A Desire to Belong
KIRSHENBAUM, BINNIE
A Desire to Belong What Remains By Nicholas Delbanco Warner. 200 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Binnie Kirshenbaum Author, "Pure Poetry"; adjunct professor of fiction writing, Graduate School...
...Instead, he is a Sunday painter, salvaging pleasure in doing self-portraits on weekends spent in his studio...
...She has a grand logic all her own too: If that art school had not rejected the young Adolf Hitler, nothing would have happened...
...And make no mistake about it, this is a sorrowful novel...
...Not in this house.'" No Yiddish is spoken, no synagogue attended, and they celebrate Christmas replete with a tannenbaum and Christmas goose...
...Not the whole ring, only a piece of it—the head of Minerva in gold...
...They have not let go of their Goethe or their Heine or their chamber concerts or their language...
...I miss it very much.' "And then she gives him chocolate, and they sit and rock...
...Ratherriches to solidly upper middle class, which is a small price to pay for life and limb, for freedom from fear, for a chance to belong...
...Her pragmatism results in Julia's determination to move to America, to raise her boys in a place she believes will be more congenial than England to refugees...
...Even when momentarily overwhelmed with sadness while telling her grandson Ben of Germany, of the paradox of a nation that produced the music of Bach and Beethoven and Schubert yet also made Hitler (whom she often refers to as Schicklgruber), Granny averts her face from the boy...
...But, no...
...She wants her sons to go to Harvard, and so this branch of the family—Karl, Julia, Jacob, and Benjamin—leaves England and finds further refuge in Westchester County, where a third son is born...
...Questions remain about Jacob Steiner as well, about why he rejected Julia's offer of love and what part of him feared the Nazis most...
...It is all the fault of the art school...
...memory from which story is fashioned...
...They are rich German Jews who were among the fortunate in so far as they were able to get out of Nazi Germany largely intact, and with more than the shirts on their backs...
...When one of their friends, Dr...
...No, they can never go back...
...Enormous, but not so much that we don't take her seriously...
...Rather, it is the grace of language and of ideas that creates the gravitational pull which draws in the reader and swells the heart...
...In a tender detail of their safety, the father of the family's two small boys has painted a donkey, an elephant and Rafi the giraffe on the ceiling and walls of the garage that serves as their air-raid shelter...
...Again, life is more than fair to them...
...adjunct professor of fiction writing, Graduate School of the Arts, Columbia Nicholas Delbanco's 13th novel is a breathtakingly beautiful slim volume...
...This splendid family accepts what fate has dished out for them with all the courtesies, the stoicism, the strength, the dated elegance they value...
...Still, the matter of what remains continues to reverberate and unfold...
...Only this time, it is Jacob who finds the piece of gold and Ben who must face a small, but painful, truth...
...Ben returns to England with the idea of possibly taking it over, since Gustave would like his life's work to remain in the family...
...Lucas accuses, anti-Semitism as much as perhaps an elitism and a desire to belong...
...But no one in this family laments or gripes or indulges in a cheap nostalgia...
...Since this family—so warm, so loving, so morally and intellectually superior— had the prescience to see what was coming and the ability to save themselves, where is the sorrow...
...It was a solid marriage, a successful marriage, stable and obviously one of mutual respect, but was it a happy marriage...
...She infuses them with a love of nature, and hownot to merely look but to see...
...It is she who runs the show, and who is always prepared to flee if need be...
...After she at last married Karl and settled down, she gave her first son Jacob's name so as not to forget—to always be reminded of her initial romantic adventure, her daring intransigent wide-eyed youth that day...
...The American Dream come true, albeit not exactly the Horatio Algerrags-to-riches version...
...But don't be misled by its size...
...The scope of What Remains is epic, spanning generations and continents...
...The title points to the answer: It is in the ache of what is lost and of what remains behind that the author evokes in each of his wonderful characters...
...Hitler is gone...
...Elsa may be the one who most longs for Germany, and technically she is the matriarch, but it is Julia who is the clear-eyed pragmatist...
...It won't work out...
...Their English is liberally peppered with German, and their few friends outside the family are German refugees...
...She teaches her grandsons the need for lovely manners...
...Perhaps Julia's love for Jacob was not eternal, but something of it was...
...Nicholas Delbanco opens his story with an epigram, a line from Ezra Pound: What thou lovest well remains, the rest is dross What remains is this virtuous novel, written with love...
...This is not, as Dr...
...Elsa, however, knows better: '"And when a whole country is evil like that it's madness to think of returning...
...in the knowledge that their lives will never be the same, innocence lost cannot be found...
...Ben cannot stay in England, and we are left to believe that the gallery will soon be no more...
...The sentiment is sweetly mirrored in a scene where Karl's wife Julia loses a ring...
...But, as Ben knows, it is 1946...
...In the very end what remains is our ashes, the dust of us...
...Her sons set about looking for it, with the promise of a pound to the one who finds it...
...In another paradox, it is their Germanness that keeps them from their Jewishness...
...They live in a nice house, Karl's business is successful, Jacob and Benjamin do indeed go off to Harvard, as it seems the youngest brother will too...
...wishes the family a good yontiff, he is reprimanded: '"We don't speak Yiddish here,' says Julia...
...The War is over...
...Elsa, the mother of Karl and Gustave, the grandmother of Jacob and Ben, is almost eccentric...
...in the opaque patina of grief that transforms this family...
...Yes, bombs certainly did fall and they did experience the irony of being unwanted, not for being Jewish but for being German in wartime England...
...Lucas (always with the German formality of Dr...
...There is more than a passing nod to keeping the German way of life alive in exile...
...Not ever' "'Do you miss it?' "'Yes,' she says...
...To be a responsible family man, Karl gave up his dream of being an artist...
...But they are German...
...She dresses always in head-to-toe black or head-to-toe gray (the best backdrops for her silver jewelry—gold being vulgar...
...Yet all in all they lived a comfortable life...
...Dust and memory...
...And questions remain about Karl and Julia's marriage...
...These are not Emma Lazarus' tired, poor, huddled masses...
...a studio apart from the rest of the house because Julia cannot abide the smell of turpentine...
...So very, very German, and this they don't relinquish easily...
...Told in chapters of alternating voices that skip back and forth in the time between 1944 and 1996, What Remains is the story of an extended family, three generations of refugees...
...She is too complicated to simply slip into an Auntie Marne type caricature, although she has her quirks: She winningly chainsmokes, leaving trails of ash in her wake...
...With her sons grown and out of the house, what remains for Julia is a loneliness that cannot be filled...
...Surely Ben will find it, because he is the one who always finds what is lost...
...There is nothing splashy here, no verbal pyrotechnics...
...It is in part a remnant of the memory of her first love —an unrequited love for a young man in Germany, Jacob Steiner, who jumped from a window to his death as the Nazis closed in...
...Although no longer fabulously wealthy —no more chauffeur-driven cars or costume balls—they are safely ensconced in bourgeois abundance (they do have a maid) in London...
...They could return, if only for a visit...
...It is further testimony to Delbanco's skill as a writer that he artfully packs so much into such a compact work...
...And what will become of Gustave's art gallery...
...That is not so clear...
Vol. 84 • January 2001 • No. 1
