Sad, Dreamy, Jewy

The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald (1992; English translation published 1996)

“And the last remnants memory destroys”

This was my first Sebald, and I went into it more or less cold. A writer whose literary taste I respect (s/o to Jay Caspian Kang) tweeted a few years ago about how great The Rings of Saturn is, so I kept an eye out for Sebald and ended up picking up both that and this book, The Emigrants, during a used bookstore haul. I was going to start with Rings of Saturn, but the back of the book said this one was about Jews so I opened it first. 

You see, I’ve been on a bit of a Jewish literature kick for a couple of years. I guess it started back in my senior year of college, when I read Herzog by Saul Bellow for a class. It was one of those books that redefined for me what language could do, what literature could express. Reading it was an ecstatic, revelatory experience. I wrote an absolute banger of a midterm essay about the anxiety of incest in the subtext of Herzog that was probably mostly nonsense, but it got an A. More importantly, the book shook something loose in my brain and helped me to recognize the toxic patterns of abuse in the relationship I was mired in at the time, and led to me breaking up with my abuser (the first time). It took a couple more years to finally get free, but that’s a story for another time. 

Aside from its purely literary value, I felt a tug of identification and pride in the Jewishness of Herzog. I’m half Jewish and had a moderately Jewy childhood in a liberal reform synagogue. When I was little, I braided challah at Hebrew school and won my first pet, a goldfish named Shiner, from a Purim carnival game. But we were never deeply rooted in the community and my parents didn’t force my sister or me to study for a bat mitzvah. You could find us at temple on the High Holidays, but that was about it. When I was 11 or 12, my family gave up on temple for good and settled into a habit of sporadically celebrating Passover and Hanukkah when the mood struck. (Mostly for my dad’s latkes.) By that point I was already a snarky little atheist, but I always enjoyed a good Seder. I never felt Jewish enough to fully claim it as an identity, steering clear of Hillel and Chabad in college. At the same time, I’ve always been attuned to attitudes towards Jews and Jewishness, have always fixated to some degree on the questions around that identity. Have always worried about the precarity of Jewish life here and around the world.

Fast forward to a couple of years ago, when I started trying to fill in some of the massive gaps I have when it comes to Jewish American literature. As I developed my own fiction writing, I’ve become more curious about the literary traditions into which my work may one day fall. I’ve been reading Roth and Heller and Malamud and lots of Bellow, trying to piece together a literary history of secular Jewish American life in the 20th century. And then along came this odd little book by W.G. Sebald, who is not Jewish or American. Sebald was German, yet he dared to write a book about Jews. 

I’ll admit, I came to this book with my hackles up. What right, I thought, does a German have to tell Jewish stories? I’m not the direct descendent of any Holocaust survivors— my great-great-grandparents emigrated from Alsace-Lorraine (a sometimes French, sometimes German region that was once home to a plurality of Western Europe’s Jews) sometime in the 19th century. A French branch of the family stayed and converted to Catholicism during the war. When I was 11, my family visited these distant relations in Paris, including my namesake: a great-great aunt, Lillian Petit. I don’t know if that was her real last name, changed during the war, or if it was some kind of family nickname. No one spoke English, I spoke no French, and I found the whole episode baffling. 

Still, despite my distance from the horrors of the Holocaust, I’ve long had a fascination with it and a tendency to think of Germany as permanently tainted by the Third Reich. I think that’s as much a function of my Americanness as my Jewishness. After all, we call the generation that fought the Nazis “the Greatest Generation.” I traveled to Germany for the first time last August and approached the trip with deep ambivalence. Berlin was fine, if dirty and oppressively hot. I enjoyed the curry wurst. The museums were transcendent, stunning, unbelievably rich in classical and ancient treasures. Freiburg was lovely, delightful. The Germans I met were all kind, worldly, liberal, engaged, concerned about the rise of the AfD. The trains were miserable in the heat and always delayed. And yet. Beneath it all, I thought I could feel the weight of absence—from centuries of expulsions and pogroms to a decade of mechanized murder.

So I wondered where Sebald would take it. He was born May 18, 1944 in Bavaria. His father served in the Wehrmacht and was a prisoner of war until 1947. Sebald would not have grown up knowing Jews. There were no more Jews to be found. He would have grown up before thorough and responsible education about the Nazis and the holocaust became widespread in Germany, as a result of the liberal denazification efforts of the 1960s and 70s. I braced for this book about Jewish emigrants to make me cringe.

Instead, I found myself drawn into a strange and mournful meditation on memory and the casualties of history. It reads like memoir, peppered with photographs that seem to prove the veracity of the text. The four men are peripheral figures in the narrator’s life, mysteries that are partially excavated through research and reportage but who ultimately remain tantalizingly unknowable. There is the suggestion that all lives are tragic lives, if you look closely enough. The massive scale of death during the war is never confronted directly, but it haunts the stories, touching each of the four men’s lives in ways profound and occult.

Slow, quiet, heartbreaking. The Emigrants tells four small stories that, together, claim that the broadest sweeps of history can be made legible in the fringe cases, reflected in the private lives of the disquieted and the discontented. Much like an Ishiguro novel, Sebald demonstrates extraordinary skill and control in the unfolding of each narrative, and the delight of this very sorrowful book is in the soft discovery of the contours of each man’s life, and the intersections with the narrator’s life.