The Menace of Memory

...her husband Lev, who abandons her...

...and above all, Alex...

...Later, as an old man, he expands this indictment to include 20th-century crimes committed by Ukrainians against Jews during the Nazi occupation...

...War perverted a lot of people...

...In effect, however, Nick is also the Kruks' creator: separate enough to render their tale fully, and independent enough to apply "the adhesive of imagination whenever the pieces seemed too jagged to cohere...

...No more unusual, though, than this finely-wrought novel in which the concrete details of human tragedy are present and throbbing, while the abstractions of meaning are never imposed...

...Ada's first and most abiding love, Anton emerges from their DP camp after the War determined to remake his life in England...

...The book begins and concludes with a meeting between Nick, now married and working as a physician in Boston, and Ada, who has summoned him back to his old neighborhood to assist in an emergency involving his childhood friend Alex...

...They were ready for it, waiting to be perverted...

...Do you think God forgets...

...He is somewhat peripheral to the book's central figures, the Kruk family—in particular, almost mythic Ada, the eponymous "Ambassador of the Dead," a Slavic combination of Mary and Medea, and her doomed artistic younger son, Alex...

...She wants something we can't give her," he tells Nick...

...The old country they come from, Ukraine, is subsumed by the Soviet Union and effectively wiped off the map...

...The last includes an allusion to "a Russian slyboots of a writer by the name of Sirin," a.k.a...

...No denying...

...No denying...

...To his credit, Melnyczuk forthrightly and seamlessly addresses this history through his two most trustworthy characters, Anton and Nick...

...Years later, coming to New Jersey on a lecture tour, he tells the members of his old community, "I know we have duties to the past...

...Nick is traveling in Europe, having taken a leave from his medical studies following the death of both of his parents and a devastating revelation, perhaps truthful, perhaps malicious, that he receives from Ada about his mother's and father's behavior during the Great Famine and the War...

...They have settled in a community of other Ukrainian immigrants in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where they struggle to raise their two American-born sons, Paul and Alex...

...The animating center of the novel is the tension between those like Ada who cling tenaciously to their memories, and those like her sons who seek normalcy through integration into the American mainstream...

...her brother Viktor, who goes out one day for some sugar and vanishes in Siberia for 20 years...

...We have blood on our hands," he tells Nick during a fortuitous meeting at a Ukrainian monastery in Italy...

...Though able as a young child to see Ada's ghosts, the gifted but troubled Alex, following his father and brother before him, attempts with increasing desperation and futility to escape...

...he asks Ada...

...Not only people are lost to the ravages of the disappearing sickness...

...Don't get trapped...

...As did Nick's parents, the Kruks arrived in America in 1950 from a Ukraine shattered during the savage first half of the 20th century by the Soviets and the Nazis...

...the reader never feels they exist merely to make a point...

...It was as if some part of him wanted to stay asleep...

...When he rejects that role, she cuts him off coldly...

...Given the notorious Ukrainian treatment of Jews, however, some readers might feel less than sympathetic...

...He immerses himself in a new language and new references...

...She is afraid of ultimately losing herself in what Melnyczuk calls "the disappearing sickness," a recurring motif throughout the novel that is enormously resonant...

...He tries to seduce her out of the past by exorcising it through a manuscript he gives her as a gift—a fictionalized retelling of her story, called "Ambassador of the Dead...

...The sensuai, Jesus and Mary-obsessed Ada, zealously represents the ghostly constituents of her embassy of the dead...

...The case for assimilation is also made by the figure in the novel with the greatest intellectual and moral authority, the poet Anton...

...In its simplest sense, the disappearing sickness is a metaphor for a malady that strikes almost everyone Ada touches: Her father, who is murdered by the Nazis...

...In addition, from his vantage point outside the story's crucible he has the distance needed to ponder its meaning and implications, even to enrich it with literary references...

...This grace is achieved partly through Melnyczuk's narrative voice, Nick Blud...

...Ada demands of Alex...

...Vladimir Nabokov, as well as to what looks like a nice chunk of the writing department at Boston University, where Melnyczuk teaches and edits the literaryjournul AGNI...

...Yet character and story remain alive andpresent, real rather than illustrative...

...Very soon after his conversation with Anton, he returns home to restore his life and to marry a Jewish woman, whose opening sally in their courtship is, "Your parents were murdering my parents in the old country...

...her husband, the violent Lev, is known as "the old revolutionary...

...To know history is essential: without that, there can be no conscience...

...As a young man, Anton, a student of Kabbala among other subjects, attributes Ukraine's suffering in the War to the "sins" it committed in the 17th century, the terrible massacres and pogroms, most notably those led by Chmielnicki...

...Don't you know why people have children...

...The Kruks' story unfolds within this frame, so that when Alex' horrific fate is finally revealed it seems the fulfillment of an ancient, foreordained tragedy in which not only the novel's characters but we the readers are complicit, because we weren't able to resist being captivated by what inevitably will end in some form of human sacrifice...

...Nick says early on, though, the Kruks are "my little Russian novel," and since he plays a supporting role in their lives, his destiny is personally touched by them...

...The past can become an evasion, an escape, easier to deal with than what's around you...

...Anton advises Nick, "I'm not saying don't wonder what your father did...

...In the course of evoking large, weighty themes —history, memory, family, loss and renewal—the author does not hesitate to step back and reflect on them...

...her sister Nina, who is taken from her as an infant...

...Indeed, for Alex as a baby the disease is not metaphorical...

...As Ada notes, possibly not with total good will, "Unusual, you know: a Jew and a Ukrainian...

...Pinsky, Epstein, Kaysen, Appelfeld"—all make cameo appearances as Jewish doctors, colleagues of Nick's father...

...But I invite you to notice there are other ways of being, different ways of viewing experience...

...And without conscience, there can be no self...

...it is real, magically real it is true, but nevertheless he is actually diagnosed as having malus invisiblus: "The first months of his life, every morning, on waking, his skin would begin turning transparent until it seemed to have evaporated, leaving only a pulsing heap of vessels, muscles, and burgundy organs...

...Those words are a penetrating source of comfort for Nick...

...Weneededtranslators...

...The suffering of Ukraine under the Soviets and the Germans is undeniable of course...

...Reviewed by Tova Reich Author, "Mara," "The Jewish War" One of the rare qualities of Askold Melnyczuk's intelligent, beautifully written second novel, is his ability to naturally and fluidly combine thematic seriousness with narrative immediacy...

...But have your own life...

...The only way he could stop himself from disappearing entirely was by screaming...

...Ada is profoundly tempted to go with Anton but finally refuses him...

...her son Paul, who commits suicide...

...her mother, who dies young...

...During that visit to New Jersey Anton asks the now divorced Ada to join him in England...