A grand claim for what most perceive as a minor art, but we must begin somewhere, and where better than memoir? All human knowledge begins in our prodigious capacity to remember. This much is plain: the great challenge of the present century is not exterior but interior. At least for the moment, Western culture has conquered the planet. Now our challenge is to learn to live in harmony with our Earth, with each other, and with ourselves.
In a world in which the facts are so easily manipulated, what is truth, and how may we know and preserve it? Worldwide we are witnessing violence with its roots in the tension between science and religion, history and memory, the law and the heart, reason and faith. Extremists from both sides would have us believe that these forces are mutually destructive when in fact we are at a moment when we may draw upon and give expression to both, creating a synthesis and achieving what Zen Buddhists aptly call “nonduality.”
Is it not the responsibility of the magicians of the earth—its artists and scientists and priests and writers—to propose and model peace? Perhaps memoir, a vessel so particularly well suited to embrace both the head and the heart, fact and truth, can provide us one means through which seemingly hostile disciplines can make constructive peace, in which the scientist will lie down with the priest, the historian with the fictionist, the lion with the lamb.
1 The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (1954; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971) and The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (1959; New York: Harper & Row, 1961).
2 William Dalrymple, “Homer in India,” New Yorker, November 20, 2006.
3 Urban sophisticates are fascinated by contemporary writing from less developed cultures in part because it so often portrays this transition from circular to linear time. In his poignantly titled novel Arrow of God (1964), Nigerian Chinua Achebe’s priest-protagonist Ezeulu refuses to allow his people to harvest their ripening yams even though to delay the harvest—as tradition requires—will spoil the crop and lead to famine. For Ezeulu, to violate tradition is to betray his priestly responsibilities, breaking the circle of time and severing the link to all that has come before. In desperation the villagers convert to Christianity—a philosophy that permits and encourages progress; a philosophy of linear time. A generation later South African writer J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) portrays a white father and daughter forced to choose between the values of the progress-oriented culture of the cities and the circular culture of the tribal people among whom they have chosen to live. In America the memoirs, essays, and novels of N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) and Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo) portray the dislocation of native peoples whose communities are islands of circular time surrounded by linear, progress-oriented culture.
ANNETTE KOBAK
Whose War?
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
Joe’s War: My Father Decoded
FROM Joe’s War: My Father Decoded
It was 1993, and I was visiting Australia again, this time to take a trip with my parents up to the Great Barrier Reef....We drove through the lush, rolling hills behind Byron Bay and Brisbane, bathed in golden sunshine and almost English except for their sudden peaked, red, rocky hills. Then came the monotonous kilometres of sugar cane country, with their bulbous cane toads creeping around inside. We passed through endless creeks, their names spelling out bluntly the tale of men’s first encounter with them...Kangaroo Creek, Duck Creek, Deadman’s Gully, Magpie Gully, Spider Creek, Devil Devil Creek and even Creek Creek. I said I’d heard that to double a word in the Aboriginal language was a way of saying “very.” My father laughed, and said he had a better idea, which is that they were deaf, and needed everything said twice.
He said this with fellow-feeling, because deafness by this time was beginning to be an issue. He’d been going slightly deaf for a while, which he put down to the noise of the Stuka and other bombings in the war, and the Morse code machines. It looked as if his corporal’s sardonic prediction of going deaf “by the age of thirty” was belatedly coming true. What we all failed to notice for a long time, since my mother had an eccentrically extravert conversational style, was that she was going profoundly deaf as well. She felt that this, too, must have been a result of the war—of the Blitz—since deafness wasn’t otherwise in the family. Just as communication had opened up between us, this new subtle impediment was brought in to hamper the kind of spontaneous, redundant remarks that are the stuff of life....New kinds of no-go areas were threatening, and we would have to beware that what was said didn’t become that much more two-dimensional than ordinary language, a kind of Morse code. Around the house notices had begun to appear: FAX SWITCHED ON? KEYS? WINDOWS LOCKED? I half expected SSHHH. WALLS HAVE EARS. My father had made a device on the telephone which made it ring far more loudly and shrilly than usual, and added a flashing red light, so that to ordinary ears a telephone call now felt like being hunted down by the police.
On the way up to Cairns we went to the usual tourist sites, visiting rainforests and crocodile farms. At one, we saw a keeper feeding a crocodile in a large pool. The crocodile, with its zigzag grinning jaw in its massive pugilist’s head, ambled into one end of the murky pool, whiplashing its scaly tail behind, before disappearing under the brown water. The man took a dead chicken round to the other side of the now-still pool and held it out on the end of a stick. There was a long silence, then at the man’s feet the waters erupted like a volcano and a prehistoric jaw rocketed out vertically to snatch it in one gulp. It was awesome, archetypal, and strangely emotionally familiar.
• • •
Whose War?
Last week, over a coffee with an archivist at the Imperial War Museum in London, I asked him as an afterthought, “By the way, is there a...penalty for breaking the Official Secrets Act?” It was late in the day to have thought of this: my book about my father’s secret life in World War II and beyond, Joe’s War: My Father Decoded, had come out three years earlier, and the seventeen cathartic tapes he and I had made over the course of a few blazing hot Januarys in Australia—where my parents now live—had just been transformed by the archivist into seventeen gleaming CDs, one set of which was now lodged in the Imperial War Museum’s sound archives.
The dutiful part of me felt proud that this record of my father’s war, and of his early life in Czechoslovakia (where he was born) and Poland (where he studied), was preserved in such safe hands, for future searchers to consult or ignore, according to the vagaries of history to come. Proud, that is, until I asked that question. “Oh yes,” the archivist replied, “there would be a prison sentence for breaching the Official Secrets Act.”
Walking home to Borough with my set of the golden CDs—the new, boxed-up version of my father’s life—I thought how ironic it would be if, after all the perils my father had survived, he should in the final furlong find himself clapped into prison courtesy of his daughter.
Of course, I exaggerate. This won’t happen: the secrets in question belong to sixty-one years ago; airing them has given unexpected insights into the history of World War II as well as of the Cold War; my father is well into his eighties now and lives on the other side of the globe; the very thought of punishment would be waved away airily by the powers that be, with graceful murmurs of appreciation for his defense of the realm...wouldn’t it? All the same, the brush with the mere possibility of penalties reminded me that the truth telling of memoir comes at a price. For the project of memoir—the lone voice telling its tale—can rouse sleeping dogs that others would rather let lie. The tale told can, for example, conflict with the narratives of power; and power can be not too happy about that.
I had no thought of such things when I embarked on Joe’s War. In fact, it took a while for me to be interested in my father’s story at all. Like any child, I took my surroundings for granted: I didn’t query my father’s taciturni
ty, or the fact that we didn’t have a telephone, or the fact that his eyes oscillated continuously, or that he slept with a hammer under his pillow. I was an only child, and we lived quite a cut-off life (that no-telephone, for a start) in an anonymous south London suburb, with few visitors, apart from the occasional sighting of one of my English mother’s family. It didn’t occur to me, even as an adult, that I had a childhood or story worth writing about: to look back on it was to see something formless and bitty, with more blanks than memories. “Memoir” was surely about settled, substantial people. It emanated from writers with provenance, with peopled childhoods and a sense of place, like Gwen Raverat and Nabokov. And my father’s own backstory seemed more than an absence: it was a no-go area I obligingly didn’t go into.
Until, that is, I started writing about my childhood in the guise of what was to be a fictional tale about World War II. By retrieving that hammer, those flickering eyes, and even that lack of a past from memory, I belatedly began to see that these things were not normal. By this time I had teenage children of my own, and my parents had emigrated to the other side of the world. Why, I now wondered, did I know almost nothing about my father’s life before he’d arrived in England in 1940 as a young soldier with the Polish army? And why hadn’t I asked about it, in all the seventeen years I’d lived at home?
Partly, it was because at the time I’d put any peculiarities down to the fact that my father was foreign, with different ways—like drinking sour, curdled milk or making lime tea from limes he found on a tree (not using Brooke Bond and milk, like normal people!). I knew he’d been born in an obscure country called Czechoslovakia, notoriously a “faraway country” to Prime Minister Chamberlain in 1938, and once again faraway to us English after the war, behind its “iron curtain”; an iron curtain that was solid and metallic, in my child’s mind. I’d also gathered that my father had been through a tough war, fighting as a very young and accidental soldier in the Polish army (why Polish, when he was Czech?) on the front line in France, being bombed from the air, hiding in haystacks. No wonder his eyes flickered. And I knew that all his family was now locked away behind that Iron Curtain (a piece of Churchill’s inspired wordsmithery, although coined, I would find, with some bad faith, since he had such a hand in bringing it down). Early on, my father sent his family food parcels, but even that connection stopped, after it became too dangerous for them to have any contact with the West. Otherwise, he didn’t want to talk about such things as I grew up, steering away from the no-go areas with (I now see) a subtle repertoire of stonewalling, jokiness, and well-pitched unavailability—the latter not unusual for fathers at that time, and in his case cloaked with the cover of his work (a researcher with the Coal Board) and solitary home tasks like carpentry and watch mending.
This much I’d known about my father—Józef, as he’d been born, then Joseph, as he’d been known in England, and now redubbed, with Australian chumminess, plain “Joe.” And as a child it had been enough. My only interest in the war had been in zooming around bomb sites with the local children, wearing gas masks and pretending to be airplanes as we played “Japs and Germans”—with scant idea who “Japs and Germans” were. By adolescence, the grimness and conflict of war seemed to have been kicked into a different era by Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” and the emerging swinging sixties. By university, the war was coming back retro, as I donned a flak jacket over my miniskirt. With marriage, and children, I became immersed in the present and future, not the past; and in the seventies the link with my father and the war receded even further, when he and my mother emigrated to Australia—on the face of it, for my father’s work and a better quality of life. It wasn’t until the eighties, when the warmth of Australia and the more forthright curiosity of the Australians thawed out my father’s reserve, and when my marriage broke up, that I turned around and took stock of what I’d never asked him.
As I got wind of his story, I began to see that a Central European take on the war might look quite different from our standard British version of Churchill, Colditz, and the Dam Busters—and, more to the point, that I’d never heard or read one. I wanted to explore it, and my father, in a book. I wanted it to be about his journey to England across war-torn Europe in 1939–40, and my journey toward him. (I just mistyped this as “my journey toward me,” and of course it was that too—what else is memoir?) The book was always going to be about history and emotion: both, interlaced. By now, I’d written my first book, a biography of a young nineteenth-century traveler, Isabelle Eberhardt, with a troubled Slavonic past full of family secrets she never knew about. My subconscious had evidently been working overtime, doing a recce of the territory that needed exploring.
Yet in 1988 the market wasn’t ripe for memoir, let alone for one about an unknown individual from an obscure country like Czechoslovakia. As my American editor pointed out regretfully, since the U.S. president (Reagan at the time) didn’t know even where Pakistan was, there was slim chance of finding readers interested in a remote country with an unspellable name. She also wondered how I could write frankly about my parents while they were still alive, and without “instrumentalizing” them—a new word to me—and at the time, before the memoir boom, these seemed good points. So the memoir went onto the back burner while I worked on another book, did a radio series on travel writers, and brought up my children.
But it simmered away in the background. When time and money allowed, I visited my parents in their new homeland, and with green curtains drawn against the midday sun, my father and I made those tapes, at first faltering, about a gray and fraught European time. And back home in England, I boned up on the history of Czechoslovakia, Poland, and World War II, to understand the complex context to his story.
These forays into history became riveting to me in their own right. I was discovering so much I hadn’t known and that nobody seemed to know, whole narratives absent from the history books. I began to see a backdrop to Joe’s story that he himself hadn’t fully known, as a lone young individual hit suddenly by “the monster from outside,” as his fellow Czechoslovak Milan Kundera called the history of the twentieth century. I began to see, too, how history might look like that monster if you’d been brought up in Central Europe in the thirties. My father and I pieced together the past, and bit by bit—especially after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991—he dropped his guard.
Joe, it transpired, had been an eighteen-year-old engineering student in Lvov (then in Poland, now in Ukraine) when war broke out in September 1939 and Poland found itself partitioned overnight between the two tyrannies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Lvov fell to the Soviets, Stalin’s Terror began, and Joe, picked randomly off the streets whilst queuing for scarce bread (scarce anything, shortages set in at once), managed to bribe his way out of prison just before he became part of a quota of Siberia-bound prisoners. Realizing that students and teachers were being targeted and that studying would no longer be safe, he made a perilous journey back to his parents’ mountain village, now in Nazi-occupied Poland. The local vicar, knowing him to be a good skier who knew the terrain, asked him to take some refugees clandestinely across the Slovak border, and the third time he’d done this, the Nazi commandant in the village found out and put out a death warrant for him. In January 1940 he had to turn back on skis through the mountains, and he had never seen his parents again. (No wonder he had nothing from his past.) He described how he ended up joining the Polish army—under the French army, until that collapsed—in Marseilles and had found himself, as a raw recruit, fighting on the front (those bombs and haystacks), and then transported to the unknown country of England on the last ship out of occupied France. There he met my English mother, who was in the women’s air force, and a few years later I was born.
Joe’s memories, locked away for half a century even from my mother, came out pristine, like insect fossils trapped in amber. He had vivid recall of detail: of the Omega watch he gave to the young guard in the prison to set
him free; the metal rod “15 millimeters by 30 centimeters” with which he’d killed an NKVD officer (or did he?); of the exact two suits, balaclava, overcoat, shoes, and galoshes he wore as he skidded across the frozen river San at night under gunfire to get back home; of the teeth of the smiling Senegalese soldiers amid the military chaos in France; of the Scottish coal-carrying tanker that rescued his unit; of Morse code, which his ear, brain, and fingertips can still transmute at high speed, like an automaton, from dots and dashes into the alphabet.
I was struck by the clarity of his recall, the exactitude of the detail. Perhaps, I thought, it was because he’d studied engineering and would become a physicist, a specifications man. But I came to see there was another reason for this specificity, too: he’d been traumatized by the relentless sequence of events hitting him in the nine dislocating months from September 1939 to summer 1940, when he reached England. In his state of high alert, everything was etched keenly on his memory. The amygdala, we’re told—seat of the fight-or-flight impulses—registers things more deeply than the neocortex, engine of our more evolved selves. His silence at home had come from what we now call post-traumatic shock and from depression, exacerbated by being cut off from his family and homeland by the onset of the Cold War. And yet...there was more to it than that, too. It’s not depression, after all, that makes you stash a hammer under your pillow.
By now, our conversations were taking place in a new century, the twenty-first. The monster-from-outside century, with all its wars, was, the dates told us, another era. Until, on September 11, 2001, the monster crashed in on us in the West, and it began to look as if it had merely gone in for some shape and place shifting. By now, my book had been commissioned in America and Britain, in the wake of the new vogue for memoir and of the opening up of the former Soviet Union. Place names like Czechoslovakia, Lvov, and Ukraine were not quite so alien any more; even presidents and prime ministers had heard of them.
Tell Me True Page 3