Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (18 page)

From here on the narrator stays with us, making his presence felt, not continuously, but at occasional important junctures, when he offers us useful bits of commentary and information just as we are likely to want or need them. And now we realize that exactly this—the outside perspective, the cool authorial distance—was what was lacking in the novel up to that point. The claustrophobic sense of enclosure, realistic as it was, had almost begun to stifle us. This new viewpoint is not utterly alien, for the narrator too seems to be Jewish, as evidenced by his speech rhythms, his local prejudices, his choice of phrases. But unlike the other characters, he is not completely confined by the world of the tale. He, at least, seems to know where we are going, to have an idea about what is pertinent and what is not. We are reassured by the sense that what we are letting ourselves in for is not just anecdote, but art.

Of course, the intrusive tale-teller does not give us this feeling of reassurance on his own; it is the existence of an author clever enough to invent this narrator that wins us over. Doubly clever, really: to invent such a narrator, and then to withhold him for a hundred pages until we are desperate for his services. This is an author who will be able to guide us toward something worth having. He has, as it were, the necessary authority. At the same time, he appears to be wise enough to know the limits of his own authority, his own cleverness, for he is already thinking of the world that will come “two or three generations from now,” when he is no longer there to control it.

Some works of literature are born with a sense of tragic grandeur, while others have it thrust upon them through the permutations of history.
The Family Mashber
has both qualities. When Der Nister finished the book in 1939, the old Jewish life of the
shtetl
had already vanished, and, as his preface makes clear, “It has not been easy for me to evoke that world, to animate it and to put its people into motion.” So his novel, even when it was new, had its own tragic shadow cast over it. But the author had no way of knowing, when he finished this first volume, that he would never be allowed to complete the multivolume work he had undertaken. He could not foresee that he would die in a Soviet prison hospital in 1950, having been arrested as part of Stalin’s campaign against “rootless cosmopolitans.” And he could not have known, in 1939, that the idea of a lost Jewish world would soon take on another and even darker meaning. So the final lines of his novel have for us a sadness and a resonance that even he, great writer that he was, could not have put into them:

Well, that’s it. And now we take the narrative back from Mayerl and we undertake to report what is to come in our own fashion and in the style that is unique to ourselves.

Again, that’s it. And with this, we believe that our first book is finished.

To be deprived of a promised sequel—to lose the characters midway through their fates—is always hard. But in this case the loss is compounded by history. We, looking back, have our own special and additional reasons for feeling anguished that the first book was also the last.

Let me say a word, here, about Jews and history. Perhaps my perspective is distorted by the fact that I am a secular Jew myself, so you may want to discount my notion accordingly. But it seems to me that while the tragedy of Christianity is inherent in its religious doctrine—the fall of Man, the redemption through the death of Christ—the tragedy of the Jews lies much more in their relation to history. So when what I am calling grandeur, which could be another word for tragedy, appears in literary works with Christian leanings, it is likely to have an abstract and theological aspect; whereas when it appears in Jewish literature, it is more likely to draw on events that have actually happened in the world, either the world
within
the literary work or the known, historical world outside it. I grant that I may be wrong about this. There is certainly quite a lot of Jewish literature I haven’t read (as there is also a lot of Christian literature I haven’t read). But if I just compare the works I have loved in the two categories, this difference seems to hold true.

At any rate, if history, and in particular the tragic history of the Jews, can lend added richness to a work of great literary merit like
The Family Mashber
, it can also give a kind of novelistic power even to a book that was never intended as literature in the first place. This is what happened to Victor Klemperer’s wartime diaries. Published in an English translation under the title
I Will Bear Witness
, these diaries chronicle the weekly, sometimes daily existence of a Dresden-based professor of German literature in the period 1933 to 1945. That Klemperer was a non-practicing Jew with an “Aryan” wife is the plot, so to speak, of his account of life in Hitler’s Germany. He watches as one friend or relative after another flees the country, but he—devoted to the German language, unable to imagine life elsewhere, and convinced until far too late in the day that his marriage to a non-Jew (not to mention his own merely nominal Jewishness) will protect him—stays put. As each year passes, his life becomes more and more constricted. First he loses his job, then his car, then the right to own a house in the countryside and even the right to keep pets. Eventually he is forced to wear a yellow star, and when his wife refuses to divorce him, they are both moved into a cramped, crowded “Jewish house,” where life, tentative and fearful, is carried on at poverty’s edge. And then, after he has already received his transport orders, mere days before he is due to be shipped out to a death camp, Dresden is bombed by the Allies, and in the ensuing confusion Klemperer and his wife escape.

Unlike Der Nister, Klemperer is not a brilliant writer, and in any case this is a diary, not necessarily meant for other eyes. His style is plodding; his concerns are often petty or pedantic. We do not warm to him, because he has neither the willingness nor the ability to charm. But his story is gripping, in part
because
of the plodding and the pettiness. This is normal life, gradually becoming less normal as each year passes. The minutiae of Klemperer’s existence form the basis of our intimacy with him—not an emotional intimacy such as you might form with another person, but an experiential intimacy such as you have with yourself. In a sense we
are
him, and in another sense we remain completely separate, because we know what is coming whereas he does not. For anyone who recalls the salient fact about Dresden’s twentieth-century history—the firebombing of 1945—the diary is like two competing stories racing toward each other at different speeds. On the one hand there is Klemperer’s achingly slow life, with its gradual, steady decline, and on the other hand there is this gigantic historical event hurtling toward him. That the terrible bombing, in destroying his city, saves rather than kills him is only part of the book’s tremendous irony. Peering through the lens of history, we are enabled to be two sizes at once: the antlike creature blindly moving forward on the ground, and the godlike overseer waiting for the inevitable explosion. It is a remarkable experience, and I have rarely in my reading life felt such suspense.

A similar sense of history inflects Edmund de Waal’s unusual family memoir,
The Hare with Amber Eyes
, but here the dual perspective is self-consciously built into the account from the beginning, not forced on it by subsequent events. Plotting is both a given and an invented feature of this book. In its broader outlines, the nonfiction story has been handed to de Waal; he cannot make things up. And yet the very way in which he chooses to dole out the information he has painstakingly gathered lends a true sense of mystery to the work. Because he is dealing only with his own family history, it might seem that the author runs the risk of portraying massive world events through a Lilliputian telescope. Luckily, the family in question occupied an oddly central position in the history of several European countries. Even more luckily, de Waal is the kind of nonfiction writer who only comes along a few times in every decade, a person highly sensitive to nuance and form. (He is a ceramicist by profession, as it happens, but—or and—he writes better than most professional novelists.)

His story begins with several visits to Japan, where Edmund, the English son of a half-Dutch Anglican clergyman, goes to learn his trade. There he becomes acquainted with his Great-Uncle Iggie (his actual name is Ignace Ephrussi), an elderly gay man who has lived in Japan for many years with his younger Japanese partner. Iggie owns a remarkable collection of 264 Japanese netsuke, but what is most remarkable, perhaps, is that he owned them
before
he ever got to Japan. In fact, these small, expertly designed, witty but beautiful Japanese objects—each tiny enough to be held in the palm of one’s hand and valuable enough to be displayed in a museum—have been handed down in the Ephrussi family since the late nineteenth century. Edmund, who is told by his great-uncle that he will eventually inherit the collection, decides to look into its history.

The original collector was Charles Ephrussi, part of the Paris branch of this international Jewish banking clan, which seems to have been second in wealth and importance only to the Rothschilds, with whom the Ephrussis occasionally intermarried. Having spread out from Odessa to Vienna and Paris, the Ephrussis quickly acquired enough polish to spawn art collectors as well as bankers, and Charles, who was apparently a fine amateur art critic as well as an early exponent of
japonisme
, was perhaps the most artistic of the lot. A dandy and a boulevardier, he was friends with Manet, Pissarro, Degas, and Proust; he also hobnobbed with French aristocrats, until he fell out with them over the Dreyfus affair. In 1899, a few years before his own death, Charles gave his netsuke collection as a wedding present to his younger cousin Viktor, a member of the Vienna branch of the family.

So now the tiny objects move, in their fancy display case, to the center of Freud’s, Schnitzler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Karl Kraus’s world. The vitrine occupies the dressing room of Viktor’s wife, Emmy, where the children, including the young Iggie, are allowed to play with the valuable netsuke—the hare with amber eyes, the monk bent over his begging dish, the various kinds of fruit and vegetables, creatures and humans and objects—as if they were merely toys. And there they remain, through all the vicissitudes of the first third of the twentieth century, until the family finally flees Vienna in 1938.

By this time the reader will have become so caught up in the story that she will have neglected to ask herself a crucial question: given that all the household furnishings had to be left behind, how did the netsuke eventually end up in Iggie’s hands? It is precisely by holding this information in reserve—by distracting us, as a magician would, so that we don’t even wonder about it until he is ready to spring the answer on us—that de Waal achieves one of his most masterful effects. For it turns out that the Ephrussi family had an Austrian servant named Anna (we don’t even know her last name) who stayed behind in Vienna and kept working for a while at the requisitioned mansion. Gradually she smuggled all of the netsuke out of the building in her pockets, a few at a time, and hid them in her mattress, where they stayed for the duration of the war. After the war was over, she eventually succeeded in returning the collection to its rightful owners.

A tiny, beautiful object—even 264 tiny, beautiful objects—cannot begin to replace all the lives and ideals that were lost in those years, and in that place. But something about this tale of selfless generosity restores, in quite a visceral and moving way, one’s faith in human nature. It sometimes lies in the power of art to make the small stand in for the large, to give us an object we can hold in our hands and make us feel we are holding the world.
The Hare with Amber Eyes
possesses that power.

It also turns out that de Waal’s book has a built-in connection with literary history, for Charles Ephrussi, that netsuke-collecting ancestor, was one of the primary models for Proust’s Charles Swann. The parallels are obvious, and numerous. Swann was an assimilated Jew who managed to penetrate the highest circles of French aristocratic society, and so was Ephrussi. Both men wrote art historical essays—Swann about Vermeer, Ephrussi about Dürer. Each had a beautiful, willful mistress who adorned herself in Japanese kimonos. And so on. Charles Ephrussi, of course, was real, and Charles Swann merely a fiction; yet it is Swann who is, and will always remain, the larger, more memorable character. This is not de Waal’s fault. Scrupulously reported reality cannot compare with an imagination the size of Proust’s.
Think you there was or might be such a man as this I dreamt of? Gentle madam, no.

Perhaps it will seem perverse of me to compare Swann, even implicitly, with Antony. As tragic lovers they have almost nothing in common. It is only by a linguistic stretch that we can even call Swann heroic, for his is the very subdued heroism of the modern protagonist: a largely honorable existence led within a society that mainly values the appearance of honor over the thing itself. And if Swann is admirable, he is also pathetic, for he is reduced to terrible self-deceptions and ridiculous concessions by his love for the unworthy Odette. We never pity Antony in the way we pity Swann, for Antony is in love with someone who is at least his equal (an impossible achievement, in Proust’s world). On the other hand, we never really understand Antony in the way we grow to understand Swann. And that intense, relentless degree of understanding—of investigation into the very process of understanding—turns out to be one of Proust’s greatest literary strengths.

Remembrance of Things Past
, or
In Search of Lost Time
, or whatever they decide to call it in the decades and centuries to come, is a work that breaks wide open my distinction between grandeur and intimacy. There is no single part of this many-volumed novel that you can point to and say, “Here it is grand,” or “Here it becomes intimate.” The whole thing is grand and intimate at once. Every one of those sentences that last a page, or paragraphs that go on for the length of a normal author’s chapter, is focused minutely on the interior details of a quietly led day-to-day existence. And yet the cumulative experience is that of contemplating, not just an individual life, not even a single society’s life (though it is all these things too), but Time itself: its slow and fast passage, its retrieval through memory and history, its disappearance in death. You reach the end of this massive reading project, through which you have crept at a snail’s pace—moment by moment, year by year, as time elapses both inside and outside the novel—and you feel you have arrived somewhere. It is not precisely a place within yourself, but nor is it completely outside yourself. It is an Elsewhere made accessible to you through the efforts of another imagination, collaborating for a time with your own.