Fugitive Pieces by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels might be the best book I’ve ever read in my life. I’ve had it for 25 years, but each time I pulled it from my shelf I lost the nerve to read it. it’s a book set during the Holocaust.
I first learned about the Holocaust in Mrs. Wilson’s 7th grade English class where we had to pick a topic and give a three minute speech about it to the class. Why I chose the Holocaust I have no idea, but I’ve never forgotten that first look into what it was. When I gave the speech, my little hands shaking so furiously I could hardly read my notecards, I was so overcome I threw up. To this day I don’t take a shower without thinking about the gas chambers. Each time I reached for Fugitive Pieces that memory returned. Last week I forced myself to take it down and read it.
I’ll never forget it.
Michaels is a poet and the language of the book is musical, rich and metaphorical. Her descriptions of feelings and events draw you into the deep emotions of what is going on. I cried throughout this book, not because of graphic death camp images—there are none—but because of her penetrating insight about how suffering is carried from one generation to the other through silence.
The book is narrated by Jakob Beer at the age of 60 in 1992. It opens with 7-year old Jakob witnessing the slaughter of his parents and abduction of his sister by Nazis. He is only saved because he was playing a game whereby he was concealed behind a wall.
After hiding in the forest, digging holes and covering himself with leaves so as not to be discovered, he is found by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist and polymath. Together they flee to the Greek island of Zakynthos, and hole up in his study, hiding from the Nazi occupation as the Greek Jewish community is slaughtered. They have very little food and never leave the confines of Athos’ study.
Michaels vividly describes their hunger in two sentences:
We craved citrus. Athos carefully sliced a lemon in half and we sucked out the sourness down to the skin, ate the skin, then smelled our hands.
Athos does his best to raise Jakob, reading him stories of the discovery of the North Pole, and introducing him to the many books in his library, where they have sequestered themselves. Athos introduces Jakob to language and to beauty. Jakob, at 60, recalls this:
Important lessons: look carefully, record what you see. Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.
But Jakob is undone by his memories and his nightmares. From the distance of fifty years he has this to say:
Grief requires time. If a chip of stone radiates itself, its breath, so long, how stubborn might be the soul. If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are the screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy, moving forever toward the psalms.
Athos has created an environment in the cloister of his library, where Jakob learns to love language and begins to write poetry, trying to find meaning in his life through language. At the end of the war they move to Toronto, and Jakob remains disoriented and unmoored, looking for answers he cannot find.
Athos and Jakob differ in their attempts to make sense of their experience, or at least to order it. Jakob says this of the differences:
Athos could speak about it, he needed to speak of it, but I couldn’t. He asked endless questions to order his thoughts, leaving “why” to the last. But in my thinking, I started with the last question, the “why” he hoped would be answered by all the others. Therefore I began with failure and had nowhere to go.
Then concludes:
The search for facts, for places, names, influential events, important conversations and correspondences, political circumstance—all this amounts to nothing if you can’t find the assumption your subject lives by.
He cannot find the assumption the Nazis lived by, except that they modified language so that human cruelty was altered to mean just cleaning things up:
Nazi policy was beyond racism, it was anti-matter, for Jews were not considered human. An old trick of language, used often in the course of history. Non-Aryans were never to be referred to as humans, but as “figuren,” “stucke”—“dolls,” wood,” “merchandise,” “rags.” Human beings weren’t being gassed, only “figuren,” so ethics weren’t being violated. No one could be faulted for burning debris, for burning rags and clutter in the dirty basement of society.
Then he remembers a detail that seems to hold so much of what his parents knew, but never said:
In the back of my mother’s closet was a small suitcase, the contents of which my mother revised as I grew. This small suitcase, which I feared as a child, now represents to me the enormity of their self-control.
What writing! Michaels packs the agony of the parents and the persistent tension in the house in that one small detail. Her writing is so tight you have to read the book slowly.
Eventually Jakob takes a professorship at a college and after many years meets a woman and falls in love. Early in their relationship, he takes her to a restaurant and he recounts the scene:
In Michaela’s favorite restaurant, I lift my glass and cutlery spills onto the expensive tiled floor. The sound crashes high as the skylight. Looking at me, Michaela pushes her own silverware over the edge.
Who wouldn’t fall in love with her? That tiny incident tells us so much about the woman who becomes his beloved.
The last third of the book is narrated by Ben, a younger man, the son of Holocaust survivors. He lived in a house freighted with silence and unspoken sorrow, a sorrow he didn’t personally experience, but that he carries with the same bent back as his parents. It affects his life and eventually poisons his relationship with his wife. Profoundly influenced by Jakob’s poetry, he leaves his wife to go to Greece after Jakob’s death to try to find Jakob’s notebook’s. While there, he finds what he is looking for, but more importantly, finds his own personal sorrow about destroying his marriage, a sorrow that is his own, rather than one passed down from generations. He says:
In my hotel room the night before I leave Greece, I know the elation of ordinary sorrow. At last my unhappiness is my own.
Ann Michaels spares no cranny when she looks into the effects of memory, of violence, of unresolved pain, of something that has no explanation. She explains nothing. She just shines a light on what was left behind (and what in fact is not left behind but is right here with us) and illuminates it with language. As she writes, every moment is two moments—the past and the present, fugitive pieces.
Her writing is both beautiful and brave. I was moved and changed by reading this book. I’m sorry it took me twenty five years to get around to it.
You can buy or order Fugitive Pieces at your local bookstore. If you don’t have a local bookstore, you can order it online at Bookshop or Barnes and Noble.
About Susan Edsall
Writing is how I make my way through the thicket of what we’ve made of this planet we’re on. It takes me a long time and lots of words. Social media mystifies me. How do so many people have so much to say, so quickly, and with such resolute certainty? Read more about Susan >
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