Quarrel & Quandary (6 page)

Or, if not conjured, then come upon by degrees, gradually, incrementally, in hints and echoes. Sebald allows himself to discover his ghosts almost stealthily, with a dawning notion of who they really are. It is as if he is intruding on them, and so he is
cautious, gentle, wavering at the outer margins of the strange places he finds them in. In “Dr. Henry Selwyn,” as the first narrative is called, the young Sebald and his wife drive out into the English countryside to rent a flat in a wing of an overgrown mansion surrounded by a neglected garden and a park of looming trees. The house seems deserted. Tentatively, they venture onto the grounds and stumble unexpectedly on a white-haired, talkative old man who describes himself as “a dweller in the garden, a kind of ornamental hermit.” By the time we arrive at the end of this faintly Gothic episode, however, we have learned that Dr. Henry Selwyn was once a
cheder-yingl
—a Jewish schoolchild—named Hersch Seweryn in a village near Grodno in Lithuania. When he was seven years old, his family, including his sisters Gita and Raya, set out for America, like thousands of other impoverished shtetl Jews at the beginning of the century; but “in fact, as we learnt some time later to our dismay (the ship having long since cast off again), we had gone ashore in London.” The boy begins his English education in Whitechapel in the Jewish East End, and eventually wins a scholarship to Cambridge to study medicine. Then, like a proper member of his adopted milieu, he heads for the Continent for advanced training, where he becomes enamored—again like a proper Englishman—with a Swiss Alpine guide named Johannes Naegeli. Naegeli tumbles into a crevasse and is killed; Dr. Selwyn returns home to serve in the Great War and in India. Later he marries a Swiss heiress who owns houses in England and lets flats. He has now completed the trajectory from Hersch Seweryn to Dr. Henry Selwyn. But one day, when the word “homesick” flies up out of a melancholy conversation with Sebald, Selwyn tells the story of his childhood as a Jewish immigrant.

The American term is immigrant, not emigrant, and for good reason, America being the famous recipient of newcomers: more come in than ever go out. Our expatriates tend to be artists,
often writers: hence that illustrious row of highly polished runaways, James, Eliot, Pound, Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway. But an expatriate, a willing (sometimes temporary) seeker, is not yet an emigrant. And an emigrant is not a refugee. A
cheder-yingl
from a shtetl near Grodno in a place and period not kind to Jews is likely to feel himself closer to being a refugee than an emigrant: our familiar steerage image expresses it best. Sebald, of course, knows this, and introduces Dr. Selwyn as a type of foreshadowing. Displaced and homesick in old age for the child he once was (or in despair over the man he has become), Dr. Selwyn commits suicide. And on a visit to Switzerland in 1986, Sebald reads in a Lausanne newspaper that Johannes Naegeli’s body has been found frozen in a glacier seventy-two years after his fall. “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,” Sebald writes.

But of exactly what is Dr. Selwyn a foreshadowing? The second account, entitled “Paul Bereyter,” is a portrait of a German primary-school teacher—Sebald’s own teacher in the fifties, “who spent at least a quarter of all his lessons on teaching us things that were not on the syllabus.” Original, inventive, a lover of music, a scorner of catechism and priests, an explorer, a whistler, a walker (“the very image … of the German
Wandervogel
hiking movement, which must have had a lasting influence on him from his youth”), Paul Bereyter is nevertheless a lonely and increasingly aberrant figure. In the thirties he had come out of a teachers’ training college (here a grim photo of the solemn graduates, in their school ties and rather silly caps) and taught school until 1935, when he was dismissed for being a quarter-Jew. The next year his father, who owned a small department store, died in a mood of anguish over Nazi pogroms in his native Gunzenhausen, where there had been a thriving Jewish population. After the elder Bereyter’s death, the business was
confiscated; his widow succumbed to depression and a fatal deterioration. Paul’s sweetheart, who had journeyed from Vienna to visit him just before he took up his first teaching post, was also lost to him: deported, it was presumed afterward, to Theresienstadt. Stripped of father, mother, inheritance, work, and love, Paul fled to tutor in France for a time, but in 1939 drifted back to Germany, where, though only three-quarters Aryan, he was unaccountably conscripted. For six years he served in the motorized artillery all over Nazi-occupied Europe. At the war’s end he returned to teach village boys, one of whom was Sebald.

As Sebald slowly elicits his old teacher’s footprints from interviews, reconstructed hints, and the flickering lantern of his own searching language, Paul Bereyter turns out to be that rare and mysterious figure: an interior refugee (and this despite his part in the German military machine)—or call it, as Sebald might, an internal emigrant. After giving up teaching—the boys he had once felt affection for he now began to see as “contemptible and repulsive creatures”—he both lived in and departed from German society, inevitably drawn back to it, and just as inevitably repelled. All his adult life, Sebald discovers, Paul Bereyter had been interested in railways. (The text is now interrupted by what appears to be Paul’s own sketch of the local
Bahnhof
, or train station, with the inscription
So ist es seit dem 4.10.49:
This is how it has looked since the fourth of October 1949.) On the blackboard he draws “stations, tracks, goods depots, and signal boxes” for the boys to reproduce in their notebooks. He keeps a model train set on a card table in his flat. He obsesses about timetables. Later, though his eyesight is troubled by cataracts, he reads demonically—almost exclusively the works of suicides, among them Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Klaus Mann, Koestler, Zweig, Tucholsky. He copies out, in shorthand, hundreds of their pages. And finally, on a mild winter afternoon,
he puts on a windbreaker that he has not worn since his early teaching days forty years before, and goes out to stretch himself across the train tracks, awaiting his own (as it were) deportation. Years after this event, looking through Paul’s photo album with its record of childhood and family life, Sebald again reflects: “it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back”—but now he adds, “or as if we were on the point of joining them.”

Two tales, two suicides. Yet suicide is hardly the most desolating loss in Sebald’s broader scheme of losses. And since he comes at things aslant, his next and longest account, the history of his aunts and uncles and their emigration to the United States in the twenties—a period of extreme unemployment in Germany—is at first something of a conundrum. Where, one muses, are those glimmers of the Jewish ghosts of Germany, or any inkling of entanglement with Jews at all? And why, among these steadily rising German-American burghers, should there be? Aunt Fini and Aunt Lini and Uncle Kasimir, Aunt Theres and Cousin Flossie, “who later became a secretary in Tucson, Arizona, and learnt to belly dance when she was in her fifties”—these are garden-variety acculturating American immigrants; we know them; we know the smells of their kitchens; they are our neighbors. (They were certainly mine in my North Bronx childhood.) The geography is familiar—a photo of a family dinner in a recognizable Bronx apartment (sconces on the wall, steam-heat radiators); then the upwardly mobile move to Mamaroneck, in Westchester; then the retirement community in New Jersey. To get to Fini and Kasimir, drive south from Newark on the Jersey Turnpike and head for Lakehurst and the Garden State. In search of Uncle Adelwarth in his last years: Route 17, Monticello, Hurleyville, Oswego, Ithaca. There are no ghosts in these parts. It is, all of it, plain-hearted America.

But turn the page: here are the ghosts. A photo of Uncle
Kasimir as a young man, soon after his apprenticeship as a tinsmith. It is 1928, and only once in that terrible year, Kasimir recounts, did he get work, “when they were putting a new copper roof on the synagogue in Augsburg.” In the photo Kasimir and six other metal workers are sitting at the top of the curve of a great dome. Behind them, crowning the dome, are three large sculptures of the six-pointed Star of David. “The Jews of Augsburg,” explains Kasimir, “had donated the old copper roof for the war effort during the First World War, and it wasn’t till ’28 that they had the money for a new roof.” Sebald offers no comment concerning the fate of those patriotic Jews and their synagogue a decade on, in 1938, in the fiery hours of the Nazis’ so-called
Kristallnacht
. But Kasimir and the half-dozen tinsmiths perched against a cluster of Jewish stars leave a silent mark in Sebald’s prose: what once was is no more.

After the roofing job in Augsburg, Kasimir followed Fini and Theres to New York. They had been preceded by their legendary Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who was already established as a majordomo on the Long Island estate of the Solomons family, where he was in particular charge of Cosmo Solomons, the son and heir. Adelwarth helped place Fini as a governess with the Seligmans in Port Washington, and Theres as a lady’s maid to a Mrs. Wallerstein, whose husband was from Ulm in Germany. Kasimir, meanwhile, was renting a room on the Lower East Side from a Mrs. Litwak, who made paper flowers and sewed for a living. In the autumn succahs sprouted on all the fire escapes. At first Kasimir was employed by the Seckler and Margarethen Soda and Seltzer Works; Seckler was a German Jew from Brünn, who recommended Kasimir as a metal worker for the new yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue. “The very next day,” says Kasimir, “I was up on the top of the tower, just as I had been on the Augsburg Synagogue, only much higher.”

So the immigrants, German and Jewish, mingle in America
much as Germans and Jews once mingled in Germany, in lives at least superficially entwined. (One difference being that after the first immigrant generation the German-Americans would not be likely to continue as tinsmiths, just as Mrs. Litwak’s progeny would hardly expect to take in sewing. The greater likelihood is that a Litwak daughter is belly-dancing beside Flossie in Tucson.) And if Sebald means for us to feel through its American parallel how this ordinariness, this matter-of-factness, of German-Jewish coexistence was brutally ruptured in Germany, then he has succeeded in calling up his most fearful phantoms. Yet his narrative continues as impregnable here as polished copper, evading conclusions of any kind. Even the remarkably stoic tale of Ambros Adelwarth, born in 1896, is left to speak for itself—Adelwarth who, traveling as valet and protector and probably lover of mad young Cosmo Solomons, dutifully frequented the polo grounds of Saratoga Springs and Palm Beach, and the casinos of Monte Carlo and Deauville, and saw Paris and Venice and Constantinople and the deserts on the way to Jerusalem. Growing steadily madder, Cosmo tried to hang himself and at last succumbed to catatonic dementia. Uncle Adelwarth was obliged to commit him to a sanatorium in Ithaca, New York, where Cosmo died—the same sanatorium to which Adelwarth, with all the discipline of a lifetime, and in a strange act of replication, later delivered himself to paralysis and death.

The yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue, the Solomons, Seligmans, Wallersteins, Mrs. Litwak and the succahs on the Lower East Side—this is how Sebald chooses to shape the story of the emigration to America of his Catholic German relations. It is as if the fervor of Uncle Adelwarth’s faithful attachment to Cosmo Solomons were somehow a repudiation of Gershom Scholem’s thesis of unrequited Jewish devotion; as if Sebald were casting a posthumous spell to undo that thesis.

And now on to Max Ferber, Sebald’s final guide to the deeps. Ferber was a painter Sebald got to know—“befriended” is too implicated a term for that early stage—when the twenty-two-year-old Sebald came to study and teach in Manchester, an industrially ailing city studded with mainly defunct chimneys, the erstwhile black fumes of which still coated every civic brick. That was in 1966; my own first glimpse of Manchester was nine years before, and I marveled then that an entire metropolis should be so amazingly, universally charred, as if brushed by a passing conflagration. (Later Sebald will tell us that in its bustling heyday Lodz, in Poland—the site of the Lodz Ghetto, a notorious Nazi vestibule for deportation—was dubbed the Polish Manchester, at a time when Manchester too was booming and both cities had flourishing Jewish populations.) At eighteen Ferber arrived in Manchester to study art and thereafter rarely left. It was the thousands of Manchester smokestacks, he confided to the newcomer Sebald, that prompted his belief that “I had found my destiny.” “I am here,” he said, “to serve under the chimney.” In those early days Ferber’s studio, as Sebald describes it, resembled an ash pit: “When I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust … that process of drawing and shading [with charcoal sticks] on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust.”

And in 1990, when Sebald urgently undertook to search out the life of the refugee Max Ferber and the history of his lost German Jewish family, he seemed to be duplicating Ferber’s own pattern of reluctant consummation, overlaid with haltings, dissatisfactions, fears, and erasures: “Not infrequently I unravelled
what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralyzing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of the narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable act of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages.… By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘final’ version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.”

All this falls out, one imagines, because Sebald is now openly permitting himself to “become” Max Ferber—or, to put it less emblematically, because in these concluding pages he begins to move, still sidling, still hesitating, from the oblique to the head-on; from intimation to declaration. Here, terminally—at the last stop, so to speak—is a full and direct narrative of Jewish exile and destruction, neither hinted at through an account of a loosely parallel flight from Lithuania a generation before, nor obscured by a quarter-Jew who served in Hitler’s army, nor hidden under the copper roof of a German synagogue, nor palely limned in Uncle Adelwarth’s journey to Jerusalem with a Jewish companion.