Calvinism and the Holocaust

...his looks, moreover, are "ageless," and he calls himself "a Jew alone among goyim" who asks for neither love nor hate but merely a "safe-conduct...

...if my life has a meaning, my mother's death in a gas chamber at Auschwitz must also be meaningful...

...And it becomes clear that it is the task itself, the very process of writing, that holds the novel and its narrator together, for the action is as haphazard and confused as his life...

...I might as well go on being myself...

...He wants resolution since he is, after all, a journalist, concerned with facts and matters of craft...

...All these experiences somehow induce him to begin his book, "to embark on a certain arrangement of signs with the help of which I hope to chart my position...

...These words might equally apply to The Divine Comedy, Lolita or, for that matter, any number of tales by the Brothers Grimm...

...There is nothing but a vast confusion...

...This essentially Calvinist idea is at the core of the book and, not surprisingly, Efraim is the bloodless sort of Jew only a Christian could envision: a symbol of rootlessness, the Wandering Jew...

...The novel opens in 1962...

...This gloomy view was engendered by the Holocaust...

...Although the identification is never explicit, Efraim repeatedly states his interest in that mythic figure of Christian Europe...

...Awarded the Deutscher Kritiker-Preiss in 1958, and the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1968, he is also one of the founders of "Group 47," that remarkable company of West German writers which has met annually since 1947, and includes such names as Heinrich Boll, Giinter Grass, Uwe Johnson, and Jakov Lind...

...but the problem of this combination of words no longer interests me...

...it's obsolete...

...Everything is always possible...

...But Efraim, a self-acknowledged puritan, is not pleased with this "orgy of subjectivity...

...With the outbreak of the War, he enlisted in the British Army and saw action on the Italian front, changing both his citizenship and his name (from the Germanic Georg to the softer George...

...A weak conclusion to be sure, yet it is the best he can arrive at, given his insistence on facts...

...Reviewed by Peter Glassgold Editor, New Directions In spite of two novels and a collection of short stories brought out here over the past 12 years, the German writer Alfred Andersch ha...

...like "an indestructible ornament," Efraim matter-of-factly observes, "work runs through chaos...

...An author of Andersch's stature deserves better treatment than this...

...It therefore seems less than fair to him that nowhere in the front matter or jacket copy of Efraim's Book has his current publisher seen fit to list his previous titles...

...Some 300 pages and two years later, Efrai--now living in Rome, a journalist no longer--comes to the end of his task...

...In both these novels the pace is slow, the action secondary, the narrative subordinate to internal monologue...

...And because Efraim's Book is a difficult work--meandering, philosophical, strangely unresolved--this helpful epigraph is grossly emblazoned across the dustjacket spine: "A novel about a man's search for a young girl, for truth, and for himself...

...Like his contemporaries, Andersch is in large part a political writer, particularizing recent history in his fiction, searching for explanations in the bewildered lives directly affected by the great events of our times...

...Things happen or do not happen, men come and go, do this or that, after which something happens or does not happen...

...He can discover nothing of importance, but in the course of his stay visits his childhood home, develops an overblown passion for a young actress from East Berlin, and precipitates a fight at a party over the callous slang usage of the word "gassed...

...The same is true of Efraim's Book...

...As for me, I refuse to believe in the meaning of Zyklon B." Wandering Jew, Everyman, call him what you will--Andersch has posited the 20th-century pilgrim, whose labyrinthine path leads nowhere...

...Thus his broodings on the Holocaust, even when violent, assume a philosophical detachment, at times a semantic cast ("Jews . . . German Jews, Jewish Germans, Germans...

...There are no laws and there is no freedom...

...Such speculations wind their way through this dense novel, thick with self-conscious digressions, hesitancies and backtracking...

...And so, starting from an initial proposition that "it makes no difference where one lives, what one does, who one is," Efraim finally sums up: "If it makes no difference who I am...

...Once more, then, we arrive at the book itself as Efraim's salvation, the means by which this Anglicized German Jew who is neither German nor Jew nor Englishman may acquire an identity he can accept and comprehend...

...Flight to Afar, for example, is about five Germans--two disaffected Communist party members, a Calvinist pastor, a Jewish woman, and a fisherman's apprentice looking for excitement--in-volved in a sea escape from Schles-wifi-Holstein in 1938...

...Efraim's Book ends because Efraim himself simply has no more to write...

...The Redhead tells of a young woman on the lam from her husband and lover in postwar Europe, and her inadvertent entanglement in the affairs of a neo-Nazi, underground organiza-tian...

...Later Efraim was transferred to a radio propaganda unit and, learning of his parents' death by gas in Auschwitz, he decided to follow his chief, Keir Horne, into newspaper work after the armistice rather than return to Germany...

...Instead, we are told that "The publication of this novel . . . presents an extraordinary literary figure to readers in the United States"--as if Flight to Afar (1958), The Redhead (1961) and The Night of the Giraffe (1964) were not available in any well-stocked public library...

...A German Jew by birth, a native Berliner, Efraim was an adolescent in 1935 when his parents sent him to a wealthy uncle in England...

...although its "plot" turns upon a journalist's search in West Berlin for traces of a young Jewish girl who disappeared before the War, it in fact becomes a long, often painful discourse on hopelessness: "As for me," the narrator, George Efraim declares, "I believe neither in fate nor in reason...

...Efraim is back in Berlin after a 27-year absence, dispatched there to look for clues of Home's illegitimate daughter, Esther Bloch, whom he knew before the War...

...Settling in London, he married a young photographer only to find that Horne, still his boss, had been and remained her lover...

...he remains a metaphor of unregenerative man with no hope whatever of salvation...

...In short, in work lies salvation...

...He then left her and went on to become his paper's major foreign correspondent...

...His dilemma requires a theological solution, but this he rejects out of hand...

...Auschwitz becomes the embodiment of chaos, explainable only by God's nonexistence or--here again, a cardinal Calvinist notion--by His removed indifference to the affairs of man...

...achieved little recognition in this country...