Auschwitz and After, and: The Emigrants, and: Operation Shylock: A Confession, and: W, or the Memory of Childhood (review)

224Fourth Genre with the comment: "I can't imagine hating one's former spouse." His last section, "Reaching Tidewater," seems to break the mold of his reticence to deliver a moral, though he may be meeting the natural demands of a final chapter. But again, he teaches writers how to do it, with an enviable dexterity , as he juggles anecdote and generalization, always the master performer . Patrick Madden What these four books have in common is that they aU derive, to some degree, from the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. Whereas much of Holocaust literature deals directly with the experience of persecution, torture , and death, often taking the form offirst-person memoirs, these books come at their subject in genre-pushing ways and often deal with the Holocaust indirectly, but powerfuUy. Auschwitz and After, by Charlotte Delbo, translated by Rosette C. Lamont. Yale University Press (paperback), 1995. 354 pages, $18.95. The most directly tied to Nazis and concentration camps and terrible sufferings during World War II of the four books, Auschwitz and After is a memoir of Delbo's capture (as a non-Jewish member of the French Resistance), fife in Auschwitz, impossible friendships and unbelievable terrors , release, and return to life outside the camp. She varies her prose stylings by interspersing poems and prose poems, by breaking the chronology of events and by reflecting subtly on her experience, always resisting her writing as she writes. While telling of the death ofa feUow prisoner—"The dog leaps on the woman, sinks its fangs in her neck. And we do not stir, stuck in some kind of viscous substance which keeps us from making the slightest gesture"—she catches herself: "And now I am sitting in a café, writing this text." As I read the book, people kept asking me if I enjoyed it. The title was enough to pique their curiosity. Then I, in my miniscule way, experienced what Lawrence Langer wrote about in the book's introduction: the inability to express what one experiences. And I was only reading the narrative, which is nothing at aU compared to actuaUy living the horrors. But this may be the closest I can get, so I want to say that I can, along with Delbo, see how old categories cannot hold, how language itself is in a very real way Book Reviews225 insufficient. Anyway, I want to feel that, even if I don't want to have suffered . And I feel guilty for that, but thankful also. Thankful for my comfortable lot, thankful for Delbo's strength and beauty and ability to translate some part ofher experience into words for me to read and wonder at and learn from. So when people ask me if I am enjoying the reading, I teU them something like, "It's very powerful and very weU written."Because words fail me. And this is just me, some pampered coUege student whose parents gave him everything he needed and who has never experienced any measurable hardship firsthand. The Emigrants, by W G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hülse. New Directions (paperback), 1996. 237 pages, $10.95. The Emigrants teUs the story offourJews who were not imprisoned in the camps but who lost relatives and suffered greatly stfll. Each person—a painter, a teacher, a doctor, and the author's great uncle—has lived in exile from the time of the SecondWorldWar. Sebald retraces their movements as he recounts their experiences and the effects ofthe Holocaust on them. But he never writes angrfly nor very overtly about concentration camps or escapes or hatred. His prose is tempered and calm, but always underneath there is the unspeakable horror of the past that wfll never let the emigrants forget. How is The Emigrants not Uke creative nonfiction? There is not very much overt méditation on the author's part. I want to focus on his understatement , the fact that he never directly blames the Nazi persecution ofthe Jews for the tragedies he teUs, the fact that his writing is so controUed and fuU of description and observation that it would seem like a mistake to philosophize about the awfulness his subjects have endured. He teUs us somewhat...