611 - Memory Fields: The Legacy of a Wartime Childhood in Czechoslovakia & Katerina

Memory Fields: The Legacy of a Wartime Childhood in Czechoslovakia
By Shlomo Breznitz
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. 179 pp. $21.00.

Katerina
By Aharon Appelfeld
Translated from the Hebrew by Jeffrey M. Green.
New York, Random House, 1992. 212 pp. $18.00.

"The dead of Auschwitz should have changed everything, and nothing should have been able to continue as before, neither among our people nor within our churches, especially within our churches!" The exhortation delivered by the Roman Catholic theologian Johannes Metz is frequently greeted with an embarrassed nod. Perhaps the Shoah is "an epoch-making event," but Christian theologians generally have difficulty integrating such an unmanageable reality into their formulations of redemptive transformation. Genocide leaves a disruptive legacy. The dissonance that derives from such a cultural rupture is too unsettling to ignore, and yet too overpowering to face directly.

Shlomo Breznitz and Aharon Appelfeld have each composed first-person narratives that steer a path through the whirlwind. The stories are stitched out of the memories of a Jewish boy hidden within a convent and a gentile woman whose life took a strange and unpredictable turn by becoming entangled with the fate of Jews. Both accounts unfold at a dangerous intersection where the lines between Christians and Jews converge. Though the ethnic and religious boundaries are crisscrossed by the narrators, they are acutely aware that they inhabit a world where the borders are vigilantly patrolled. One side holds the promise of life; the other is marked for death. By reconstructing events that befell two individuals who resided on this precarious edge of history, Breznitz and Appelfeld expose forces that knocked the world off center.

Shlomo Breznitz's Memory Fields traverses almost a half a century, spanning the distance that separates an accomplished Israeli psychologist from an eight-year-old boy from Bratislava, Czechoslovakia. Though Breznitz manages to recover the earliest fragments from a time when he rested within the hopeful embrace of his family, the challenge that lies at the heart of the book is to retrieve and then befriend memories buried beneath the wreckage of the war. The excavation takes the reader to 1938, when the press of international events compelled a Jewish couple to have their children converted to

612 - Memory Fields: The Legacy of a Wartime Childhood in Czechoslovakia & Katerina

Christianity. In a desperate scramble to save their son and daughter, the parents hand their children over to an orphanage run by the Sisters of Saint Vincent before they are themselves swept off to Auschwitz. There Shlomo Breznitz learns the turbulence of the human condition. There he learns the power of fear, the push and pull of cruelty and compassion, the dynamics of hope, and the dreadful discipline of waiting.

The prodigious memory that made Breznitz a chess prodigy at the age of six enabled him to retain long and complicated litanies. When this talent came to the attention of the Mother Superior, she arranged a meeting with the local prelate at which time the boy was called upon to demonstrate his gifts and to recite a sequence of prayers. This performance in all likelihood saved the child's life. A popular legend of a Jewish child who would grow at the bosom of the church, excel in the faith, and eventually become a Pope seized the imagination of the priest and the sisters. The suspicion that they were safeguarding the future of the church prompted the sisters to take special precautions.

While the reader may wince at a piety that welcomes the stranger only when he is imaginatively merged with a self-serving ecclesiastical fantasy, goodness frequently turns out to be as complicated as evil, and rarely are they wrapped in separate packages. This truism never triggers any feelings of resentment in Breznitz's story. His account is told with the psychological precision of someone who has learned to stare into the face of disaster without blinking. Breznitz reveals the interplay of past and present, but he refuses to yield control to the child who might have become lost in bitter disappointment.

Breznitz's autobiographical meditation is propelled by a subtle, quietly modulated, often elegant narration. This gift for poetic understatement is also a driving force in the writing of the renowned Israeli author, Aharon Appelfeld, whose recent novel Katerina once again demonstrates a remarkable literary genius. Appelfeld is also a survivor of the Shoah. He too found himself separated from his parents at the age of eight and was hidden in forests until rescued by the advancing Soviet army at the age of eleven. Appelfeld wanders into these memory fields, reclaims the shards of a shattered heritage, and builds his fiction upon the ruins.

In his novel Katerina, Appelfeld composes a disturbing saga that blends the sensibilities of Kafka with the biblical ethos of a twentieth-century Ruth. After escaping the confines of an oppressively parochial village, Katerina drifts into the employ of a Jewish family. Her life becomes entwined with one Jewish family after another, and she discovers that these people are her people. Where they go, she goes, and not even death can separate her from them. Her attachment is not born out of theological conviction. An almost physiological connection develops as she grows into the body of Israel. Her language, her habits, her looks bespeak an indissoluble linkage, and this intimacy elicits fear, distrust, and hostility from her Gentile neighbors. Every Jew with

614 - Memory Fields: The Legacy of a Wartime Childhood in Czechoslovakia & Katerina

whom she has dealings is eventually caught in a web of hatred. As the destiny of the Jews becomes increasingly bleak, Katerina struggles to serve as their defender. Though her efforts are futile, she refuses to abandon them or to feed on their misfortune. In the end, the story circles back to the reflections with which she began. "Everything is in its place, except for the people. They've all left and gone away.... Too bad the dead are forbidden to speak. They'd have something to say, I'm sure." The burden that haunts Katerina and fills her account with urgency is that "now there are no more Jews left in the world, but a little of them is buried in my memory, and I am afraid that that little bit will be lost."

The strength of Appelfeld's heroine is embodied in her capacity to endure the vicissitudes of the outsider without yielding to those powers of superstition and hatred that promise to return her to the world that she left behind. She refuses to relinquish her love and pays a considerable price. Though Appelfeld insists that there are no metaphysical truths or redemptive meanings that we can extract from the Shoah, the story suggests that we cannot love our neighbor until we have ventured onto alien territory and become strangers to ourselves.

A good many of us Christians have been pounded senseless with the failure of the church during the Nazi era. For this and other reasons we are reluctant to dwell on the historical trauma of the Holocaust. No divine revelations appear buried beneath the rubble. Ashes and emptiness remain, and they have proven pliable material in the hands of the Hollywood producer and the nationalistic demagogue. We are eager to avoid the temptations of kitsch, the pornography of atrocity and political bad faith. In our efforts to stay clean, we may march past neighbors who might compel us to reexamine ourselves and the sacred stories we tell. Breznitz and Appelfeld provide two voices well worth pausing to hear. They alert us to a hazardous crossroad where the paths of Jews and Christians intersect. They challenge us to imagine the route that we have traveled and the direction that we have yet to take.

Christopher M. Leighton

The Institute for Christian and Jewish Studies
Baltimore, MD