See Under: Love:
Marget, Madeline
THE BEAST WHO WANTED A JEW SEE UNDER: LOVE David Grossman Translated by Betsy Rosenberg Farrar, Straus Giroux, $22.95, 452 pp. Madeline Margel See Under: Love is an intricate telling of the...
...The book is divided into four sections, each using a different literary method...
...Grossman describes the concentration camp only in succinct asides, thus making Wasserman's cataclysmically dreadful existence seem rounded...
...The first section ends when Momik's family discovers his project...
...Wasserman steps forward as a real person who invents and feels, recollects and plans, bringing himself and all the other characters- including those he invents in Children of the Heart-to life through their relation to him, in and with whom we believe and empathize...
...He turns "the Nazi Beast" from "Over There" into actual animals that he cages in his cellar...
...The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik's Life" is the last part of See Under: Love, and it is this highly experimental section that provides us the greatest and clearest understanding...
...Grossman's technique and his plot are unified...
...He draws pictures, he tapes stories to the wall, but nothing appeases the kitten and the bird and the hedgehog...
...Stories within stories show the Holocaust's impact, not only on the characters in the novel or even on the millions who were actually afflicted, but also, and with new force, on the reader...
...EDITORIALS JOHN C. CORT spent several years in the Philippines with the Peace Corps and was a friend of Ninoy Aquino...
...Though this section is packed with insights and detail that later in the book retrospectively enlighten us, I found its density overwhelming and sometimes confusing...
...It is also a meditation, ultimately optimistic, on those subjects...
...In "Wasserman," the third section, Grossman moves away from this strained, consciously literary quality and concentrates on the writer Momik's recreation of Anshel Wasserman's life in the concentration camp...
...By arranging the narrative into dictionary or encyclopedia entries, Grossman simplifies his delivery without sacrificing the breadth of his view...
...He is the author of Christian Socialism...
...The stories of the previous sections are pieced together and completed, and the structure both points to connections and reveals them...
...Madeline Margel See Under: Love is an intricate telling of the worst in human nature and experience...
...MADELINE MARGET is a writer, now working on a book about the humane delivery of high-tech medical care...
...The adults confer and Momik is sent away to school...
...He hears it spoken of metaphorically, and sees its manifestations in the adult concentration camp survivors around him: in his parents' protectiveness and suspicious-ness, in his neighbor Hannah Zeitlin's desperate and mad prostitution and, most importantly, in the wreckage of his Great-uncle Anshel Wasserman...
...Instead, he enters into a fantastic tale about the writer Bruno Schultz, here escaping history by diving into the sea and surviving as part of a school of salmon...
...The adult Momik's dialectic with the other characters, his role as the writer of what we 're reading, and his personal story are woven into the remaining three sections of the novel...
...Hannah Zeitlin reappears as a beautiful and desirable woman...
...Before the war Wasserman, using the pen name Scheherazade, wrote a series of stories called Children of the Heart...
...Now, muttering and helpless, he lives as an example of torment...
...but the circumstances of all the characters are too serious, dangerous, and immediate to allow us distance for long...
...PEGGY R. ELLSBERG teaches in the English Department at Vassar College...
...Neigel is apparently "distinctly envious of the Jew...for having such confidence in another human being...
...And, "In Wasserman's view, the act of choice is the fulfillment of the truly human in man...
...Everyone close to Momik is broken-hearted and terrified...
...LANCE COMPA is Washington counsel for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE...
...David Grossman is a difficult writer, and he does not spare us the weight of his oppressive subject...
...Her "Madeline and Ernie" appeared in the September 23, 1988 issue of Commonweal...
...Wasserman's last invention is Kazik-a baby born to other characters in Children of the Heart-who lives his whole life, from infancy to death of old age, in twenty-four hours...
...Along with the horror he presents, however, he shares with us his great effort to address it...
...In The Yellow Wind (reviewed in Commonweal, May 20, 1988), Grossman's journalistic account of life on the West Bank, the bleak picture of humanity he gives us is contradicted by the.constant example of the writer's intellectual liveliness and his generosity...
...Momik knows the Beast wants a Jew...
...And so he brings Great-uncle Anshel-unquestionably a "Jude" whom the Beast can smell and see-to the cellar to satisfy the monster, who will then leave Momik and his family alone...
...So it is in See Under: Love, where Grossman transcends the horror of his story with the evidence- shown through the astonishingly varied but intellectually and philosophically consistent voice of his fiction-of human potential and its realization...
...Momik recalls that at his wedding his aunt "covered her number with a Band-Aid because she didn't want to cast a pall on the happy occasion...
...Neigel sends the stories under his own name to his estranged wife Christina, hoping to win her back with a show of the decency she knows him to have abandoned...
...There, the commandant Neigel exacts from Anshel further tales of Children of the Heart, promising in exchange to kill the storyteller-a reverse Scheherazade-who wants his terrible life ended...
...The story, first set in the 1950s, starts as a straightforward, though complicated, narrative of Momik Neuman, an Israeli nine-year-old for whom the Holocaust is a mysterious and constant terror...
...With precision and understanding, Grossman shows us the reality of this environment for a little boy, and its result: Momik, sensitive and isolated, constructs a fantasy in which he can change fate...
...They squeal in misery...
...Preoccupied with his unhappy and unsuccessful marriage, fatherhood, and affair, hecannotbringaliveAnshelWasserman's story, as he wishes to do...
...The entry titled "Sex" is cross-referenced, and reads, in part, "see under: Love...
...First, in "Bruno," Momik, now a writer, travels to Poland to discover and explicate his family's past...
...almost as present to us as it would be to him...
...But as he listens to Anshel and talks to him, Neigel finds some common humanity, and he cannot kill Wasserman...
...For a few sentences Grossman, showing us ordinary parental worry and a practical solution, pulls us outside this Everychild's grief...
Vol. 116 • September 1989 • No. 15
