ancestors than of the village itself, and the fact that Schmemann can confuse the two is symptomatic of much that is in store.
There are volleys of Cold War rhetoric, propelled by ancestral passion, as he tells of the last years of communist rule, when a succession of walking corpses and a dead ideology were artificially sustained in the Kremlin only by a massive political-police apparatus and a ravenous military machine … There are strong doses of nostalgia, tempered but not extinguished by Schmemanns professional instincts as a New York Times journalist: the tears of peasants as the family is expelled, revisionist accounts of the role of the church and the bureaucracies in which his ancestors served, and so on.
Nevertheless, Schmemanns story is well- told and often chilling. In 1929 his relative, Georgy Osorgin, faced an inept and drunken gulag firing squad, commanded by one Dmitry Uspensky: Many of the condemned men were still alive when they were thrown into a shallow grave, and the ground thrown over them was still moving in places in the morning. Uspensky, still drunk, went out with a pistol and walked around shooting into the earth until it fell silent.