Dancing on the Edge of the Abyss

In The Warsaw Anagrams, his eighth published novel, Richard Zimler has reached the very heart of his essential theme: the Holocaust itself. It is as if, in his previous books, dealing with the persecutions of Jews and of non-Jews—whether people in colonial India (Guardian of the Dawn), enslaved Africans in the United States (Hunting Midnight), Germans (The Seventh Gate), or Palestinians (The Search for Sana)—he had been approaching, in ever-narrowing circles, this extraordinarily painful moment.

Zimler, who was over forty when his first novel was published and is now only in his fifties, has a considerable body of work behind him, most notably the four novels in his Sephardic Cycle featuring members of the Zarco family. The four are set in different historical periods, cities, and countries. The first, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon (1998), tackles the massacre of 2,000 Jews in Lisbon in 1506. Its clearest purpose is to bring home to today’s Portuguese an obscured part of their history (Zimler has lived in Oporto since 1990). In Spain and Portugal, there is little understanding of the expulsion of the Jews, which ran from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. This of course did not mean polite escort onto boats into exile, but rape, murder, theft of property, and not just the cultural and social destruction of the expelled Jews (and Moors), but also the weakening of the supposedly pure Christian society left behind.

Novels of Anger and Calm

“As a writer, I want to make people look at things they don’t want to,” Zimler frequently comments. Unlike many historical novels, his are not escapist. Rather, by obliging readers to see the past, they illuminate the sources of injustice today. And he writes with ferocious anger: the scenes of violence are horrific—a headless baby on a shovel. These scenes are not sanitized as, say, in a typical war movie. When people are brutalized or murdered in Zimler’s books, their suffering comes through.

Righteous anger, however, does not make a good writer. And Zimler is good: he controls his material. He writes in calm, clear prose adorned by the occasional glistening image like a jewel in a fast-flowing stream. His novels are not descriptions of a series of brutal events (The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon is something of an exception) that either numb readers or weary them with their gruesome repetitiveness. Rather, violence is more select: it roars suddenly into normal day-to-day tasks. One moment of racist or sexual violence changes everything forever. These moments hit as suddenly as the axe that severs a character’s arm in one of his lesser-known novels The Search for Sana, a bold investigation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Another of Zimler’s qualities as a writer—and this too helps him channel his rage at injustice—is that he is not at all Manichean. He does not believe that all Jews were good and all Christians bad. He explains the historical and social background; the evil friars of Last Kabbalist are not only evil by nature, but act evilly in a world in which the monarch, the Church, and rising social classes in conflict combine to scapegoat the Jews. This perception spills over into a broader, more general criticism of racial and sexual oppression, which means that Last Kabbalist’s portrayal of the close connection between war and sexual atrocity can reflect events like the Bosnian war, which took place as Zimler wrote the book. His is not historical writing that tells stories about a closed past: Zimler’s past is still open, an uncured wound, and lives on in the present.

The preceding paragraph may make Zimler appear something of a materialist historian or a didactic essayist. For sure his books are very well researched, but he is above all a novelist in the sense of exploring people’s behaviors and feelings. The research, the thorough historical and social background, serves to highlight the particular world in which his main characters struggle...