It is still a time, although perhaps less so than it was 10 years ago, when new or young authors choose to write memoirs instead of novels based on their early lives. It has always struck me as a purely commercial decision, and probably a correct one, in this time of "reality" shows and embarrassment celebrity. These memoirs, sometimes by people too young to have done anything, or who the only thing they've done is get addicted to heroin or alcohol or sex, are right smack in that category of the scripted reality of humiliation and embarrassment. And because memory is unreliable, and perhaps also because they were drunk or high or fucking so much, they get things wrong and sometimes this gets them in trouble. Whereas if they had changed a few names and worked their imaginations a bit, there might have been come grumbling from the real-life models for their characters, but there'd be nothing much anyone could do about their dissatisfaction.
Swedish journalist Göran Rosenberg has written a memoir of his father in which early on he explores the truth about memory. Through a series of coincidences, evil and otherwise, and questionable decisions by others overwhelmed with horrific responsibilities in the ghetto of Lodz, Rosenberg's father survived Auschwitz, was re-united with the woman he loved, who also survived the camp, and then re-located to a relatively welcoming Sweden. You might think he was lucky, but the heavy burden of what he lost, his history, culture and people, in the end proves too much for him.
It is a beautiful and painful book which I read while traveling in Turkey this spring. To me, it is restrained in the telling and the writing, as any book about the Holocaust, especially by one who did not experience it first hand, perhaps ought to be. The facts themselves can provide whatever emotion and drama you need.
All this is just an excuse for me to post a great passage from early in the book, about memory. A Brief Stop is beautiful, occasionally poetic, occasionally it reads like the script from an early experimental film, like that one with all the ants and the hand:
Actually, to be perfectly honest, what I can remember of these events is fragmentary at best. The early mornings with the garbagemen are fragments of the sleeping apartment, the sun-warmed pavement, the pungent yet sweet smell of the garbage, the clatter of the dumpsters, the dirty, oily overalls, and the vinyl seat sticking to my bare legs. I'm not even sure if the fragments are real, still less whether I've put them together correctly. I'm not sure I remember the fragments either, if remembering means actively recalling something. How can you recall something you haven't yet named and therefore don't yet have a word for?
Reflections then, rather than fragments: diffuse reflections of physical perceptions, of sensory experiences without words or order. Jumping on the ice floes: the rasp of frozen trousers on skin blue with cold, the glare of chalk-white faces in a black door opening, the pressure of hard hands, the sound of sharp voices, the feel of a thrashing. In my world, thrashing is a word linked to the sensation of ice floes.
Other words may come later. Words like dread and desperation, and, later still, words for nightmares wallpapering the small apartment facing the railroad tracks, and even finally the words for what the man who is my father and the woman who is my mother might think and feel when their united nightmares suddenly stand before them in the winter darkness of the hall, dripping deep-black water on their threshold, the thin ice crunching beneath their feat, the lethal cold burning against their skin.
Only much later can sensations turn into stories. Only much later can mute expanses of wordlessness be strewn with shattered fragments of language.
- Göran Rosenberg
From A Brief Stop on the Road from Auschwitz
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