Interviewed by David Wilk

Family history for so many contemporary Jews is fraught. Most of us have relatives who disappeared without a trace, except for scattered entries in German records of extermination. Some fewer of us have had living relatives whose lives were defined by the Holocaust, almost always in horrific and devastating ways.

Bram Presser, an Australian writer, spent eight years working on an unusual novel, The Book of Dirt (Text Publishing, $15.95). It is a compelling story that explores the real-life events of Presser’s Czechoslovakian grandfather, Jakub Rand, from the 1920s through the Holocaust and into his post-War life in Australia. Combining family stories with archival research and interviews, Presser addresses the complexities of this history with the only tool that could possibly make sense of it—imagination.

The relatively large number of characters and the movement between places can be confusing for the reader, but Presser’s grandfather, his grandmother Dasa Roubicek, and their immediate family give the book focus. More importantly, their story of survival shines through the immense amount of pain and suffering through which they lived.

You do not need to be Jewish to find this novel compelling and powerful. All of us can relate to what it means to find hope in the worst possible circumstances, and anyone can find compassion for how the descendants of survivors of terror must try to understand the stories of their forebears. Readers will find The Book of Dirt to be a wonderful and transformative literary work.

Born in Melbourne in 1976, Bram Presser has been a punk rocker, an academic, and a criminal attorney. He writes the blog Bait for Bookworms and is a founding member of Melbourne Jewish Book Week. His stories have appeared in Vice Magazine, The Sleepers Almanac, Best Australian Stories, Award Winning Australian Writing and Higher Arc. In 2011, he won The Age Short Story Award.

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David Wilk: This is an amazingly painful book in a lot of ways for people like myself, who like you had family members who did not survive the Holocaust. We probably should say that you call this book a novel, even though it’s hard to tell the difference between autobiography, memoir, and novel here, because that gives you the freedom to imagine, and to enter the lives of people.

Bram Presser: Yeah, and also where there aren’t records or where I don’t have hard evidence where I have to fill the gaps, it would be disingenuous of me to claim otherwise. I was really interested in what their experiences were, and I think you don’t get that from records. You don’t get that from seeing a train schedule or something like that.

At the beginning, I really didn’t have anything to go by. Though I had kind of an idea of what their stories were, I found that I had to turn to fiction to actually get to know them. I just felt that there was a different truth, a deeper truth in fiction than there would’ve been in it being a historical work, a biography or autobiography.

DW: I’ve read many memoirs of people who survived the Holocaust, and I think that it’s different for them; their imaginations are no longer capable of functioning because of the horror and the sheer destructiveness they lived through.

BP: Absolutely, and I think that the purpose in writing it is different as well. I’ve also read so many, and I think firstly they’re offering testimony. They’re bearing witness, which is an incredibly important thing to do, and so imagination doesn’t necessarily play into it. They are the ones who lived this horror that we can’t imagine, and I think they need it documented for their own sake, and for the sake of humanity.

DW: Whereas, your perspective is different. You’re living today. You’re the descendant, and you’re trying to place yourself in their history to create your own, and that is a different thing than to tell a story of what happened to you.

BP: Yeah, at the end of the day, I’m making sense of my own existence. I’m the beneficiary of their horrific experience and survival. All the stuff that’s coming out now about inherited trauma and what have you, that is part of my inheritance, and to understand that, I have to go into their lives and try to make sense of them.

DW: They’ve talked about trauma actually affecting the genetic makeup and being passed on through generations, which actually does make sense.

BP: Absolutely, and for me, it’s strange because Melbourne, where I come from, had the highest per capita Holocaust survivor intake after Israel.

DW: Why was that?

BP: Well, you ask most of the survivors and they say it was the furthest place they could possibly think of from Europe, and they’re right. Australia is out in the middle of nowhere.

DW: So, I don’t want to parse through the book to try to figure out what is true and what isn’t, but to build the groundwork for how you got there: Jakub Rand, he’s a real person?

BP: Yes, he was my grandfather.

DW: I love the beginning where you go through the locations where they lived. I know my own grandparents talked about where they were from, and I always took it as a received wisdom that they were from Hungary, but when I looked at the place where they actually were from, it’s not Hungary. It just happened to be part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time.

BP: Right. I actually wanted to visit the place, it’s on the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains somewhere. This is years and years ago, so it’s my grandfather’s brother and he said, “Maybe you could’ve gone there.” Now it’s abandoned and it’s surrounded with brigands and thieves and people who will attack you on the road, and he goes, “You just can’t go there, if you can even find it.”

DW: That’s so weird.

BP: I know. What’s the weirdest for me is that at the time that my grandfather was born and during his childhood, it was a reasonably vibrant small village, perfectly accessible from the nearby cities and what have you, and now it’s at best a field.

DW: Right, although as you suggest, he desperately wanted to leave this small town.

BP: Oh, very much so. It’s quite funny because he was born into a religious family. He was the son of the rabbi of that village and he was sort of the golden boy who was going to be the next rabbi, and by the time he was a teenager he was not at all interested in it. He wanted to see what the wider world had to offer so he fled to Prague in search of a secular education. I think he probably came with letters of recommendation or something like that because he was adopted very quickly into the Prague religious community. So, I don’t think he was as unknown as I necessarily make out in the book, but at the same time, I’ve got no evidence one way or the other so it could’ve been that he was just someone that turned up, they liked the fact that he was quite learned and interested in learning, and he kind of had a foot in each camp. On one side, he was part of the religious community, but on the other side he was pursuing secular education at Charles University.

DW: Again, we don’t need to go through the whole story here, but it’s sort of amazing some of the things that happened to him . . . Even as you imagine it, just the act of being a survivor in itself is pretty amazing.

BP: Yeah, the question I get asked most is, “How much is fact? How much is fiction?” Most of it is a dramatization of anecdotes that I heard that are to the best of my knowledge true.

DW: Right, as told, as remembered, it’s true, because we don’t know.

BP: But it’s not stuff that I made up out of the blue.

DW: It feels like the structure of the story is all based in acknowledgeable fact, but as you’re trying to track back and figure out what really happened, you get these kind of mixed reactions like, “That couldn’t have happened. That’s not real.”

BP: I actually still remember walking into Yad Vashem, the main Holocaust museum in Israel. The camp my grandparents were in, Theresienstadt, I remember going there and I had this story in my head: After he died, this article was published saying that he had been the literary curator of Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race.

DW: That’s the story he told.

BP: That’s the story that was told about him.

DW: Right, but it must’ve come from somewhere.

BP: Well, yeah. This is the thing. The one question that still haunts me after writing the book well after it’s been published is, to what extent was he complicit in telling that story? Anyway, it’s pretty clear that that story isn’t true but I’ve come to believe there is something that is similar that is true that would’ve actually made perfect sense to him at that point when he heard about this museum—that that’s what he was working on.

DW: Right, because we explain stuff to ourselves in order to be able to understand.

BP: Well, to have gone through anything in the Holocaust, must have been in many ways—I don’t mean this in a disrespectful way—the most kind of meaningless experience. It was literally horror for horror’s sake, right? And so, when you’re searching for meaning in that, you’ll end up attaching to something that in any way makes sense to you. And so I think he, without spoiling too much, was in this Talmudkommando, which was a group of scholars who were tasked with sorting through books that had been stolen from congregations around the Reich that had basically been destroyed. He didn’t necessarily know why he was doing it, so this Museum of the Extinct Race would’ve seemed perfectly reasonable to him as the explanation.

DW: Also, it was enabling him to live by having that job because he was not sent to a gas chamber.

BP: Yes, and I think there was a massive guilt complex. When he was taken to Auschwitz, he was actually still reasonably healthy, right? So he spent six odd weeks in Birkenau in the Czech family camp, and people died en masse there from starvation. They weren’t being gassed and shot or what have you in that particular sub-camp.

DW: This was slave labor.

BP: But they were still worked to death and they were still starved and there was horrific disease and whatever, but he had an advantage going in there thanks to this Talmudkommando that he’d been in, because he had better rations. He had decent accommodation for sleeping arrangements, things that his friends and his family didn’t have. His brother went to the Czech family camp and they liquidated that camp every six months, right? And his brother was in the first intake and his brother was gassed after the first six months was up. He blamed himself to his dying day for the death of his mother. He genuinely believed that having taken rations from his mother in this Czech family camp caused her to die because when they did the selections, the mother was chosen to stay behind, which meant be gassed, and he moved on. He believed that had he not taken those rations, she would’ve been healthy enough. She would’ve been at that time in her late fifties, early sixties. They weren’t moving any late fifties, early sixties women into work camps. She was gonna die whatever happened.

So, all these things, his involvement in telling his story would’ve been a way to explain to himself why he survived, and maybe not assuage the guilt, but at least understand the cause of the guilt or make some sort of peace with the guilt and say that he survived through being part of this incredible plan that the Nazis had to make this museum and that was just luck, because really, 90% of survival was luck.

DW: Maybe more.

BP: Yeah, exactly.

DW: I mean, it’s just so hard to imagine. One cannot.

BP: No.

DW: It’s just not possible to realize that humans do this to each other, it’s not a unique happening.

BP: No. I mean, that’s the horrific thing. I always think about, “Never again, never,” and it just happens again and again. Different scales, different situations, Cambodia and Rwanda . . .

DW: Now Yemen.

BP: Yeah, exactly.

DW: Which no one wants to talk about.

BP: It’s horrific. South Sudan, Darfur. It’s unbelievable what humans are capable of . . . And it’s interesting because when you really kind of commit yourself to writing about this and trying to understand it, it gives you perspective on both the best that people can be and the worst. I like to think that you end up with some sort of equilibrium because sometimes you’re like, “Wow, people are amazing and the things they can do to survive and to help each other is just extraordinary,” and then you look at the other side of it and you just go, “Wow, people are terrible.”

DW: Right. But we can contain both of those realities. And it’s painful to realize that what happened to the people in your book, they’re just a few people out of millions.

BP: Someone says, “Are there still Holocaust stories to tell?” Yes, there are so many because every survival story appears to be unique.

DW: Even the ones who didn’t survive . . . Some of the work is about remembering and allowing them to live in memory or in imagination.

BP: It’s very interesting you say that because a thing that happened for me in writing the book, one of the most extraordinary experiences, was I got an email from a 94-year-old guy in London and he said to me, “Look, here’s my class photo from 1942 in Prague. I’ve spent the last 30 years since my retirement trying to find out what happened to all the people in my class. The only person I couldn’t find was my teacher, Jakub Rand, and every year I type his name into Google”—and I just laugh, this 95-year-old guy, typing in Google every day—”Every year, I type it in Google and I try to find him and nothing, and this year it came up. It came up with you,” because people have been talking about this kind of crazy guy who’s running around trying to find his grandfather’s story and he’s on an obsessive quest . . . so he said, “I think this might be your grandfather. I think Jakub Rand, this teacher, might be your grandfather.” Now, this photo I can clearly see is my grandfather. I mean, at 85, he didn’t look greatly dissimilar to what he looked like at 25, right? A somewhat older version.

Anyway, I ended up going and meeting him, I went to London. He lives in Suffolk now, an amazing, amazing guy. He said to me, “I want you to promise me one thing, that when you come to write this book, I’m gonna tell you about all the kids in my class.” I think probably about 90% of them were killed, right? He said, “I want you to write about them as people. Make them characters, right? My quest is to give these children life that was denied them.”

DW: Right.

BP: So there’s chapters in the book that take place in the school where my grandfather was teaching. Actually, some of them reappear in later chapters in Terezin and also in Birkenau. When we came to editing it, my editor was like, “Oh, do we really need all these kids in it?” I agreed with 95% of her edits. I said, “This is one thing I’m gonna dig my heels in ’cause I made a promise to this guy, that these kids are going to become people again.”

That to me was really important. And similarly, my grandfather’s best friend, George Glanzberg . . . This guy, his name’s Frank Bright, Franticek Brichta, as he was back then, said to me, “Did your grandfather ever mention someone called George Glanzberg?” I said, “Funny you should say that because he mentioned him once and for some reason the name has stuck in my head.” He mentioned him during my brother’s bar mitzvah during his speech, and he just mentioned him in one line, which was, “Why me? Why not Glanzberg?” He’s talking about his survival, and I never knew who Glanzberg was but the name always stuck in my head. I was ten at the time of my brother’s bar mitzvah, so it’s strange. He said, “Glanzberg is the guy standing next to your grandfather in the photo. He was the other teacher. It was his best friend.”

DW: And they worked together.

BP: They worked together in Prague, unquestionably. They were absolute best friends. They hung out all the time together. They both had doctorates and were highly learned, but they were both young guys and what have you.

So, it was just amazing to hear about this man who just sounded like a fantastic guy, and I could see where my grandfather would’ve loved him, right? And also why my grandfather felt so guilty about having survived without his best friend when they actually had almost identical trajectories through the Holocaust. The only difference was that my grandfather was not well enough to go on a death march and was left behind in one of the camps, and George died on that death march.

DW: Have you heard from people who have read your book, how it affected them? Have people talked to you about how it connects to their own experiences?

BP: Yeah. I get a lot of people, particularly people with Czech backgrounds who say that they found the stuff about Theresienstadt and also life in occupied Prague particularly powerful for them to understand what their family had experienced, but also we’re talking about my grandmother’s side. My grandfather was working in a kind of hut a couple hundred meters out of Theresienstadt, whereas my grandmother and my great grandmother, that being my grandfather’s mother, were probably one in the laundry, one in the kitchen, what have you.

DW: This is the woman whose mother, if I remember right, was not Jewish, so she was able to stay in Prague and smuggle food to them.

BP: Well, interestingly, this was not meant to be about my grandparents initially. This was a completely single-minded quest to find out my grandfather’s story, which came to nothing very early. But on my way back, I went through Prague and my mum’s cousin was there. He’s a fantastic guy, and we’re having coffee and he said, “Look, I know you’re looking for your grandfather’s story, but I have something you might be interested in.” His mother, who was my grandmother’s youngest sister, had just died. He was cleaning out her house, and at the back of her closet he found a shoebox, and in it were these letters on the most fragile paper, the tiniest handwriting in pencil.

He goes, “These are letters that your grandmother sent from the concentration camps to her mother back in Prague.” In them, there was talk about food and medical supplies and there’s a line that says something to the effect of, “We were just where they use gas. I’ll tell you about it when I get home”—amazing stuff from within the actual Holocaust experience. They permitted little postcards to come out, but these were full letters, so these were smuggled out, right? They also talked about a Mr. B, who was the conduit for getting the supplies in and out.

Yeah, so my grandmother and my great grandmother were in contact through almost all of my grandmother’s time in the concentration camps. The only time they weren’t was during her reasonably short stay in Birkenau, because there was a story that one of the letters was intercepted, and this happens in the book. It was intercepted by the Nazis and they called her out during one of the parades and they called a girl out to translate. The girl was apparently a 15-year-old Polish girl. They actually just asked for a volunteer. They said, “Can someone translate this letter?” This girl comes out and she holds the letter and she reads it, in inverted commas, and literally makes up what’s in the letter so that it’s completely innocuous. My grandmother was beaten to within an inch of her life, but she wasn’t sent off and killed. And my grandmother spent a long time afterwards trying to find that girl because she owed her her life, and she didn’t even know the girl either. That’s the amazing part—this was a girl who just took it upon herself to essentially save my grandmother’s life.

Anyway, my great grandmother as you said wasn’t Jewish, or she was a convert, but by Nazi standards she wasn’t Jewish. So, she and the two youngest daughters—my grandmother was the oldest of four girls—stayed in Prague, and my great grandfather, who was Jewish and the two elder sisters, my grandmother and my auntie Irene, went to concentration camps, and yeah, they stayed in touch throughout. My great grandfather died, was killed. My grandmother and her sister survived. It was thanks to really the extraordinary bravery of my great grandmother.

So I set off to find my grandfather’s story, but I ended up being in absolute awe of my great grandmother, whom I knew. I was thirteen when she died, and she was in her late eighties. You know what late eighties looks to a little kid: She was impossibly old and shriveled and what have you. To think of her and the stories I heard about her whilst researching this, and what I found out through various family members and friends, was just amazing. She visited my grandmother in the concentration camp, in Theresienstadt. I thought that was just impossible. When my cousin, my Czech cousin Ludwig, told me that they had visited, I was like, “That’s not possible.” Not only that, my editor called me on that and said, “There’s no way that happened.” She goes, “Unless you find evidence of people actually being able to visit concentration camps, that can’t be in the book.” I spent a long time, and I found records.

So this story, which seemed completely impossible or at the very least highly implausible, turned out to be entirely possible, because Ludwig had actually spoken a lot to my great grandmother, she was Ludwig’s grandmother and he was very close with her, and in her older days, they spent a lot of time together talking about life and the war and what have you, and she told him a lot of these things.

DW: Wow. So do you mind reading a little bit? It would be nice for people to hear a little, because I think the writing in this book is really great.

BP: Thank you. So this happens when my grandfather is sorting the books in Theresienstadt. He’s met my grandmother, and this was actually a big part of the book because I wanted to find out how my grandparents met each other. And so he’s met her, because she is bunking in the dormitories with my grandfather’s mother, and he doesn’t want to admit it, but he has a crush on her. She is in love with someone else, but anyway. Okay:

She danced between the lines in the kingdom of paper. It started with the slightest glimpse, a blonde curl behind a slanting lamed, a flash of skin, perhaps a wrist, a shoulder, or even a thigh through the crook of a beit. By some mistake of gravity, he had ascended to the heavens where only gods and angels dwelled. He looked at Georg, at Muneles, at Gottshall, at Seeligman, but they were lost between pillars of pulp, blinded to this shimmering sprite. She grew more brazen with the days, revealing more of herself on each new page. There was nothing suggestive in her moves, just the sheer delight of freedom. She cared little for his startled gaze. At times she swirled the ink around her in a frantic pirouette until the words blurred like a shroud across her shoulders.

Jakub sat back and wiped his brow. No, it was pointless. It was like leering at a sister, a child. And was he not just seeing her with his mother’s eyes? He knew how Gusta looked on when they talked, imagining what might have been, what still could be, but theirs was nothing more than a convenient alliance: her packages, his privileges, pooled to create a semblance of plenty. Outside the barracks, away from these books, she danced for others. He had seen her in the park on his way back from the bastion, huddled close to a young man under a tree. And what to make of the other times when she would loiter near the gate at day’s end and run the moment she caught sight of Jakub coming up Südstrasse. Jakub was certain he saw the gendarme right himself before hurrying over to unfasten the lock.

Jakub looked at the SS man by the door. He rarely moved, as if asleep. Only once had he stood to attention, when Eichmann himself came to visit, to compliment these shackled scholars, to show that he, too, could speak in their tongue. It is very important work you’re doing, gentlemen, Eichmann had said. That was before September, before the Council announced the resumption of transports. Before they took Shmuel away. He should have known. Eichmann’s presence boded ill for them all.

DW: I really want to thank you for doing this, Bram. It’s been great.

BP: Oh, thank you.

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Tony Hoagland with Kay Cosgrove
W. W. Norton & Co. ($22.95)
by Mike Schneider

Just as he’s gone for keeps, Tony Hoagland, true to his ironical being, is more than ever with us. His seventh full-length collection of poems, Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, came out last year from Graywolf Press just prior to his death, and is followed this year by The Art of Voice, a heartfelt, book-length essay about the craft of poetry.

As with Hoagland’s prior books of prose, The Art of Voice demonstrates that this poet’s friendly provocateur brio didn’t quit with his poems. As many of his former students (including this writer) can attest, he took teaching seriously and was an apostle for poetry as an undervalued field of learning and endeavor.

His first prose collection, Real Sofistikashun (Graywolf, 2006), evokes a seminar with a whip-smart, unpretentious, conversationally adept professor — hip, yes, but also rigorous. With purposeful misspelling hinting at the slant of Hoagland’s thought, Real Sofistikashun addressed several standard-repertoire topics, including metaphor—“the raw uranium of poetry”—and tone, an often elusive idea that Hoagland handled with exceptional lucidity.

Twenty Poems that Could Save America (Graywolf, 2014) extended the discussion with attention to diction and idiom, along with Hoagland’s takes on particular poets, including Robert Bly, Frank O’Hara, Sharon Olds, and Dean Young. The title essay is a manifesto for updating poetry pedagogy, and includes this sporty salvo: “pretentious ponderous ponderosas of professional professors will always be drawn to the poems that require a priest.”

The Art of Voice differs from the two earlier prose books in that there’s a gravitational center that holds from beginning to end. The theme, “voice,” is a concept every poet has thought about, at least to the extent that the idea of apprentice writing is to “discover your voice.” On the surface, it sounds simple enough, but Hoagland points out that voice isn’t only a means to distinctive poetry, but an aesthetic end in itself:

One of the most difficult to define elements in poetry is voice, the distinctive linguistic representation of an individual speaker. In many poems voice is the mysterious atmosphere that makes it memorable, that holds it together and aloft like the womb around an embryo. Voice can be more primary than any story or idea the poem contains, and voice carries the cargo forward to delivery. When we hear a distinctive voice in a poem, our full attention is aroused and engaged, because we suspect that here, now, at last, we may learn how someone else does it—that is, how they live, breathe, think, feel, and talk.

As Hoagland conceives of it, voice is also a branding element of American poetry. “At the risk of sounding naively patriotic,” he says, “such aliveness of voice seems like a special strength of American poetry in the last hundred years.” One of his essays in Twenty Poems, “Litany, Game and Representation,” roughed out the historical course of poetry in relation to post-modern unease about the indeterminacy of language, arriving at what he called “New Poetry”—less invested than prior poetry in conveying experience, more involved with linguistic play for its own sake.

In The Art of Voice, the poetry Hoagland mapped out previously as “New Poetry” becomes, with a shift in emphasis, “voice poetry,” and the book is, chapter-by-chapter, a user’s guide to its techniques. A core principle is that as readers we want to encounter a speaker who “presents a convincingly complex version of the world and of human nature.” To read a poem, says Hoagland, is to enter a relationship, and if we’re going to hang around, we want it “to be with an interesting resourceful companion.”

The techniques he offers—developed with examples and exercises (writing prompts)—include, for instance, having a speaker change his mind over the course of the poem, using vernacular diction and varying speech registers, and importing multiple speakers into the same poem. A voice poem, says Hoagland, may disobey the dictum that each word in a poem must be there for a reason. In a voice poem, some phrases serve no purpose, for instance, beyond inducing conversational bond with the reader. “Here’s the thing,” for instance, or famously, “This is just to say . . . .”

Consistent with Hoagland’s prior prose, The Art of Voice promotes thinking in directions that go beyond most writing about poetry, at least with this degree of clarity and concreteness. The poems he draws from as examples are fresh, not the usual suspects, and you get the feeling that Hoagland read almost every new book of American poetry as it came out.

People are strange, and personalities come in infinite variety of quirkiness and virtue. The Art of Voice wants poems of equivalent richness, poems that linguistically enact freedom of the mind at play. Some of the vivid images and sinuous sentences Hoagland has bequeathed to readers aren’t even, in an important sense, his to bequeath, but belong to poets who will write more and better due to the gift of this book.

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An overview of the poetry of Tony Hoagland appears in the Summer 2019 Print Edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books. Purchase this issue here.

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Sarah Moss
Farrar Straus and Giroux ($22)

by Greg Chase

A wall can keep people out, but it can also be used to hide something shameful within. In her spare and enthralling new novel, Sarah Moss probes both sides of this age-old human compulsion to erect barriers.

Set in the north of England in the 1990s, Ghost Wall centers on seventeen-year-old Silvie and her parents, who have teamed up with an archaeology professor and his students to fulfill her father’s fantasy of re-enacting life in the Iron Age, two thousand years earlier. The novel comments on three different historical moments simultaneously: It alludes to the fall of the Berlin Wall (one of the students has recently visited Berlin), but it also looks back to the brutality of an older world—and forward to the brutality of our own.

Silvie, who narrates the story, makes clear that her father’s interest in ancient history reflects his nativist attraction to “the idea that there’s some original Britishness somewhere.” In one scene, the professor and her father debate how necessary Hadrian’s Wall was as a means of keeping native Britons at bay:

The Britons had enough training that the Romans had to build the Wall, Dad said . . . Well, said the Prof, they weren’t exactly British . . . Celts, we tend to call them these days, though they wouldn’t have recognized the idea, they seem to have come from Brittany and Ireland, from the west. Dad didn’t like this interpretation, didn’t want an Irish lineage, or Welsh or French. . . . He wanted his own ancestry, a claim on something.

Many more things are at stake in this conversation than the historical purpose of Hadrian’s Wall, and one of those things is class. Silvie’s father is a bus driver, an amateur historian who resents people like the professor—those who, as Silvie puts it, “were paid to walk the places Dad loved and write the ideas he could have had.” Silvie herself has “never been as far south as Birmingham,” and the trip marks her first extended contact with more privileged young people, those with the resources to travel around Europe for fun.

Whereas her father idealizes a world before industrialization, Silvie understands that Iron Age life demands a great deal of violence. After her mother remarks offhandedly on the possibility of gathering fish for dinner, Silvie reflects on the inaccuracy of this wording: “You don’t . . . gather fish, there has to be murder done.” And she understands that the violent practices they are seeking to recreate have never really left, given that her father is regularly abusive to her and her mother. In one harrowing scene, he beats Silvie with his belt, and she seeks to dissociate from the experience by focusing on “the leather of his belt, the animal from whose skin it was made . . . the sensations that skin had known before the fear and pain of the end.”

One aspect of the ancient Britons’ culture that especially fascinates Silvie’s father is their practices of ritual sacrifice; in order to ward off evil spirits, he explains, they would single out a person—often a young woman—tie her up, and leave her to die in the bog. “You give what you most want to keep,” he has told his daughter over the years. In chilling detail, Silvie describes how her father and the professor join forces to construct a makeshift wall of their own, and how the re-enactment begins increasingly to feel “like something real.” As Ghost Wall moves ominously toward its climax, Moss shows that sometimes even those who do know history are driven to repeat it.

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Ed Pavlić
Milkweed Editions ($26)
by Julian Anderson

When Ndiya Grayson, the young black professional protagonist in Another Kind of Madness, journeys to see the musician Shame Luther in an unfamiliar Chicago neighborhood, she misjudges her step off the bus and plunges into a puddle. Now, rather than appearing cool and collected at his door, she arrives post-puddle and soaked. But her vulnerability allows for a connection with Shame. For Ed Pavlic’s new novel, which is deeply invested in exploring its characters’ inner worlds, disorientation is part of the point.

Along with Ndiya, Shame too feels off-balanced. Having been on the road for ten years following a friend’s death, he discovers on moving back to Chicago that

without his noticing, all his senses had begun to work basically like the glass blocks he’d installed in the bedroom wall. . . . As soon as he returned, he noticed things and, even more, people would approach into magnified focus and bend out of range in a rhythm that changed constantly but didn’t seem to alter in response to anything he could determine or control.

Shame accepts this distorted perspective as a way of coping with the world he cannot control, but as he tries to find a path forward, the city presents its own deadly potholes. While driving, Shame is pulled over by police, designated as Man One and Man Two, who interrogate him bafflingly and then, with vague but serious threats, force him to drive for hours, according to their directions. He can only obey, rendered helpless in an African-American version of Kafkaesque dehumanization.

The present and the past also control people, sometimes metaphorically. Asleep, for instance, Shame is steadily bitten by a spider, which breaches the surface of the skin he has grown over his grief. In a description alert to language, the spider herself is “poise: tangent instant on the inside skin of grief, a stance in the wind of one’s own history, a still shot of experience, a sip of poison.” In this unlikely linking of poise and poison, the spider dances along one of the thousand magical strands, spun of sound and rhythm, which make up the story.

Not only a writer of fiction and essays, Pavlić has a considerable reputation as a poet, and he is attuned to language’s inner music. When a drug dealer is introduced to Ndiya, for instance, he experiences a shock of recognition relating to a horrific childhood crime. His subsequent escape to drugs is rendered in the statement, “And an instant was the time it took a bent mirror of the time it took to take it.” This declaration pushes the boundaries of syntax and grammar into a logic of vertiginous sensation that a reader can understand only by surrendering control.

As they try to cope with a world they feel they cannot properly perceive and trust, the characters’ responses powerfully drive the narrative. Just as Shame lives in his music, naturally and unselfconsciously, the narrative breathes poetry, augmenting descriptions of interior states with riffs of complex musicality. A reader must be prepared to suspend traditional expectations of sidewalks and street signs as they step off a bus into a story that moves with a heart’s deep longing from Chicago’s dangers to a small coastal village in Kenya. Ndiya Grayson’s smooth exterior is a veneer, after all; arriving wet and left-footed at Shame’s house, she is rendered vulnerable and human in her search for connection.

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An interview with Ed Pavlić appears in the Summer 2019 Print Edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books. Purchase this issue here.

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Lindsey A. Freeman
Redwood Press ($18)

by Will Wlizlo

Oak Ridge is a small city like many other small cities and, at the same time, a place with few parallels. Its mazy streets are dotted with anodyne pre-fab homes like so many post-war communities, yet the sleepy town just west of Knoxville, Tennessee, has a humming, volatile core. It was built from the dirt up as a primary component of the Manhattan Project; the nearby Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex provided much of the research and fissile material used in the atomic bombs dropped on Japan. It’s also where Lindsey Freeman grew up.

In This Atom Bomb in Me, Freeman describes coming of age in and around Oak Ridge, and how she carries her “atomic childhood” within herself. “I felt animated by a kind of power coming from Oak Ridge and my connection to the Atomic City,” she writes. “I often felt like the acorn inside the twirling atom, the city’s totem—something ordinary made extraordinary through a field of power.” Both the mundane and the mysterious irradiate this slim memoir, which builds into something more than just the remembrance of a uniquely situated adolescence in Reagan’s America. In addition to an idiosyncratic consideration of memory and belonging, This Atom Bomb in Me offers a poetic exploration of how culture and identity synthesize each other.

Freeman lived in Oak Ridge for a few months, but her parents moved to the nearby working-class city of Morristown while she was still an infant. She visited often to see her grandparents, who still lived there, and many of Freeman’s sharpest memories come from her summer vacations and car trips between home and Oak Ridge. Her remembrances from that time have a comic uncanniness, a sense of something sinister hidden within the goofy scenes of childhood. Freeman’s memories of playing tricks on the Russian spies who drove around Oak Ridge, finding rickety barns that concealed secret laboratories, and memorizing the lyrics to R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” all take on a darker cast when considering the historic context of the end of the Cold War. And, of course, there are memories unambiguously shot through with radioactive material. “All the autumns of my youth,” she writes, “we played soccer by a sweet little creek that was so gentle we never thought to ask if the water was laced with strontium-90 or toxic mercury, by-products of the city’s nuclear industries.”

This Atom Bomb in Me jumps rapidly between valences, and Freeman unpacks how the local manifestations of the nuclear moment and her perception of broader global currents orbit each other. For example, living near Oak Ridge felt more precarious after seeing television footage of Pripyat, a city in the former U.S.S.R. most famous for being downwind of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor. “Nearly nine tons of radioactive material was thrown into the air, creating a black plume of radioactive smoke that smothered the city of Pripyat,” she recalls. “The entire city was evacuated. It was hard to wrap my head around the fact that a city could be there one day and all its inhabitants gone the next. It was even more frightening because this was a nuclear city full of experts—scientists and engineers—and something had gone horribly wrong.” One gets the impression that, after a lifelong buildup of atomic culture in her bones, the footage of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown was among the most devastating images of Freeman’s adolescence.

Images, both devastating and nostalgic, are a key component of This Atom Bomb in Me. As Freeman flips through her memories, the memoir settles into a scrapbook-like form. The text is broken into eighty-two short sections, and the pages are filled in with visual ephemera, including family photos, historic images of Oak Ridge, snapshots of pop culture artifacts, and artworks. Reading feels like dipping in and out of a precociously curated diary.

In this way, Freeman creates what she might call a “sensorium.” By gathering things she touched, smelled, heard, saw, and ate in youth—there’s a surprisingly introspective tangent about Atomic Fireball candies toward the book’s conclusion—she conveys how a local culture fused to atomic progress can mutate both matter and spirit. “It radiates throughout the city,” she says of the subliminal atomic hum of Oak Ridge, “[it] goes underground, swims and dives through rivers and tributaries, and ignores boundaries and barriers of every stripe. I carry it in my own body. It is both outside and inside, material and immaterial, pulsing and still.”

But after immersing oneself in her sensorium, can we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel the world of an atomic child in Oak Ridge? As a researcher and professor of sociology, Freeman is aware of the challenges in understanding cultures and social narratives. To aid her introspective rumination, she treats readers to a primer on some of the thinkers who’ve puzzled over questions of authentic self-understanding. Roland Barthes’s Empire of Signs is the most prominent critical reference. Barthes’s primary anecdote in that book is the fable of Little Red Riding Hood, who is famously eaten by a wolf disguised as her grandmother. To fairly judge the place or context in which we reside, Barthes contends, is similar to the predicament of Little Red Riding Hood “trying to destroy the wolf by lodging comfortably in its gullet.” By refashioning the wolf’s gullet from the commercial clutter of mid-century America and exploring the cultural vibrations of the subsequent generation, This Atom Bomb in Me deflects some of our insights into the more essential ways that family, community, and the broader experience of childhood in the Atomic City shaped Freeman. Yet at the same time it also highlights the pervasive leeching of a culture into its citizenry. This tension remains satisfying and provocative throughout the memoir.

We’re left with a model of the author that resembles the structure of an atom. Her revealed core has two parts: a happy-go-lucky kid and a cool, neutral academic. She also presents moving, interrelated flashes of her life—the stories, remembrances, artifacts, trivia, and scholarship—that revolve around her character and keep the whole narrative in balance. These pieces are like the protons, neutrons, and electrons of Lindsay A. Freeman. Eighty-two textual scraps circumnavigate and protect the core; the loops of their meanings create both a boundary and a mechanism to communicate her story. And so, if the comparison may continue, This Atom Bomb in Me is like the chemical element lead, with its eighty-two protons, neutrons, and electrons. Lead, unlike plutonium or uranium, doesn’t have an explosive history. But, depending on how the element is used, its toxic nature can manifest in unexpected places—or its malleable structure can contain the malevolence of radiation.

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Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era
Edited by Jason Baumann
W. W. Norton and Company ($24.95)

The Stonewall Reader
Edited by The New York Public Library
Penguin Classics ($18)

by Greg Baldino

The summer of 2019 marks the 50th year since the events of LGBTQ history known as the Stonewall Riots. Among the many institutions commemorating the anniversary is the New York Public Library, which is showcasing an exhibition open through July 19th, 2019. In addition to his work on the exhibit, curator Jason Baumann has also edited two books, drawing on the resources of the NYPL’s archives and collections: The Stonewall Reader, a collection of writings examining homosexual and transgender life before and after the riots, and the photographic collection Love and Resistance: Out of the Closet into the Stonewall Era.

In the summer of 1969, the Stonewall Inn was a burnt out shell of a restaurant turned mafia-run dive bar. A powder-blue “membership card” issued to circumvent state liquor laws gave its patrons access to watered-down drinks served in filthy glasses. It was not a nice place. But it was one of the few gay bars in New York City with a dance floor, and one of the few that didn’t turn away trans patrons, and hence a popular spot. After midnight on June 28th, the police raided the bar. The gay patrons were ordered to leave, but those in the bar who at the time might have identified as transsexual or transvestites or drag queens were roughly handled and arrested—under a section of the penal code prohibiting loitering which criminalized “being in any manner disguised by unusual or unnatural attire or facial alteration.” That night, though, the patrons of the bar and the residents of the Greenwich Village neighborhood held fast and fought back against the police, leading to a three-day riot.

The riots, sometimes historicized as the Stonewall Uprising, were not the first instance of a police raid being resisted, nor even the first riot led by trans women. They were preceded by the riots in Los Angeles at Cooper’s Do-Nuts in 1959 and in San Francisco at Compton’s Cafeteria seven years later. But owing to a number of factors that no one could have anticipated, the clash at Stonewall became recognized as a catalyzing event, so much so that American LGBTQ history is divided by it. Only the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s is considered as much of an epochal marker. In spite of its importance, though, the actual events and their participants’ roles are hotly debated. A riot is a very poorly organized event, and trying to create an exact historical record of one is, at times, like trying to staple mist to a kite string.

The Stonewall Reader does not attempt to create an objective record of the moment. Instead, the selections try to create instead an assessment of the lives of lesbians, gay men, and transgender men and women in the post-war decades, and how the culture (both queer and straight) was radically transfigured. Notably, the contributors from both the before and the after sections include a number of pieces by transgender contributors. Christine Jorgensen, considered the first successful subject of transitional surgery, writes about how she was exposed in the press while still recovering in the hospital. Transgender activist Mario Martinez documents the dehumanizing attitudes from the very legal counsel that was meant to help him and others. Of the convergence of the different identity groups in action that night, Queers for Economic Justice cofounder Jay London Toole writes: “Those seven or eight people that were arrested did not make that riot, did not make that rebellion, did not make that uproar. It was every fucking person that showed up in the thousands that made it.”

What makes The Stonewall Reader successful is Baumann’s editorial approach. Rather than trying to build a linear definitive take on the events, Baumann instead leaves room for different perspectives from the preludes and aftermaths. “Rather than provide another closed narrative of these tumultuous events,” he writes in the introduction, “my purpose has been to allow the reader to sort these mysteries out for themselves by reading the memoirs and the testimony of the participants and those immediately touched by these historic events.”

This approach carries over, albeit with a tighter focus, to Baumann’s second book, Love and Resistance. Drawing on the NYPL’s archives, the book collects photographs by Kay Tobin Lahusen and Diana Davies, whose visual records reflect the differences in their cultural backgrounds, and the changes in those communities that Stonewall initiated. Lahusan had come of age during the homophile movement of the 1960s, joining the first American lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis, and becoming the art director for their publication The Ladder. Under her direction, the magazine transitioned away from cartooning and illustration work to include actual photographs of lesbian women; a brave and risky move during those days. Born eight years later, Davies grew up in a different culture and became involved with more radical organizations such as the Gay Liberation Front and Street Transvestites Action Revolutionaries. In addition to her contributions to the publication Come Out!, Davies documented the anti-war, civil rights, and feminist movements of the ’60s and ’70s. Their photographs depict the men and women—gay and bisexual, transgender and cisgender—who took to the streets to rally for change, to advocate that they didn’t have to be just like everyone else to deserve truth and beauty and freedom.

The two come from different backgrounds and ideologies, and their photographs, in both their subject matters and subjects, help to show the shift that happened in LGBT political action during that time. Common to the pre-Stonewall activism of groups like the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society was an approach that could be called assimilationist, but could also be considered destigmatizing. It was the approach of presenting both homosexuals and homosexual desires as being comparable to straight society— “straight” in this sense meaning both sexually heterosexual and performatively normal: tax paying, god fearing, and all-American. Following the riots, activism became more confrontational and transgressive, paving the way for the more direct action of organizations like Queer Nation and AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) during the AIDS epidemic. The people street fighting with the police that night had less to lose from capitulation than closeted suburbanites. For the patrons of the Stonewall—predominantly African American and Puerto Rican and no stranger to police brutality—love was literally a battlefield.

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Summer 2019 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2019

Henrik Pontoppidan
translated by Paul Larkin
Museum Tusculanum Press ($35)

by Poul Houe

This new English translation of a 750-page long Danish novel written more than a century ago is a heavyweight both literally and figuratively. On the volume’s front cover a blurb by Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann reads, “the author of A Fortunate Man is a full-blooded storyteller who scrutinizes our lives and society so intensely that he ranks within the highest class of European writers,” a claim which another cover reminder about Pontoppidan corroborates: “From the 1917 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.” Add to this that the present translation coincides with two 2018 film adaptations of the book—one for the movie screen, the other for a TV miniseries, both made by Oscar-winning director Bille August—and you are almost compelled to expect a work of art capable of traveling the distance between the late nineteenth and early twenty-first century.

In fact, evidence of the novel’s topicality is not hard to glean. Its eponymous character, Peter Andreas Sidenius, or simply Per, as in its Danish title Lykke-Per (Lucky-Per), is born to rigorously devout Christian parents, the father descending from an endless lineage of Lutheran pastors. But unlike the rest of the vicarage’s large household, Per is driven from an early age by an obstinate zest of life that eventually sparks bold ideas of his own about technical and material matters—much in sync with the modern breakthrough in Nordic culture and society, but completely out of touch with the spiritual norms of the Sidenius home.

Rational and pragmatic, this young disciple of the human god of utilitarian progress is especially intrigued by the energy potential in North Sea waves and Western Winds, and his engineering plans for capturing these otherwise wasted forces of nature for the benefit of the national economy ring like preambles for today’s environmental sustainability agenda. Including his designs for river regulations and a large Jutland freeport, Per’s technological output is precisely as uncompromising as the religious spirituality he was brought up with but now struggles to outmaneuver. Even more than his actual accomplishments, which turn out to be few, this background is what truly throws his striving into relief and makes A Fortunate Man a novel for our time.

More than their prescience, though, it is the failure of Per’s many efforts, and his subsequent life in splendid isolation (as a lowly paid road inspector in his country’s most barren and remote quarters) that deserve the attention of today’s readers. For while the prospects of his ambitions may have stood the test of time, the forces that undercut their currency from the outset, or at least suggested they were premature, remain embedded in our own technology-driven culture and cause today’s humans no less harm than they once caused Per.

Simply put, Lykke-Per, the fortunate man, is also a Skygge-Per, a man of shadows. As Pontoppidan’s lengthy narrative progresses, it reveals in ever so many compelling ways and characteristic details how profoundly indebted to his past this man is, especially when he believes himself to be confronting and resisting his origins most ardently and to be staking out his own path through life. Often others see the link before Per realizes it himself, as when this fellow suitor says to him: “Even if we are not born with chains, we seem to feel an urge to make chains for ourselves as life progresses. We are, and will ever be, a band of slaves. We only ever feel really at home when we are in chains and shackled—what would you say to that now?”

Only gradually, as his forward-moving steps alternate with crushing setbacks, does Per come to acknowledge his susceptibility to the values and attitudes he resents the most. Whether disdaining his provincial father’s religion while seeking the approval of secular urban Jews, or succumbing to feelings of guilt and remorse for his youthful misdeeds, or navigating a spiritual course between religious modes at odds with all of the above, Per increasingly embraces spirituality as a pivotal part of his humanity: not a transcendental spirituality, mind you, but a sense of nature that has affinity to modern technology and science and yet is richer than the outlook of most practitioners of both.

Torn between these opposites at any given time, Per faces shadows of his past while stumbling towards selfhood in the process. When eventually he connects with his father’s faith as an indelible influence upon his own life, it’s the spiritual passion he takes to heart, not the religious doctrine it fueled in his father’s mind. Even Per’s penchant for likeminded characters like Jewish Dr. Nathan is qualified. While admiring Nathan’s intellectual acuity and the eloquence with which he infused the public sphere with modern insights, Per deems his outlook narrowly aesthetic and alien to the natural sciences and modern technology.

Commuting between such diverse sources of inspiration, the fortunate man’s selfhood emerges as a cacophony, a patchwork, and a fluidity: a messy construction of building blocks from near and far but first and foremost a never-ending interaction between the visibly known and the shadows it either casts or represses. It’s Per’s misfortune that such shadows undercut his life, but his fortune that he meets the challenge to come to terms with the predicament. The scene is typically a fairy tale or legend, as when he asks his Jewish girlfriend if she remembers the school book story “of the mountain troll who crawled up through a mole hill so he could live amongst human beings but got terrible fits of sneezing whenever the sun broke through the clouds? Ah, I could tell you a long tale that would explain exactly where that legend comes from!” Per knows! As shadows are both his curse and his blessing, they are what makes him Per, the fortunately unfortunate or unfortunately fortunate man.

Since technology today advances even more rapidly than Per Sidenius’ era of modernity could ever dream of, Pontoppidan’s novelistic lesson about the perilous road to selfhood in a world of our own making could not be more timely. Almost daily we are treated to scary collisions of brazen innovations and the so-called unintended consequences these tend to entail. While progress appears to reign supreme, its shadows are having a ball, and the need to confront the interplay becomes paramount. It’s because fortune and misfortune are often as hard to separate as conjoined twins that a window like Pontoppidan’s on their both vital and deadly nexus is a precious commodity.

Its formal design may seem overly traditional to suit insights into futuristic challenges of this magnitude, but on closer inspection it actually does the challenges justice by bringing their shadowy disruptions to light by way of meticulous disquisitions rather than the style of impulsive tweets. Compositionally, A Fortunate Man, like the standard Bildungsroman, follows its protagonist from the home that shaped him to a world away from there, where his full self can emerge before returning home for confirmation of its independently won identity. For Per, however, the transition never ends, and when, finally, a renewed sense of home does transpire on his own terms, only a version of his homeless experience in no-man’s-land qualifies for the role. The trajectory for his development was traditional, but rather than leading to fulfilment, it led him to drain his life expectations for all that could have compromised his passion to meet them.

Similarly, the novel’s narrative mode and attitude are omniscient and Olympic with movements both between characters and within their minds. Yet while the narrator is the one who knows best, and who tells it best, his puppeteering capacity is not abused to simplify matters unduly, but works to stretch, for better and worse, the human potentials involved to their breaking point. Character depictions and characterizations serve their agents’ most conflicted and contradictory traits, inviting readers to contemplate the ways in which personal centers of gravity are repeatedly split between centripetal and centrifugal forces, or conversely, are stifled in a form of life to be deplored if not avoided.

The disruptions are never far away. Shortly after Per’s personality seems “the first formless template for a coming race of giants, which (as he himself had written) would finally take possession of the world as its rightful rulers and masters—a world which they would then reshape to their own liking and needs,” he goes humbly to bid his father a last farewell. “In ways barely perceptible to him, his decision was linked to other partly diffuse deliberations that had occupied his mind the previous night and, once again, shades of unconquered phantoms had made their disturbing presence felt.”

Again, not only does Pontoppidan’s verbal orchestration deal with authority on the cusp of an existential and national breakthrough that verges on a breakdown; it also offers up an array of painstakingly nuanced individual portrayals and revelations. Alongside this it unfolds, in telling detail, a host of theological and philosophical, political and aesthetic, scientific and technological bones of contention of the kind that defined the cultural and societal scene in Denmark and countries south of its border during the ground-shifting transition from a world of hegemonic national spirituality to one of global innovation and market economic expansion—all turning individual souls more optimistic and more lost than most people realized or had words for.

At book’s end Per Sidenius has died, but only after his tortured search for meaning in life had reached its own dead end. In a journal Per left behind, an admirer learns how he saw this search as “the final aim of our struggle and suffering. Until one day, we are stopped by a voice from deep within us, the voice of a phantom asking: But who are you yourself? From that day forward, no other question matters except this one. From that day, our own self becomes the great Sphinx, whose mystery we must solve.” While space limitations prevent me from quoting most of the journal’s dizzying grappling with the issue, its final words: “I must know! I must know!” suffice to sum up why A Fortunate Man is a demanding read worth the effort.

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