Tell Me True

by Patricia Hampl

  Joe’s War has its own life now, as books do, and this essay is itself a version of its biography. The book has subtly changed my parents’ and my lives and relationships: “by knowing her father’s story, her own becomes that much richer,” wrote the New York Times, which is true, and I’m glad to report that my father’s pillow is hammer free. Things move on. My traveling companion in Ukraine—a lauded nature writer—died suddenly and too young last year; his latest book, just published posthumously, survives him. In it he writes of our joint trek across the Carpathian mountains in Joe’s footsteps, seen through his own special interest of wood; a different version of exactly the same journey as in my book, but seen through another pair of eyes. As the central European saying has it, with an irony born of reverses of fortune and history, “There is nothing so unpredictable as the past.” Or, as Milan Kundera wrote in one of his Cold War novels, “You think that just because it’s already happened, the past is finished and unchangeable? Oh no, the past is cloaked in multi-coloured taffeta and every time we look at it we see a different hue.” This is what I’ve found: the past is not dead and gone but can be changed; at worst, manipulated, at best, lit up from the inside, and breathed back to life.

  Which reminds me, I must just go and check out the exact wording of the Official Secrets Act...

  HELEN EPSTEIN

  Coming to Memoir as a Journalist

  • • •

  WITH AN EXCERPT FROM

  Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History

  FROM Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for Her Mother’s History

  During what had become years of haunting the library stacks, I had told the Czech librarian, Zuzana Nagy, parts of my grandmother’s story and, like the three Jirˇís, she had become something of a companion. Zuzana was born in Prague to survivor parents; I did not have to explain to her why I had no family papers. When I mentioned to her that I would love to know where in Prague Pepi might have lived when she returned, Zuzana frowned. Then she set off into the stacks and pulled out an elegantly bound volume titled Adresárˇ Královského meˇsta Prahy, 1910.

  The Prague telephone directory had a marbleized cover and thick white pages that were neither broken nor brown. I opened the book, looked under W, and gasped when I found Josefa Weigertová, sˇvadlena, dressmaker. I stroked the cover, repeating my grandmother’s address and telephone number of sixty years and a world earlier as if they were poetry:

  Josefa Weigertová, sˇvadlena

  568-I Ovocny´ trh 17.

  It was the first time I had ever seen her name in print. For a few minutes, I tried to think of a way of stealing the Adresárˇ. Then I photocopied the page.

  • • •

  Coming to Memoir as a Journalist

  This is my starting point as a writer of memoir: In August 1968, I was a twenty-year-old American hitchhiking through Europe with friends. I started in Israel where I was a university student and flew to Athens. From Athens, we thumbed our way north toward Salonika, then traveled by train through what was then Yugoslavia to Vienna. Alone, I continued on to Prague, the city in which I was born after the end of World War II.

  The Cold War was very much a fact that summer of 1968. People around the world were watching Czechoslovakia’s experiment in “socialism with a human face” and wondering how long the Kremlin would allow it to continue. The Iron Curtain seemed permanent. Few westerners toured, let alone lived in, what was called Eastern Europe. Entry visas were required, applications were often rejected, and tourists had to register with the police wherever they traveled.

  As my train left Vienna, then stopped in a no-man’s-land between Austria and Czechoslovakia, I grew increasingly anxious. The border outside the train window was demarcated by watchtowers and barbed wire. The border guards were forbidding. I was carrying an American passport that identified Prague as my place of birth. There was always the possibility of a problem, and I was relieved when the train started moving again.

  I had no conscious memories of Czechoslovakia—I had emigrated with my parents as a baby—but Czech was my first language and I grew up in the Czech refugee subculture of New York City. In that community, all the adults had fled either Nazism or Stalinism, two of the massive psychic traumas of the twentieth century.

  The Nazis had dismembered the First Republic of Czechoslovakia—the only constitutional democracy in Central Europe at the time—and, in 1939, incorporated what is now the Czech Republic into the Third Reich, immediately arresting or killing thousands of anti-Nazi Czechs. Then, they targeted Czech Jews for extermination. Everyone in my immediate family except my parents was deported and murdered. My parents went through several concentration camps and returned to Prague as sole survivors of their families in 1945.

  For three years, they and all of Czechoslovakia struggled to recover from Nazi occupation. Then, in February 1948, there was a Communist putsch. My father, a champion swimmer and member of the national Olympic committee, looked out his window at the armed demonstrators and determined to get his family out of the country immediately—in swimsuits, if necessary. He saw the Communists as “Nazis in different colored uniforms” and thought he would not be able to survive a second totalitarian regime. Luckily, he was able to obtain a visa for the United States. We arrived at New York’s Idlewild Airport six months later.

  When the train finally pulled into Prague’s main railroad station on August 16, 1968, I was startled to hear our family language coming out of public loudspeakers, announcing arrivals and departures. Although I was a young adult, I spoke Czech like a five-year-old, a handicap that distorted my ability not only to speak but also to understand what was said to me. Strangers seemed like relatives. Even the black marketeers in the station seemed familiar. How could I refuse to exchange my dollars for koruny when the person asking seemed like a family intimate?

  I wandered about Prague in a happy daze. I loved the stones and spires and colors and wondered if they had become encoded in my memory when I was being wheeled in my pram down the cobblestone streets. My hosts treated me like an heirloom and squabbled over where I would stay. I was to move from one doting family to another on August 21. Until then I was staying on the living room couch at an apartment on Veverkova Ulice or Squirrel’s Street.

  I hadn’t paid attention to the news for weeks, not since I had landed in Greece, and so was unprepared when, that morning at five, my hosts woke me with the words Jsme obsazene—“We’re occupied.” I remember saying that was okay with me, that I’d manage to get to my next host family by myself if they had things to do. Then I tuned into the strange crunching noise outside and understood they were talking about military occupation.

  I heard three kinds of noise: the crunch of tanks on cobblestones, the droning of planes, the rat-tat-tat of shooting in the park nearby. I couldn’t call home, as international phone lines had been cut. My hosts left to stock up on food and gasoline. I got dressed and went outside. A line of armored tanks rolled toward me.

  I’m not sure when I began to dissociate what I saw from what I felt. I stood frozen in place, taking in like a camera the machine guns on the tanks, the Russian soldiers crouched behind them, the grim spectators, and the cyclists who had attached Czech flags to their motorbikes. I remember wondering whether that was a heroic or suicidal act. I remember a wall drawing that a graffiti artist had scrawled in chalk: the vulva-shaped outline of Czechoslovakia with a Russian sickle piercing its center.

  I know that, after a few minutes, my knees turned to Jell-O, like the knees of an animated cartoon character. I hurried back inside, turned the radio on, found a typewriter, and began recording what I saw and heard.

  Although I did not yet think of myself as a writer, I had already developed a writing habit. It began during mandatory “rest periods” of summer camp, sending reports to parents and friends about what I was doing and
how I felt about it. In those regular bulletins from the wild, I discovered the satisfactions of putting words to feelings that were exciting or joyful or painful and revising those words until my feelings made sense to me. I loved all the rituals of writing: clearing physical and mental space, setting aside a silent time, choosing my materials, watching with elation as ideas I didn’t know I had filled up the blank page.

  I had often seen the power of letters dramatized in paintings or at the theater or opera. The heroine stands at center stage or sits at a desk near a window, holding an envelope in her hands, gazing at it as though it holds something magical. If she is an actress or a singer, she passionately gives voice to her love, bitterness, disappointment, anger, regret. It has always been easier for me to write about what I feel deeply than to say it.

  On August 21, 1968, alone in the apartment on Squirrel’s Street, I wrote about how it felt to be twenty years old, terrified, and stuck in the middle of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Focusing on the words clacking out of the old typewriter relegated my physical reality to the background and provided a measure of control. It gave me a sense of agency at a time when I was helpless. It was an antidote to passivity. Like those actresses and opera singers, I sent a letter to the world.

  Two days later, I was evacuated from Prague to Paris on a special train for foreigners. I mailed what I had written to two newspapers: the New York Times and the Jerusalem Post. The Post published it as an eyewitness account of the invasion.

  Forty years later, I can see how my private experience in the context of public space set me on the road toward writing memoir. I’m still uncovering new layers of sequelae in my experience of the Soviet invasion. Like many memoirists, I’ve discovered that my particular location at the intersection of personal and collective experience, with roots back in early childhood, has provided me with an inexhaustible subject.

  Writers come to memoir from many different literary forms. Some are poets, bringing with them a lyric voice and new language. Some are novelists, skilled in characterization and narrative drive. Some are essayists, masters of introspection and the elaboration of ideas. Some are travel writers whose adventures allow us to voyage vicariously. A growing number are extraliterary professionals—physicians, psychoanalysts, academics, business and sports celebrities—joining the aristocrats, elder statesmen, and military officers who traditionally wrote memoirs at the end of their lives.

  I came to memoir from journalism. After I returned to university in Israel in the fall of 1968, the Jerusalem Post offered me a part-time job as a reporter. I wrote feature stories, short narratives about interesting people and situations, and decided to go to journalism school.

  Traditional third-person journalism as taught in 1970 at Columbia University was the antithesis of memoir. We were drilled to focus our eyes and ears out onto public space and to eradicate personal opinion. Emotion had no place in our discipline, either; neutral accuracy was our goal. We were to approach a subject without prejudice or preconception and record reality as precisely as we could. Imagining or embellishing the truth, let alone making things up, was the province of creative writing programs. I recall a certain high moral tone on this point among my teachers. We journalists did not traffic in useless, self-indulgent fantasy. We did research, made acute observations, investigated records, asked probing questions, got the facts.

  After this proactive work, in the writing itself, we were to erase all trace of ourselves. I liked that idea. Since childhood, I had been fascinated by the properties of invisible ink, and here was a chance to be there and then not be there, to become invisible.

  The ideal of objectivity was still largely unchallenged by postmodernist ideas in 1970. It sufficed to assess the “truthfulness” and “reliability” of two independent sources to verify a fact, to record it accurately and in context; then check and double-check. My teachers edited my work for concision as well as readability. They questioned my descriptions and characterizations and stamped out feelings or opinions as though they were weeds. Although third-person journalism prized a reporter’s “eye for detail” and an “ear for the telling quote,” it eliminated all evidence of the human being who possessed these sensory organs.

  I started writing freelance for the Sunday New York Times cultural pages soon after graduation and became a journalism professor at New York University. I taught my students what I had been taught: the who, what, where, when, and why of a story; the suppression of their own voices, feelings, and opinions; the ideal of themselves as sponges—absorbing, recording, assembling it all into a coherent narrative, pyramid structure, most important facts up top. I taught them how to tell a story without expressing editorial opinion. I urged them to see their role as invisible conduits between subject and reader, and of course to work on deadline within strict word limits. I drilled them in terseness, concision, accuracy.

  But I couldn’t remain impervious to the counterculture and new political movements of the 1960s. The activist media were loudly challenging the status quo and leading me to think very differently about writing. I realized that the objective journalism I had so idealistically and naïvely embraced was in fact riddled with prejudice about what was fit to print.

  Like many New Yorkers, I grew up thinking that if something wasn’t reported in the Times, it hadn’t happened. Now I realized how much wasn’t reported in its pages. As I witnessed how editors developed and assigned articles, I saw how simplistic and exclusionary my education had been. It wasn’t only that traditional journalism, like most American professions, was permeated by political, racial, social, age, and gender biases that shaped the definition of newsworthiness. Or that media, like all institutions, have their own cultural norms. Or that money and power and tradition determined access to news coverage. I realized that importance was determined inside a rarified private space by editors who did not venture much out into the public world.

  I had grown accustomed to writing on assignment, that is, pitching story ideas to editors for consideration and more often taking their direction about what was or was not deemed fit to print. In the 1970s, my Times editors were almost all men. I learned to speak their language, filled with military and sports metaphors. I wrote not in my own voice but in a more formal way, hewing to the institutional guidelines. All sources, for example, were to be identified by their honorifics or as “Mr.” or “Mrs.” No four-letter words. In describing student conductors at Tanglewood, I could not report that some of their faces were so transfigured by the music that they looked like they were having orgasms. “Not fit to print” in the Times.

  When I worked for women’s magazines, there was a different vocabulary to learn and a different kind of censorship. Advertisers and their products were not to be criticized. Cosmopolitan even gave its writers a style book, instructing them on taboo words as well as favored punctuation.1

  I began to question the role of traditional journalistic criteria, to pay attention to what was going on between me and my interviewee during interviews, to refuse deadlines, to take my time, to choose my subjects and their scope by my own criteria of importance. I continued to write about people that the New York Times deemed important—celebrated musicians such as Leonard Bernstein or Yo-Yo Ma or theatrical producer Joe Papp, whose biography I eventually wrote. But I also tried to pitch obscure people or people who didn’t employ press agents, like the late violin teacher Dorothy DeLay, who had not yet been the subject of a profile.

  I knew I wasn’t neutral in my choice of subject. I was simply becoming more interested in writing about people like myself: women, immigrants, people who had a history of trauma. I was becoming aware that we all perceive events—public and private—through the double prism of our culture and personal experience, and it resonates in multiple echo chambers of memory. Unlike journalism, which demands that reporters ignore or subsume that subjective reality, memoir encourages writers to plumb it.

  In 1976, I
tried to persuade my editors at the Times Magazine to assign me an article about sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors—a then-unrecognized group that had, as my editor put it, “no press agent, no organizational letterhead, and no expert vouching for their existence.” I argued that I, myself, was the daughter of concentration camp survivors and that there were probably a quarter of a million other people like me. But my pitch was ignored until Stanford University’s Medical School issued a press release about an Israeli psychiatrist studying the effects of the Holocaust on the second generation, and Time printed some of it, thereby validating my subject as news.

  In 1976, the Times Magazine finally assigned me to write about the group now known as “children of survivors” who were “possessed by a history they had never lived.” I identified myself briefly as one but, in my piece, focused on my interviewees. The article provoked over five hundred letters—lengthy, intimate, full of provocative material—that made it clear I had a book on my hands.

  Although it was easy to get a publisher, it was hard to jettison years of training, turn my investigative skills on myself, and transform a magazine article into the memoir Children of the Holocaust. The terms “survivor” and “Holocaust” were not yet household words; the idea of the Soup Nazi unimaginable. I found it very difficult to sustain the belief that my subject was important and that my private experience could be considered significant in the public sphere. Neither my friends nor my family were enthusiastic about my project. But, feeling a compulsion to write it, I turned away from third-person journalism and began my book like this:

  For years it lay in an iron box buried so deep inside me that I was never sure just what it was. I knew I carried slippery combustible things more secret than sex and more dangerous than any shadow or ghost. Ghosts had shape and name. What lay inside my iron box had none. Whatever lived inside me was so potent that words crumbled before they could describe.