In This Dark House: A Memoir (review)

Book Reviews 167 In This Dark House: A Memoir, by Louise Kehoe. New York: Schocken Books, 1995. 232 pp. $22.00. This is a beautifully crafted memoir by a dutiful daughter, centering on the life of her father, a pathological tyrant, who abused his family both physically and psychologically, while keeping his Jewish identity a secret from his children. In 1939, at the height of his career as an avant garde architect, Berthold Lubetkin, supposedly of Russian aristocratic lineage, took his family and left London for Upper Killington, a remote village in the Cotswold countryside. There in isolation from even the people of the village, he and his wife Margaret Church-a lovely upper-class young English woman-became farmers and raised a family of three children at a cottage appropriately called "World's End." Born four years after the Second World War, Louise was the youngest of the three. Her brother Steven was a few years older, and her sister Sasha was older still. The household centered on the alternating moods, petty whims, rages, exquisitely dispensed brutality, and indiscriminately distributed affection of the tyrant.father. He would keep notebooks on each child, recording their childish peccadillos: "Three apples on kitchen table at breakfast; only two left at lunchtime. I questioned Steven, who repeatedly denied taking apple, but was obviously lying because he blushed ... Louise's bed unmade despite two reminders ... Sasha stole piece of fudge from the kitchen" (p. 52). The punishments for such "crimes" were often physical, but the worst of it was the soul-crushing psychological abuse. The children were made to feel guilty and worthless for acts of childish confusion, exuberance, and even unsanctioned kindness. As is often the case in such families, Margaret, the mother, doted on her husband, seeing him, and not her children, as the true victim of circumstance who needed her constant solicitude. "One day he'll explain everything to you. Then you'll understand" (p. 54). Only Sigmund Freud or Charles Dickens would have understood. The children were not only terrified of him, they were also mystified by him. They were certain that Lubetkin was not his true name, and that he was not what he appeared to be. Later when they became older and tried to get a perspective on their lives, they concluded that his cruelty and bizarre behavior must have been connected in some way to his secret life, his hidden past. it became Louise's obsession, when she became an adult, to uncover that past in order to reveal her father's true self, and thereby master the demons that haunted her own childhood. 168 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 About halfway into the memoir the story becomes an intriguing mystery as Louise like a detective tries to trace her father's past. Much to her surprise-because she was brought up in a non-religious, indeed, antireligious , household-she discovers after his death that her father was a Russian Jew whose family of origin perished in the Holocaust. From this she concludes that much of her father's inexplicable behavior can be traced to the guilt he felt over having abandoned his own parents. In a seeming act of reconciliation she then officially converts to Judaism and goes on with her life. The book is fascinating and reads like a novel, but its conclusion is psychologically unconvincing. There is no logical or psychological connection between having lost one's parents in the Holocaust and having to deny one's Jewishness, on the one hand, and becoming a tyrant to one's children, on the other. To the contrary, some survivors with similar pasts became strong Jews and doting parents. Neither does Louise's becoming a Jew seem like reconciliation with her monstrous father. It seems like something much better and healthier: her becoming a Jew is a denial of his whole life including his self-hatred and cruelty. like many writers ofmemoirs, Louise presides over a just retribution for a cruel past. Robert Melson Department of Political Science Purdue University Figures of Conversion: "The Jewish Question" and English National Identity, by Michael Ragussis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. 340 pp. $49.95 (c...