by Bernhard Schlink, Yosl Rakover Talks to God (1999) by Zvi Kolitz and Address
Unknown (1966) by Kressman Taylor may well be thought to be direct testament
resulting from the Holocaust. What is at issue is not empirical facts that can be
verified but spiritual facts that must be pondered. For example, Wilkomirski
perfectly captures, in the manner of Primo Levi, how one, or at least one’s soul,
never leaves the concentration camps, even long after the war.
Of all the reviewers of these cases, Elena Lappin seems to come closest to
what I believe may explain these imaginative reconstructions. The idea of “ ...
inexplicable shreds of memory” (Lappin, 1999:58) though finding form in what must
be seen as anything other than fiction was nevertheless written in a way that was
experienced deeply by both their writers and readers perhaps because of
correspondence. The correspondences in the case of Binjamin Wilkomerski were his
orphan status, obscure social origins, a childhood swamped with loss and change,
prison-like orphanage institutions, and the great loss and memory of a mother.
Another aspect of this phenomenon, a technical one, may be seen in The
Emigrants by W.G. Sebald, which first appears simply to document the lives of four
Jewish exiles or émigrés in the twentieth century. Gradually, however we see how
Sebald’s precise, almost dreamlike prose works its mythopoeic magic, and the four
narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss. There is
another element, one exemplified by Holocaust literature; Schlink and Sebald
exemplify a generation of German writers who share a complex relationship with the
German past that represents an acknowledgement of guilt and yet contains a
certain ambiguity. It is interesting that no significant German writer, between the
end of the 1939-45 war wrote about the moral and physical destruction of their
country, as Sebald says, “ ...with the horrendous place I came out of and the
devastation wrought by history” (Wyndham, 2000:9). Yet certain events and indeed
places seem to acquire archetypal status and thus have a particularly puissant effect
on MLC. As Wyndham avers:
All Sebald’s work is fictional but not a novel, blending memoir,
travel, history, crime essay and imagination into a stream of
consciousness that manages to be allusive, fact filled and surreal.
Conversations merge with artworks, memories, landscapes and
dreams, often leaving the reader entranced but uneasy
(Wyndham, 2000:9).
Like Keneally, Malouf and McCullough, and other mythopoeic writers,
Sebald’s work is conceived in the personal psyche and then it moves into a different