by Alan Lelchuk
Teaching these seminars was always a question of knowing the text well, the historical context just as well, and presenting the right questions to be discussed. “So tell me,” he began, “why does Doctorow choose to tell the story from the point of view of the son, Danny Isaacson? And does he make the son like the real-life Rosenberg boy? And if not, why not?” He paused. “Furthermore, how is history brought into the narrative? Through the characters, or otherwise? And is the writer redressing history, so to speak—at least history as it has been written by the historians? Does the fiction writer have such a right? You can answer any of those questions.”
Matt Cheney, a thin fellow from Maine, spoke up first, “Well, Danny is not at all a saintly type. Quite the opposite. In fact he’s portrayed at times as nasty and selfish, even brutal to his own wife. Clearly Doctorow doesn’t paint the picture of a perfect sort of radical kid.”
Carolyn Johnson, a smart, heavyset young woman from a poor black Roxbury background, opined, in her clear slow voice, “Well, history also comes in through those small essays that Danny enters into the narrative, like minilectures, you know like when he tells us about Stimson, the secretary of state, thinking maybe we should tell the Russians our secrets about the A-bomb, so we and they would have parity and trust each other, and maybe avoid the whole Cold War. And then he’s shoved aside. Or when …”
These kids were good, Manny knew, when you gave them the opportunity, and when you trained them to think. They even taught him on occasion, if he listened closely to their semi-articulated views and cut through those to their true thoughts.
“Yeah, but I think he went too far and got it wrong,” said Paul Olsen, a short-haired conservative who doubted all his peers’ ideas. “They were guilty as hell, like the recent histories show, and the writer is merely trying to justify his own leftist interpretation.”
“Well, actually, the recent histories show that Ethel was not guilty, just Julius,” Gellerman corrected, “but perhaps the more important question is, Does the writer not have the right to put in his own interpretation? Especially if the particular case is not clear at all, but filled with an assortment of prejudices, mysteries, and inventions posing as facts?”
“Sure, here in a novel he can interpret as much as he wants,” suggested Paul. “But if he were writing a real history—”
“What do you mean, a ‘real’ history?” said Matt. “Don’t historians make their own interpretations as well? Is that what you mean by ‘real’ history?”
“And of course it’s based on what they take to be ‘the facts,’” said Caroline. “And maybe their facts?”
Country girl Jodie Reyes offered, “Maybe we should read some of the histories as fiction then? And some of the fictions as history?”
“Well, why not?” answered Matt. “We’ve had some good examples this term, haven’t we?”
“Especially if people who have mostly written the histories have been those elites at the top?” Mike Reynolds put in. “Wasn’t that what E. P. Thompson said, in his Making of the English Working Class, at the beginning of the term?”
“Well,” Manny refereed, “let’s look at what were the so-called facts in the trial itself. Take out the source book, and let’s check out those documents.”
As the class opened up their source books—which Manny had created for them, in the form of a thick scrapbook, with other documents for other cases, such as the Sacco-Venzetti letters and papers, English anarchist documents, and recent KGB file openings—he decided perhaps to make one for his own Wallenberg case. Weren’t there as many prejudices and mysteries there as with these legendary cases?
Why, he might even bring that RW case in here, for the seminar to study and inquire about. Especially if there was a novel already written about it. He’d have to check up on that.
As the class proceeded to look at the sources for the Rosenberg trial and the histories written about it afterwards, with mocking scorn and disbelief, Manny felt proud of their newly-trained skepticism and newfound openness.
“This is really hard to believe,” asserted Paul, who wanted to become a prosecuting attorney, “that they would allow such stuff to appear as evidence.”
“Hey, you haven’t been legally indoctrinated yet!” noted Matt good-naturedly. He said, “See us in a dozen years!” and got everyone laughing.
Manny spoke up, “So here we have a clear example of a country that wants to create its own patriotic history, using the legal system, so that it is willing to put into evidence in a federal trial untrustworthy and illegal material, not to mention bringing in a prejudicial judge. But soon thereafter, in the next years, equally as pernicious and maybe worse, we have historians who rush in to support the illegal trial and accuse the same victims, and thereby help create a patriotic narrative about the nation and its politics, which contributes of course to the Cold War theme and belief system. After all, in a nation that comes first in “selling,” both its products and its ideas, this is not too surprising. Fortunately, however, we still have a counterhistory, which begins to kick in some years later, and we start to have a more balanced and fair perspective. Clearly, we should count The Book of Daniel as part of that counterhistory, one of the first and strongest documents to stir up rethinking about the whole issue, and despite—or because of?—its fictional package. For if it is merely a novel, it is not supposed to be as politically dangerous as a formal history, right? But actually it turns out to be just as dangerous, and maybe more so.”
Some discussion ensued, while Manny considered his notion of creating a Wallenberg source book.
He paused and checked his watch. “Okay, that’s it for today; we’ll see each other on Thursday, and we will have several oral reports. Okay? See you then.”
The class packed up, along with Manny, while several students came over to continue the discussion with their bearded, bespectacled professor.
One student uttered, “You know, sir, I’ve never quite taken a history course like this before. It’s kinda … different. Not just the dates and years. Now, how long should my oral report be on Thursday? About ten or fifteen minutes?”
Afterwards, Manny looked toward his regular ritual—either playing tennis with his regular partner, or going to a movie at the local movie house up the street from the campus. With Peter not around, Gellerman deposited his briefcase in his car and walked up to the small theater, The Nugget. Once upon a time a fine art cinema with two large screens, it had succumbed to commercial pressures and reduced itself to four squeezed theaters with much smaller screens and louder speakers; instead of art films, it offered commercial fare. No matter; all Gellerman wanted was to escape from his classroom and his intense mental focus, see a movie, and later grab a quick bite when the restaurants were emptying out.
He got lucky. Sitting up close, he watched with interest Good Night and Good Luck, the semi-documentary film about Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy. Surprisingly, the movie was gripping, with fine acting, TV-like black and white scenes, the gloomy sense of the shadowy fifties, the intimidation of McCarthyism. Now, some sixty years after the fact, it was safe to make such a movie, and even make a hit. Murrow had become a kind of Radio God, though Manny recalled his broadcast about Buchenwald, and his glaring omission of the word “Jew” when speaking about the “victims.” How come the moral icon of the radio had omitted “Jews” and substituted “Europeans?” Gellerman had never forgotten that.
Still the movie was a worthy effort, and he felt grateful that he could actually sit through an American flick and not be insulted or bored, on edge to leave.
After an avocado pizza at Molly’s, he drove to his countryside home, twenty-eight miles, and settled into his living room. He built a fire in his Indian Room—his private name for the room, which had, on the wall between high bookcases, four of Edward Curtis’s striking portraits—and read the newspaper and mail. Tomorrow, when he was fresh, he could read through Angela’s draft a little more seriously. Meanwhile, his thoughts wand
ered to East Europe, its different cities and values, its culture of gray scarcity. So different from the native pot of overflowing Plenty. With a value system of what, nowadays? Power, gluttony, greed?
In the morning, he had his orange juice, a full bowl of mixed cereals and sliced banana, and freshly ground coffee. Having slept decently, he felt well, felt firm, and looked forward to his own work and to the thesis. All the sins and failures of his recent past—no book in a while, the divorce, certain friends lost—were now relegated to the back burner. The beauty of mornings, after real sleep, wiped all that away. Before getting to the work, he checked his e-mails and found a new one from the East.
Dear American Professor Gellerman,
My friend Gerevich tells me of your interest in my dead father. Your student also was here. What is it you wish to know to work on, please tell me? I am open to your questions, and your interest.
Sincerely,
Zsuzsanna W.
Intrigued, surprised, baffled, Gellerman absorbed the note and considered a possible response.
In the living room, he turned on the classical music station, took his second mug of coffee, and turned to the thesis. As he began reading, he found his attention engaged in both places—in the pages, and over yonder, in Budapest. Happily, Angela could write well, and so it was not unusual torture to go through her thesis more carefully. He read—while listening to Beethoven’s Opus 59, the “Razumovsky” quartet—and was pleased to find her work competent: a reasonable amount of footnotes, a good bibliography, solidly written sentences. And when he came to the section describing the interview with the daughter, he observed that the temperature of the prose grow more heated. Angela had bought the cockeyed story, hook, line, and sinker, and spent nearly a half dozen pages on it, acknowledging that there was no hard evidence to back it up. So Manny marked it in red and made the suggestion that perhaps she should drop it into a long footnote. And treat it as a local myth that grew naturally from the unnatural facts, a sort of apocryphal legend … As Mozart took over, Gellerman moved on, getting through all sixty-eight pages in an hour and a half, and understood the kind of romantic hero she had portrayed. Yet he learned two things from it. One was the number of RW “sightings” that she had come up with—ex-prisoners of the Gulag who had claimed, in one way or another, that they had seen an old ailing Swedish prisoner in different work camps of the Soviet Union, after 1947. Second was the source where Angela had come up with this finding: a “Swedish-Russian Working Group that in the early 1990s had put out regular papers and reports, some very long, every few years.” So the case had lingered, and remained of continuing, haunting interest. This meant that secrets remained, along with guilt and shame …
Manny rose, stretched, went for a walk in the woods, stepping over the crunchy snow-covered trail toward his old writing cabin. The smells and sights of the white branches, the glistening birch trees, the protected delicious air of the forest—all that refreshed the spirit. Footprints of a deer and droppings appeared. He walked up and down the looping trail, stopping by the huge shelter tree, of some two hundred years, admiring its vast girth. The state forester who had walked through with him had explained that deer and bear would huddle there, during bad weather or wind. (A good place for Manny one day?) Even now, here, in this season, he could hear some birds twittering. The forest was always alive with its own noises, creakings, silences. His loop took him through his sixty acres and out into a lower meadow …
Who was the real Raoul? And why did he go to bat, and sacrifice himself, for the Jews? (And not even Swedish Jews, but Hungarian ones.) Made little sense. But then, many of the best things often made little sense. Maybe like his own increasing pursuit of that curious Swedish diplomat turned noble man.
Manny watched the news: the latest surveillance scandal of the Bush administration; one minute and thirty seconds about the ongoing Iraq war; one minute for the latest rumor about the next likeliest anchor of the CBS news (a smiley talkshow host to replace cordial Uncle Schieffer, about twelve million bucks annually for reading the teleprompter for twenty minutes); a possible new drug for the arthritic, delivered by a pretty blonde (and the ads for drugs to aid the heart, the penis, the bladder). The celebrities and the distractions received as much time as the real news, if not more. The nation had become so bent out of shape, with anchors deemed newsworthy and celebrities thought to have “heft,” it was no wonder that audiences could hardly tell the differences between the real, the illusory, and the irrelevant.
Sitting back in his study, he read a 1996 U.S. News & World Report essay on Wallenberg, making the claim that he was a double spy for both the Americans and the Germans. A conspiracy theory coauthored by a Russian émigré. Manny took a few notes on the melodramatic piece and then returned to the collection of RW’s Letters. He read a half dozen of these letters, imagining the various sites—Haifa, Capetown, Ann Arbor—of Raoul’s broad education, provided by his pragmatic grandfather. Next he read an interesting piece on a German prisoner, Rodel, who had been in prison with RW …
He opened his laptop and composed a little scene:
A gray misty day, typical for Budapest in February. The thin man in the dark suit sat at his small wooden desk, examining a sheaf of papers he had received that issued new rules and boundaries for the Swedish mission.
As he skimmed through the monotonous bureaucratic language, he looked up to see Vilmos, his husky secretary and driver, approaching. The large fellow motioned to the phone, and the diplomat lifted the receiver.
“Wallenberg here,” he said cooly, and listened to the speaker at the other end. In a few seconds he nodded to Vilmos, motioned with his hand, and the secretary departed. The diplomat said a few more words, hung up, and stood. Getting on his overcoat, he made for the door, but, checking the inside pocket of his suit jacket, he returned to the desk and removed a small revolver from the drawer. Now he moved out quickly, grabbing his backpack, and, saying a word to a colleague in the hallway, he bounded down the stairs of the large three-story private house.
“How bad is it?” the driver asked.
“About two hundred fifty Jews, including children and grandparents, are at the Keleti Station, about to be deported in one hour. If you get us there in twenty minutes or so, that will give me approximately forty minutes to do something.”
“Oh, you have plenty of time then.”
Raoul lighted up, and said dryly, “Yes, plenty of time.”
Vilmos knew the city like the palm of his Hungarian hand, having grown up there, and he slippped the car through the gray side streets like an eel through water. Once again Raoul was grateful for the sleek American car, which he had insisted on, having once driven one for over a year in Michigan. Whenever he felt deeply gloomy, he returned to those three golden years in Ann Arbor.
Driving about in that 1934 Studebaker was a delicious freedom. He recalled driving it the two and a half hours from Ann Arbor up to a small town, Ganges, on the banks of Lake Michigan, where a friend’s family owned a cottage on the ravishing lake. An architecture colleague in Slusser’s studio, Sof (for Sofield) had become a good pal who beat him regularly in tennis but educated him about the Midwestern laid back style. After staying with the genial family for a few nights, he’d go on a road trip way up north to the Upper Peninsula, a region wild and remote. It reminded him of the wild north of Sweden, where he had gone skiing as a young man, and where he had done his army training. An isolated wilderness for hunting and fishing, which he had tried once or twice. Oddly enough, he never felt lonely driving up there among the mountains and forests, but, rather, highly gratified, whole.
Sometimes he’d drive over to Chicago and view the soaring skyscrapers, created by his favorite architects. Harmony in steel, they shaped a powerhouse introduction to the city of rugged beauty and slaughterhouse crudeness. So appealing—and so very different from his tame, proper Stockholm.
At the Keleti Station in Buda, he alighted from the Studebaker, followed by Vilmos, and made his
way into the station yard itself. The scene was half chaotic, half orderly, with two young sentries asking him for papers, in Hungarian, and Vilmos responding, and Raoul taking out his diplomat’s papers. A crowd of families with luggage and children milled around each other, for warmth, comfort.
The guards called for their superior, and a middle-aged fellow in an Arrow Cross uniform came over and brusquely asked who they were, what they wanted.
Vilmos repeated his information, and the lieutenant shook his head, pointed to the exit. Immediately Wallenberg stepped into his face, took out a notebook, asked his name in German, and told him that if anything happened to any of these people, for whom he had safe house passes—which he waved in the man’s face—he would be shot or hung. Or far worse, if the Russians arrived first.
The lieutenant’s face changed from fury to bafflement, and Wallenberg stood right before him, not budging, blocking his way. The gray sky hung very low.
Wallenberg told him, if he was in doubt, to call the German high commissioner, whose number Raoul held out for him.
The lieutenant said something in disgust, waved his hand, and walked off. The sentries moved out of the way. Wallenberg and Vilmos walked into the yard.
The crowd moved in closer, very slowly, and an older woman wearing a large black hat pointed at Raoul and whispered to her husband, and presently the whisper circled through the crowd, creating a consensual hushed conversation. They moved closer toward Raoul. Two children were allowed to run up to him, chattering away in Hungarian. They fiddled with his trousers, reached for his hand, and held it.
A light sleet began to fall as Vilmos called out to the group to stand in queue, and he collected their Swedish safe house passes.