Nov
19
Fred Wander
Filed Under Fiction |
I’m reading a slim novel called The Seventh Well by Fred Wander, a holocaust survivor (due out this December from W. W. Norton). It was originally published in East Germany in 1970, and is only now translated into English - very elegantly - by Michael Hofmann. Wander seems to have been somewhat of a street urchin, having grown up on the streets after dropping out of high school. He left behind his mother and sister in Vienna and fled to France, on foot, where he was eventually put on a train to Auschwitz. Between 1939 and 1945, he was transported to and from twenty different concentration camps. (Fred Wander died recently, in 2006, in Vienna.)
It doesn’t seem appropriate to call The Seventh Well a ‘novel.’ Wander’s book is comprised of episodic pieces dedicated to remembering different inmates whom he knew, along with short, poetic essayistic prose pieces. Wander’s prose is spare and lucidly beautiful. Really, the only other works I thought of in comparison were Primo Levi’s Periodic Table and, strangely enough, The Coast of Chicago by Stu Dybek (because of the short prose poem-y interstices.)
Michael Hofmann, in his Afterword to the novel, writes about a French term which he finds strangely beautiful - “univers concentrationnaire” (coincidentally enough, in my post about late style, there’s a quote by Sebald in which he calls our world, even now, “le monde concentrationnaire.”) I think Hofmann might be right when he hypothesizes that Primo Levi might have been the person who coined the term. And like Levi, Hofmann evokes the bleak closed system of “the world of camps” in purely unsentimental terms. The inmates finally get to sleep in their bunkers made of boards after escaping another day, after having eaten their fill of rotting beet soup. They try to sleep -
When the three of us were pressed together under one blanket, a blanket stiff with filth, dried blood, and pus, Petrov and I and Tadeusz between us, we could hear a rushing murmur in our ears: a mechanism, a perpetuum mobile, that ran on nothing but life itself and was trying to prevent its own dissolution.
Yet the true beauty of The Seventh Well comes from Wander’s refusal to be trapped in le monde concentrationnaire; the novel, in a crucial way, charts the writer’s growth as an artist, even inside the camp world of solipsism and death. What punctures the insular walls of the camp are the vibrant debates and arguments that various inmates engage in. On Block 16 of Buchenwald, Wander remembers inmates feverishly arguing about the relations between Volkonsky, Rostov, and Trubetskoy in War and Peace, or about Cousin Pons or Colonel Chabert of Balzac. Rack their brains trying to remember a whole scene from Hamlet without any omission. An inmate named Antonio belts out “Addio amore” from Puccini’s Turandot in the middle of the night. Many inmates wake up, startled: listening, spellbound. “It was like poison,” Wander writes, “like a drug, it drove the blood into our hearts and choked us. A glimpse of paradise. The Jews on the mountain, in the valley below the promised land of Canaan.” In the morning after, as usual, death claims more inmates, including Antonio -
Death was all alone among a great number of men. Some lay there stiffly, eyes open, anonymous and despised, like deserters: deserters from a remarkable existence. Then I found Antonio, but he was no longer living. A little man, with dark skin and dark eyes, that even as they faded wore a wistful expression of regret, the last flinching of someone who had seen much that was beautiful. A Mediterranean type, with sores on his legs and a grotesquely swollen head on a neck like the stem of a flower.
(Image from Gerhard Richter’s “Atlas”)
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