A few weeks ago, I attended a discussion at Princeton University between distinguished American authors AM Homes and Joyce Carol Oates about the state of the novel in contemporary times. It was the day the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced and Oates, a perennial contender, waxed humbly yet rhapsodically on the importance of the novel as a vehicle for personalising historical experience through the empathetic capacity of the writer. Both authors proclaimed that the great gift of the novelist is the wonder and awe of imagination. Yet now, it seems many authors are being confined to write about only what they have personally experienced. Both said this was a tragedy, to which Homes added, “Now that the youngest of the Holocaust survivors are elderly, frail and dying, can no one write about the Holocaust?”
As a novelist whose first book was a fictionalisation of my experience growing up in the home of Holocaust survivors, I can attest that for many years scholars and academics deemed that only non-fiction works by actual survivors could be popularly disseminated, for fear that the fictionalisation of the experience would serve as fodder for Holocaust deniers. My novel in 1997 was published in the same year as Roberto Benigni’s critically and commercially successful film Life is Beautiful, about a Jewish-Italian bookshop owner who employs humour, play, fantasy and even pantomime to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a concentration camp. But the fact that my novel employed humour as a tactic of survival made it ineligible for sale in the bookshops of either the US Holocaust Memorial Museum or the Jewish Museum. I was heartbroken and could not write fiction for many years.
Happily, the landscape of Holocaust literature and film has vastly changed, including such celebrated works as Taika Waititi’s film Jojo Rabbit, Lois Lowry’s young adult novel Number the Stars, and David Grossman’s seminal first novel, See Under: Love, about growing up in Israel in a family of Holocaust survivors.
Directly addressing Homes’ question are two astonishing new works: Anne Berest’s The Postcard, which the author has described as a “true fiction”, and Rachelle Unreich’s A Brilliant Life: My Mother’s Inspiring Story of Surviving the Holocaust. The mothers of both authors were survivors and inspirations for these works. Unreich, a distinguished Australian journalist, started interviewing her mother Mira only six months before her death from cancer as a way to distract her from the pain of her illness and to discover how she had survived four concentration camps (including Auschwitz) as well as the death marches. She not only survived but went on to thrive and live what she describes as “a beautiful life”.
Meanwhile, French actress and author Anne Berest was inspired in 2018 to discover who had sent an anonymous postcard to her family home 15 years earlier. On the front of the postcard was a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back were the names of her maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques – all killed at Auschwitz. That was all.
These works are similar in structure, alternating exquisitely detailed, descriptive chronologies of their family’s war experiences with present-day discussions between mothers and daughters. Both works also take advantage of the plethora of survivor and witness testimonies that have only recently become easily accessible, as well as Nazi documents released in the past 15 years. Unlike Holocaust survivor testimonies, however, they include important historical elements tracing the direction of the war and the world’s response to what was happening. And while for many years survivors were silenced by both fear of reprisal and fear of endlessly reliving their horror, their daughters, who had assimilated much of their mothers’ anxiety, were nonetheless a generation away from the trauma.
Berest has said, “You have to understand the silence of the Jews in France after the World War II, because … they were afraid to speak out. They were still living in fear because that fear was so ancient in Europe. They thought that the denunciations could start again. My grandmother, after the war, baptised my mother in a church to protect her. And many Jews did the same in France after the war.”
So what inspired Berest to set out to find who had sent the postcard and why? She writes that it was 10 years after the card’s reception, when she was staying at her parents’ house and about to give birth (she was on bed rest because her cervix had dilated too early) that her “thoughts turned to my mother, my grandmother, and the whole line of women who had given birth before me. It was then that I felt a pressing need to hear the story of my ancestors.”
So, with the assistance of her chain-smoking mother, friends, a private detective, a graphologist and others, she went on a quest to discover the postcard’s origin story.
Why did she choose to write a “true fiction” rather than a family memoir? Well, first, she’s French, and the French have mastered auto-fiction, but in her own words, “I wanted to write it in a novelistic way. For example, I changed the name of the village where my family was arrested because I didn’t want that the inhabitants of this village [to] have trouble because of my book. I changed the name of people who [had behaved badly] during the war because I didn’t want their grandchildren … [to hear] people say, ‘Okay, I know that your grandfather, grandmother denounced the Jewish during the war.’ So that’s why I call it a novel, because I took the liberty as a writer to change little things.”
A Brilliant Life, by comparison, is an accurate account of the life and survival of the author’s mother, Mira Blumenstock Milgrom Unreich. It was inspired by a remark made by Mira when asked how she survived: “The Holocaust taught [me] the goodness of people.” Rather than zeroing in on the people who had tried to destroy her, she focused on those who had helped her, and there were many – Jewish and non-Jewish alike.
This remark resonated with memories of Unreich’s childhood. She recounts how her mother would comfort her when she was upset as a young child. “How can you stand it?” she asked her. “How can you bear it when I am this upset about something so small after you have gone through so much?” She did not have to think about her answer. “Pain is pain,” she said, “What you go through is hard for you. What I went through is hard for me.”
So Unreich embarked on her quest to record her mother’s story of survival and to discover the names of those individuals whose kindness inspired her mother to go on and not become one of the Muselmänner, or living dead. At the same time, the author was speaking to a good friend whose husband had just received a terrible diagnosis. The friend wanted inspiration from Mira’s story and encouraged Unreich to use her journalistic talents to write her mother’s incredible tale of survival.
“Isn’t that what you want your legacy to be?” her friend asked her.
That is when Unreich felt “the magic of Mira”. She proceeded to write the book during one of the frequent pandemic lockdowns in her native Melbourne, writing from dawn to dusk. In six weeks she had a first draft.
Being a child of Holocaust survivors who writes about the experience, I often feel I’ve read and seen everything there is to be learned from those unimaginable horrors. Often I feel I can’t read another word, such are the feelings of terror. Yet through these two brilliant new books, I learned something new. I continue to laugh, to cry, to hope. Again I feel the urgency to listen and to tell these tales so the world will never forget, even as it seems that chaos and hatred are drowning out the voices saying people are essentially good and begging us to continue to hope that love, compassion, imagination and peace will prevail.
