The author’s grandmother in her younger years.Supplied
Eric Beck Rubin’s latest novel is Ten Clear Days.
I was, in an intellectual sense, as prepared as I could be for the end of my grandmother’s life – a life that began in the suburbs of Budapest, in 1935, and ended in Toronto, just over 80 years later.
In that time, she had lived through the piece-by-piece destruction of her world, first by fascists, then Nazis, then communists – the original incarnations of these still undefeated movements. She had seen her mother and father dispossessed of their belongings and their home – legally, at the time. She witnessed the sudden (equally legal) disappearance of her father, then the sudden and permanent disappearance of her aunts and uncles. When she returned to her small and mostly Jewish neighbourhood after the war, she found almost every other child she used to know was no longer there, leaving behind grieving parents.
In my doctoral research, I waged a small battle against yet more destruction and loss. I collected my grandmother’s memories as evidence. I tested them against arguments that witness testimony is the only authentic form of evidence, and counter-arguments that all memory falls into precast narratives, making it indistinguishable from storytelling.
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I applied these ideas to courses and seminars I taught on monuments and memorials, and to architectural competitions answering calls for parks and statues and museums meant to preserve the memory of exactly that history through which my grandmother lived. My role, as I saw it, was to draw attention to the fulcrum where we now stand, and from which we will soon fall – as the last generation to have grown up with witnesses to the most consequential history of the 20th century, the terrible crimes that gave birth to distinct categories for which, 70 years later, we still reach when we try to give words to right and wrong.
When my grandmother died in late August, 2018, it was not sudden or unexpected. My research, teaching, and the years that preceded it, the hours of listening to her that began when I was still a young child, too young to grasp the order or meaning of what she was telling me – all were directed toward this moment.
None of it, as it turned out, was the preparation I needed.
While alive, my grandmother represented to me the idea that a person can contain and disseminate a witness’s idiosyncratic, fragile and irreplaceable knowledge.Supplied
The “wit” in witness means “knowledge” and is connected to the word “witch”: a person from beyond who tells us things we don’t like to hear, and that we cannot accommodate to our understanding of things.
For years, I could not untangle some of the stories my grandmother told me. To take one example, her father negotiating face-to-face with Adolf Eichmann, for the sake of his sisters’ lives. How could a negotiation, as such, take place? How was he allowed to leave afterward?
On the other side, how was it her father had miraculously reappeared after a death march – so gaunt his own wife did not recognize him, but carrying an espresso machine and Pick salami in his hands?
I eventually learned the answer to the first – ransom payments were an efficient way for Nazis to extract money, always an initial consideration for them – but the second remains a mystery. One of many. For all I have read and seen and heard, my grandmother’s memories consistently wrong-footed me, opening doors I didn’t know existed, in rooms I thought I knew by heart. Their irrationality – or, to be more precise, their knowledge of things beyond reason – kept its grip on me.
Not that I was alone in this regard. Theodor Adorno decreed after the war that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”; 15 years later he made an exception for those who had lived through it. Nothing had changed in the culture he was describing. What changed was his understanding that witnesses possess a seemingly unimpeachable answer to most arguments, including his: “I was there.” That is an exercise not in logic or persuasion, but of authority – one of the few places it persists in modern culture. Even if that witness’s recollections are mistaken, even if they are influenced by preconceived ideas, we give that person special consideration. Rightly, and sometimes wrongly, a witness tells us things no one else can, and that no one else dares. And my grandmother was daring – only she regarded her daring as common sense.
To read the news, or walk down to Yonge and Bloor (or Bathurst and Sheppard) on some Sunday afternoons in Toronto, is to watch embryonic versions of the types that made my grandmother’s life so full of history. Once again they are transgressing society’s limits, seeing what Canadians will tolerate and against whom we’ll tolerate it. In a way I did not foresee, the world today resembles my grandmother’s much more than my parents’. She would be the ideal interlocutor. But to the many questions I would ask her – for example, when precisely did you no longer find yourself at home in the country where you were born? – I have no sense of what she would pick out of her thoughts and memories as a response.
I was trained, and trained myself, to believe the end of witnesses to history was equal to the loss and disappearance of that history; I now see it as a loss of certainty in the present and destruction of faith in the future.
Detail of La Ninfa by Italian sculptor Giovanni Battista Lombardi.IMAGE TREATMENT: THE GLOBE AND MAIL
I would like to live with this destabilization. Intellectually, even ethically, it seems appropriate to embrace uncertainty. But personally, psychologically, it leaves me only destabilized, down to my roots. And it puts my various, nearly lifelong projects of reconstructing the past into serious question. Mine and all of ours, from our oral histories and class trips to our public dedications and monuments.
The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, in an example of the kind of witch-knowledge that buries your name for 2,000 years and obliterates everything but fragments of what you wrote, said “One cannot step in the same river twice.” Typically, this is understood as an expression of humility, if not resignation: What’s past cannot be retrieved. When I read it now, though, his words seem less an observation and more an admonition: Why are you still trying?
How, today, can I argue with this ancient warning? The teaching I’ve done falls largely into a void. The scholarly articles – entirely. The memorial designs are visible as ultraviolet, and museum exhibitions have come and gone. I had thought of my work – really, my vocation – as an attempt to carry on the history and memory my grandmother had opened up to me; now I wonder if it is any different from the compulsive grasping for understanding derided by Heraclitus (and many others since)?
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Now when I think back to my grandmother’s stories, it is not as an adult armoured with so-called experience and education. It is as the child of eight or nine, listening for the first time, at about the same age my grandmother was when she experienced this history herself. Both of us too young to make any sense of the experience.
All the subsequent listening, recording, teaching, writing, remembering: They were, as I imagined, a battle, but now I see they were not against some notion of collective amnesia or falsification of history, but against helplessness of that first encounter.
While alive, my grandmother represented, among many other things to me, the idea that a person can contain and disseminate a witness’s idiosyncratic, fragile and irreplaceable knowledge. I believed this because she had done this herself, in her person. I thought I could take on some part of this. It took only a few years of her absence to show me that this was an illusion.