THE TRAIN TO WARSAW
Gwen Edelman
Grove Press
195 pages; $24
In September 1939, more than 350,000 Jews lived in Warsaw. Six years later, only 11,500 were left. Most of Warsaw itself had been wiped from the face of the earth.
But not from memory, especially for those who were young at that heightened moment, when the colours of the world tend to be their most saturated and intense. The irretrievability of youth and the desire to return to the past bedevil us all, but what happens when that lost Eden is intricately tied to staggering loss? What is the particular anguish of longing for a time just before, or even during, atrocity?
These are some of the questions that drive Gwen Edelman's riveting, dreamlike second novel, The Train to Warsaw, which is compressed into a two-day period and centres on Lilka and Jascha, two survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. The novel opens with the couple en route from London to Poland, their first time back in the 40 years since they left. Jascha, now a famous writer in his 60s, has been invited to give a reading at the Writers' House in Warsaw, but it is Lilka, consumed with the vision of walking once again through the "Saxony Gardens", of eating "cabbage and pierogi, latkes and goose liver", who has insisted on this trip. They sit together in the freezing train compartment, smoking cigarettes, eating the chocolates she keeps in her purse, and disagreeing about the snow-covered landscape speeding by outside the window, which for him holds "nothing human in it" but for her is beautiful, "the whole world white and unbroken".
Theirs is an erotically charged relationship, composed in equal parts of exasperation, grief and unyielding love. They first met in the early days of the Warsaw ghetto, when Lilka was a 16-year-old nurse-in-training from an upper-middle-class Jewish family and Jascha one of the ghetto's top smugglers. Both seem partly frozen in their youthful poses, she still very much the wishful girl, an "angel" in the "midst of all that filth", and he the cold-eyed realist who can't help challenging her reflexive softening of the truth. "You were a man of the world," she tells him now. "Of a small enclosed world," he responds, "where everyone was about to die."
Edelman, whose previous novel, War Story, also dealt with reverberations of the Holocaust, brings us exhilaratingly close to the interior experiences of this couple, who are walled in by what has happened to them. She uses the spaces they occupy in the novel - a train compartment, a hotel room, a steamy bathroom - to underline their enclosed world. She also forgoes quotation marks, indentations and line breaks with dialogue, allowing the words and memories of her characters to roll into one another like a kind of psychic enjambment: "He put out a hand to her. That's enough for now, darling. No, she said fiercely and pushed his hand away. Don't give me your hand. He shook his head. Why are we fighting? It was so long ago. Lilka spread a roll with black jam. Not to me, she said. It's as near to me as last week."
Lilka's yearning for her childhood home, and her haunted sense of a shadow universe of long-gone people and places existing right beside her, gather urgency in the novel's final third when the couple, who have stayed inside their hotel room all day, finally set forth into the snow-shrouded streets of Warsaw. The exposure is, of course, brutal. Neither has fully anticipated how naked they would feel wandering these streets - or what, after 40 years, they would finally reveal to each other. They are, we realise, a kind of Adam and Eve, and it is no coincidence that late at night, in the cold, they find themselves in a frozen garden. With quiet but devastating force, Edelman plays the experience of being closed in - to trauma, to the past, to a ghetto - against the experience of being forever cast out.
Gwen Edelman
Grove Press
195 pages; $24
In September 1939, more than 350,000 Jews lived in Warsaw. Six years later, only 11,500 were left. Most of Warsaw itself had been wiped from the face of the earth.
But not from memory, especially for those who were young at that heightened moment, when the colours of the world tend to be their most saturated and intense. The irretrievability of youth and the desire to return to the past bedevil us all, but what happens when that lost Eden is intricately tied to staggering loss? What is the particular anguish of longing for a time just before, or even during, atrocity?
These are some of the questions that drive Gwen Edelman's riveting, dreamlike second novel, The Train to Warsaw, which is compressed into a two-day period and centres on Lilka and Jascha, two survivors of the Warsaw ghetto. The novel opens with the couple en route from London to Poland, their first time back in the 40 years since they left. Jascha, now a famous writer in his 60s, has been invited to give a reading at the Writers' House in Warsaw, but it is Lilka, consumed with the vision of walking once again through the "Saxony Gardens", of eating "cabbage and pierogi, latkes and goose liver", who has insisted on this trip. They sit together in the freezing train compartment, smoking cigarettes, eating the chocolates she keeps in her purse, and disagreeing about the snow-covered landscape speeding by outside the window, which for him holds "nothing human in it" but for her is beautiful, "the whole world white and unbroken".
Theirs is an erotically charged relationship, composed in equal parts of exasperation, grief and unyielding love. They first met in the early days of the Warsaw ghetto, when Lilka was a 16-year-old nurse-in-training from an upper-middle-class Jewish family and Jascha one of the ghetto's top smugglers. Both seem partly frozen in their youthful poses, she still very much the wishful girl, an "angel" in the "midst of all that filth", and he the cold-eyed realist who can't help challenging her reflexive softening of the truth. "You were a man of the world," she tells him now. "Of a small enclosed world," he responds, "where everyone was about to die."
Edelman, whose previous novel, War Story, also dealt with reverberations of the Holocaust, brings us exhilaratingly close to the interior experiences of this couple, who are walled in by what has happened to them. She uses the spaces they occupy in the novel - a train compartment, a hotel room, a steamy bathroom - to underline their enclosed world. She also forgoes quotation marks, indentations and line breaks with dialogue, allowing the words and memories of her characters to roll into one another like a kind of psychic enjambment: "He put out a hand to her. That's enough for now, darling. No, she said fiercely and pushed his hand away. Don't give me your hand. He shook his head. Why are we fighting? It was so long ago. Lilka spread a roll with black jam. Not to me, she said. It's as near to me as last week."
Lilka's yearning for her childhood home, and her haunted sense of a shadow universe of long-gone people and places existing right beside her, gather urgency in the novel's final third when the couple, who have stayed inside their hotel room all day, finally set forth into the snow-shrouded streets of Warsaw. The exposure is, of course, brutal. Neither has fully anticipated how naked they would feel wandering these streets - or what, after 40 years, they would finally reveal to each other. They are, we realise, a kind of Adam and Eve, and it is no coincidence that late at night, in the cold, they find themselves in a frozen garden. With quiet but devastating force, Edelman plays the experience of being closed in - to trauma, to the past, to a ghetto - against the experience of being forever cast out.
© 2014 The New York Times News Service