by Lore Segal
I have polled my friends. Put yourself back into your first bedroom. Lie down on the bed: You know which way your feet point and the position of the window in relation to the door in relation to the chest of drawers, and the direction of the room in which your parents are asleep. Did you know that you have this map in your head? My friends are surprised, but not overly interested. Boring. We’re not excited by the elemental fact that we carry our heads north of our feet, yet this is our basic orientation: it determines what we call up and down, what we experience as right and left. It’s not something, when we’re talking together, that we mention to ourselves or to each other. We take it, or would take it, if it so much as occurred to us, that this is what we have in common. But neither do we account to ourselves or to each other for the place in which we stand—the standpoint—from which we do our talking.
The kids have a bit of slang that gets near to what I mean. “I know where you’re coming from,” they say. Or “You see where I’m coming from?”
No, I don’t know. I don’t see, and neither do you, and that’s why the things we tell each other seldom achieve direct hits. What we mean is likely to land, if it lands at all, to the right or left or aslant of what we intended. Ask someone to quote back to you what you just said. Do you recognize yourself? Proust put it best. He said when A and B talk there are four conversations—what A says and what B hears and what B says and what A hears.
It’s the secret of our ur-geographies that poets and people of that sort never stop trying to give away; it’s into each other’s earliest space that lovers, in their first weeks, believe they are going to be able to enter.
ESSAYS
MEMORY: THE PROBLEMS OF
IMAGINING THE PAST
The theme of my essay is the writing of story—more particularly, the writing of story whose theme is a memory; yet more particularly, the writing of story whose theme is the memory of the Holocaust. I do not intend to talk about the theory of fiction, or the nature of memory, or the idea of Holocaust; my essay, therefore, may not look to you much like an essay. What an essay does is to formulate a problem and argue it to a conclusion. I would like to do what a story does: to show you something. I want to show how fiction works when memory is its subject.
Fiction does what theater does, except that it does it in the privacy of your mind. Whereas the essay sets out to discuss its idea with you, fiction wants to stage the idea in your imagination. Essay wants to explain its thought; fiction wants the thought to happen to you—to happen in your experience—and experience may not be able to reach a conclusion.
All I want is to take you with me through my experience of writing about the Holocaust, and to leave with you some of the problems I have encountered along the way. Let me attempt a demonstration: I am walking down 100th Street toward my building on the corner of Riverside Drive. The garbage bags are piled on the sidewalk. Someone has thrown out a brass standing lamp with a fluted post—a gooseneck, with a shredded pink-silk shade, its fringe unkempt, no light bulb. If there were a bulb, you would light it by pulling the chain made out of little metal balls; it is like the lamp that stood next to my father’s leather couch in the living room of our Vienna flat which the Nazis requisitioned in the spring of 1938.
But the garbage I am talking about is in New York. The time is 1987 P.B. (Post Bauhaus). We tend toward a new homesickness for old things—things with detail and decoration, even things of the undistinguished sort exemplified by my garbage lamp. I climb over the bloated, green, giant vinyl bags with their unexplained bellies and elbows, and I capture this object—this lamp. I translate it, etymologically speaking—that is to say, I “carry” it “across” the threshold into my lobby and up the elevator, and I put it in my American living room. It has become my lamp.
It is a queer and perfectly everyday thing that I, the writer, and you the reader have just accomplished together: I have translated a lamp in-the-world into words on-the-page, and you have translated the words into a lamp in your mind. Now it is your lamp, too.
Look at the lamp standing in your imagination—I told you it was a standing lamp. Does it look like any particular standing lamp in your past? Upon your remembered lamp my words have grafted certain details—oldness, brass, fluting, pink silk—creating an imaginary object of some visual complexity. Look again. My lamp in your head is made of such stuff as dreams are made on—an immaterial material. It is semi-transparent. You see it and, through it, you see your own lamp, your picture on the wall.
You have lamps and you have garbage bags in your experience, to which my words have added my details. There are other things in my little story that I have merely named for you—lobby, elevator, living room—relying entirely on your experience of such things to fill in what I mean. In all cases, I need you to put your experience of the world at the service of what I am telling you.
And it is not only objects that we have translated together. There was a small joke about fashions in design, a protagonist (myself), and an action (my carrying the lamp). And there is yet another act that you have performed with me: my act of remembering another lamp in that expropriated living room in another past and place.
Notice that I gave my little story a locale—a street on the West Side of Manhattan—without giving you any detail with which to imagine it. Suppose you have never been to New York and have no relevant experience to help you imagine it? In this instance, I do not need you—in fact, I need you not to see and feel my street in New York, in America. In this instance, my street in New York is not a seen-and-felt place but an ideal one, whose rhetorical purpose is to be at vast remove from my street in Nazi Vienna. Your experience, on which I am relying, is distance and difference.
* * *
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We come home, at last, to the subject of the Albany conference and to my particular theme: the translating of the remembered past—the Holocaust past—into the reader’s present experience. Our first problem is the complexity of the distance and difference between what we remember and what is in front of our eyes.
Two brief passages in my novel Her First American concern themselves with the problems of remembering. In one, my heroine, Ilka, has come to America with documentation that her father was killed in the last weeks of the Nazi war. Her mother was missing, but she has been found alive in a kibbutz and is about to materialize in New York:
They went to the wharf and stood in the cold drizzle watching the people walk down the gangplank. Ilka was afraid of not recognizing her mother. She kept saying, “I haven’t seen her in eleven years. I was ten years old,” and saw her mother in a wheelchair being wheeled down the gangplank, but it was not her mother. Ilka ran forward, and it was her mother.
In the taxi, Ilka looked sideways at the woman who sat next to her, who was her mother. It wasn’t the added years only: events accrued to her that Ilka did not know anything about that made her a stranger. And it wasn’t only that. Her actual person coincided with Ilka’s memory of her person; the memory hung about like a ghost, competing for the space filled by its incarnation. Ilka looked out the car window and Riverside Drive was real and her mother returned into that transparent, unstable stuff our memories of the dead are made of. Ilka looked at her mother. Here she was.
Later, the two return to Austria to look for the spot where Ilka’s father had last been seen, on the road outside a small market town:
The stewardess spoke German with an Austrian voice and Ilka’s childhood address came intact into her head. “Mutti, hey listen: “AchterBezirkJosefstädter-Strasse81/83ZweiterStockTür9.”
They burst into the streets of Vienna. “The J Wagen!” cried her mother. “It goes—it used to go to Vati’s shop. You were too small to remember…”
But it turned out that Ilka remembered what she did not remember, as if she had reentered a childhood tale: she might not recall how it came out but knew what the next sentence was going to say. “Josefstädter Strasse will be the next left. It is! Cobbles! And nothing over four storie
s! There was a bank that had a door that cut the corner off the building that was closed when I went down with Vati, the morning after Hitler. Here it is! Mutti! You see! The corner door!” To be proved correct had that odd little importance one feels in presenting certification—a driver’s license, a library card: this proves that this is me. The person standing before you is the person standing before you. It is I who lived here. “Mutti! Schmutzki’s sweet shop. They had a mongoloid son. He used to peck his head forward like a pigeon, with every step. Like this.”
“Oh, Ilka!” Ilka’s mother laughed.
“I used to practice walking like that.”
“Ilka!”
Remembering is a complicated act. The often-documented alteration of the size of the object because of the viewer’s altered size is its simplest aspect. There is, besides, the coincidence of the ghostly, transparent, unstable stuff memory is made of, with the hard-edged material object, which, as often as not, is, in fact, altered: “The Schmutzkis’ sweet shop selling shoes!” Ilka’s mother peered through the display window and said, “The counter is the same counter but they have it on the other side. The cash register is in the same place but this is a modern cash register.” And there is the degree of history the viewer shares with the view, whether it’s the fact, merely, of having passed, or of having been at home here, where his neighbor hated him to death.
Ilka said, “The Schmutzkis ‘put their heads in the gas oven,’ as the grown-ups put it.”
“Frau Schmutzki said to me, ‘What country is going to give us a visa, with the boy?’ Walter was his name. They put their heads in the gas oven, the father, mother, and the boy.”
“I used to lie in bed trying to picture them kneeling side by side. I’d fall asleep trying to imagine three heads into one oven.”
Ilka’s mother said, “The next time, I can see that one might rather put one’s head in the gas oven.”
“One might survive again,” said Ilka.
“One might survive all over again,” said her mother. “I can see how one might rather put one’s head in the gas oven. Here it is. Number eighty-one. The court has got shabby.”
The second problem I want to illustrate is the problem not of remembering, but of misremembering. In 1968 my husband, David, determined, rightly as it turned out, that I needed to face my Austrian past. I did not think I needed to do any such thing, since the past was not, I thought, giving me any sort of trouble. (It was on this trip, incidentally, that we visited the actual street fictionalized above.)
Our goal was my grandparents’ old house and haberdasher’s shop in the village of Fischamend. It was there that my father and mother and I had lived after the Nazis took away our Vienna flat—until the autumn, when the Nazis took away the Fischamend house as well, and turned it into party headquarters. The village was some ten minutes by rented car from the Vienna airport at Schwechat, not far from the Czech border.
* * *
—
Finally, I shall relate an event only recently told to friends, and never before written down.
My experiences are not the extreme Holocaust experiences. My father had put me on a transport that carried five hundred children out of Vienna and brought us to England on December 10, 1938. What I want to relate is the mildest sort of event; it turns out, also to be an indigestible one.
I cannot say whether the following occurred in the weeks just after or right before. In any event, there was something in the air—in the remembered air—compared with which the most monstrous horror in a horror movie seems a mere cuteness, except for the anxiety, the waiting for whatever it is that is about to happen. Memory tells me that it was warm, that I was wearing no coat, that it was toward evening. My father and I walked home through one of Vienna’s noble parks, with perfect lawns and great beds of massed roses. In an open area not far from our exit, by a magnificent wrought-iron gate, there were people feeding the pigeons. An old man was selling little packets of pigeon feed, and I said to my father, “I want some pigeon feed.” My father said, “Let’s go home.”
I said, “I want some pigeon feed.” I vividly remember looking down at the mass of moving pigeons. These pigeons have got into a novel of mine in an utterly different circumstance:
On the expanse of pavement milled a crowd of pigeons in a perpetual exchange of place, dipping anxious, greedy heads with each advance of each leg. Here and here, and over there, one or another raised and shook an agitated wing. Now one, now two, now all rose off the ground and settled a few yards to the right.
The pigeons revolved around my feet—I was walking in pigeons, saying, “I want some pigeon feed.”
When I turned around my father had one of those little packets in his hand, but he didn’t give it to me.
I said, “Give it to me!” and reached for it but he raised it out of my reach. I said, “Give it to me give it to me give it to me!” and pulled his sleeves. He raised his hands higher. I jumped and caught his wrists. I seem to remember depending on his two arms the way a child might hang swinging a moment from two branches of a tree, and I looked into his face and it wasn’t my father. It was a rather large young man with a fat, fair, round, smooth, bland face. He looked embarrassed and raised his feed packet higher in the air. And then I first became aware of my father’s voice calling me from a perfectly unexpected direction, saying, “Lore! Over here! Lore!,” and I ran and buried my face in the stuff of his suit and refused to talk about the matter for the next thirty years.
In what way is this a Holocaust memory? Nothing happened to me except an experience of that excruciating shame to which children and young people are unreasonably prone. The worst that can be said of the young man is that he lacked imagination: most of us, in such a situation, would say to the little girl, “Hold out your hand,” and give her a palmful of feed. Maybe he was too young to imagine children. He wore a business suit like my father’s—not a uniform. He had the face not of a sadistic monster, but of a silly young man. Why is he the Nazi of my memory?
A friend, a psychiatrist, theorizes a screen memory here. There was no young man, he says. It was really my father incapacitated and never again able to give me so much as pigeon feed. But memory insists on that young man. If I imagined him then, I cannot unimagine him now; nor can I not think of him as a Nazi. But, yes, it was my father. It was my father, who suddenly was not there. It was my father, as well as every comfortable, familiar, dependable, ordinary thing which, during that childish thirty-second mistake, had been switched on me.
* * *
—
Let me corral one of the problems I have wanted to demonstrate. Some pertain to writing, some to remembering, some to the Holocaust: Recollection is a double experience like a double exposure, the time frame in which we remember superimposes itself on the remembered time and the two images fail to match perfectly at any point.
The rememberer has changed, and so, in all probability, has the thing or the place remembered.
There is, to move to a different metaphor, a collision between two images—I mean the sort of collision you experience when a dream remnant overlaps into the waking mode. Memory is made of a different material from the material of the real.
I remember, as a child, standing at the corner of Josefhstädter Strasse and testing out the whole business of remembering—saying to myself, “I will always remember that person, there, the one who is just stepping up onto the sidewalk.” But, by the time I went to bed that same evening, I had forgotten to remember. And yet, fifty years later I remember performing that experiment with memory, and its proof! We cannot will ourselves a madeleine; nor can we rid ourselves of those memories which never cease their demands that we bear witness, that we write them into stories.
THE GARDNERS’ HABITATS
I knew John Gardner before he became John Gardner. In 1970, John Gardner was the name of one of the novelists my husband, David Segal, was going to publish.
David had left an unhappy partnership in his father’s yarn busines
s to go into publishing, the profession of his desire and his genius. He acquired Resurrection, the first of John Gardner’s books to be published, for Harper and Row. By the time it came out, David had been fired. John Gardner was one of the writers David took to Knopf with him. Grendel was published the summer after David’s death of a heart attack in the last days of December 1970.
* * *
—
On a day the following March, the doorbell of my Riverside Drive apartment rang and outside stood a beautiful man, still young, wearing an open-necked shirt. It is only in romances that widows open the door and outside stands a beautiful young man, except that this one was beautiful in a very original manner: he had the neat nose one might look for in a charming girl but was solidly built, had grubby nails and silver hair.
The beautiful, silver-haired young man said he was John Gardner and came inside. I don’t remember that he carried a suitcase. Maybe a carpet or canvas bag?
The beginning of every story is preceded by the things that happened before the story can begin. John told me the following: He was, at the time, professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Southern Illinois and had come to New York at his editor’s invitation. David Segal, they told him, was out to lunch. John sat down and waited. Publishing lunches are notoriously long lunches. John caught David as he stepped off the elevator, introduced himself, and supposed that David had forgotten their appointment. It is lucky when the person telling the story is a novelist: John knew how to convey David’s comic tone of ill usage. Why was he suspected of forgetting? What editor better loved his writers, better loved their books? John believed him. John appreciated the comedy of two edgy, ambitious young men, writer and editor, each of whom experienced their first meeting as revolving around his own person.
