After Auschwitz: A Love Story

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"When we're young we tend to think of memory as something belonging to us. There are good memories and bad ones, but aside from forgetting names occasionally, it is hard to imagine what ceasing to rely on your memory means. My mind still functions enough for me to be frightened and feel diminished. Someday, I hope not too soon, I'll cease to be alarmed...."            --    Renzo, from After Auschwitz: A Love Story Two of the 20th century's terrible A's collide in this powerful novel -- Alzheimer's Disease and the Auschwitz death camp.  Brenda Webster brings to bear her considerable knowledge of Jewish and Italian history and culture, personal acquaintance with the families of luminaries like Primo Levi, and a lifetime of psychological insight as she observes the intellectual decline of Renzo, a once brilliant writer and filmmaker. The novel is set entirely in Rome in 2010, and benefits from the author's comfortable familiarity with the city's haunts, both hidden and famous.  Renzo, aware that he is slipping deeper and deeper into the haze of Alzheimer's, keeps a journal in which he grapples with his complicated marriage to Hannah, who survived the death camps as a child and went on to become a chronicler of that experience.  Renzo knows how painful it is for Hannah to lose yet another loved one -- himself -- as he chronicles his own failing grip on reality. This story of enduring love -- a love that makes the pain bearable -- inspires hope where there appears to be despair, and allows humor to leaven the loaf of existence.  As Renzo's rich memories of the artistic and intellectual currents of the 20th century begin to fade, highly lyrical passages elucidate his sophisticated anguish and his child-like wonder.**ReviewThis one-of-a-kind novel depicting love between an aging Roman film director suffering from the onset of dementia and a Holocaust survivor is not for the faint-hearted. It takes you to places you don't want to go, but the voyage is not just searing but also transcendent. After Auschwitz: A Love Story will remain with you long after you have put it down.    --    Marilyn Yalom, Senior Scholar, Clayman Institute for Gender Research,        Stanford University; author: How the French Invented Love: 900 Years of         Passion and Romance Webster's new novel blends the horrors of the holocaust with the redeeming power of love. The plot traces the lives of Hannah, a child survivor of Auschwitz, and her husband, Italian filmmaker Renzo, as he becomes increasingly crippled with age and Alzheimers and dependent on her. If this sounds grim, it is not -- thanks to Webster's marvelous writing, deft touch, and her own love for her characters. A wonderful read that I can strongly recommend to everyone.--    Louis Breger, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, Psychoanalytic Studies, Caltech;         author: FREUD: Darkness in the Midst of Vision Brenda Webster's new novel is a brave and haunting love story. The narrator's struggle with the ravages of old age, his strain to hang onto mental coherence, are rendered with unblinking persuasiveness, and his sheltering in the care of the woman he has long loved, left, and to whom he has finally returned, is imagined unsentimentally and movingly.    --    Robert Alter, author: The Pleasure of Reading in an Ideological Age After Auschwitz: A Love Story is without a doubt the most profound, moving and important of Webster's novels. The level of complexity and insight is remarkable. I was deeply moved by her exploration of relationships and long term love and commitment in the face of aging, parenting, dealing with loss, illness, ambivalence, ambiguity, and the prospect of imminent death.    --    Alan Rinzler, legendary editor of Toni Morrison, Tom Robbins, etc. An intimate and real portrayal of memory loss, [After Auschwitz: A Love Story] tells the story of an imperfect love maintained through mutual caretaking. Webster makes it feel real.    --    ForeWord ReviewsFrom the AuthorThe Funeral of Primo Levian excerpt from the new novelAFTER AUSCHWITZ: A Love Storyby Brenda WebsterPublished by Outskirts PressReprinted here with permission. INTRODUCTION: The excerpt, below, is from the new book, After Auschwitz: A Love Story, by author, playwright and critic, Brenda Webster. The excerpt takes place at the funeral of a friend of Hannah and Renzo's, causing Renzo to think back on the funeral of the famous writer, Primo Levi. A Holocaust survivor who committed suicide, Primo's funeral -- like this book -- raised uncomfortable issues about how best to navigate the end of life. The Funeral of Primo Levian excerpt from the new novelAFTER AUSCHWITZ: A Love Storyby Brenda Webster At the cemetery I think I somehow expected a crowd like the one that followed Primo Levi's coffin. Would a reader nowadays understand the reference? You'd think as an Italian he would at least know the name and be able to say by rote: a great writer Primo Levi, one of the greatest in our time. But what would it mean to him? What remnants of a moral vision are left in our modern consumerist Italy? The economic miracle without a soul. By now only the grandchildren of survivors are alive and the very old like me. Of course I had read Primo's books about Auschwitz. I'd admired his lucidity, his absence of rage at his persecutors, wondered how he could sustain these things; apparently he couldn't. In the end he succumbed, hurled himself down the stairwell of his mother's house. People said it was a delayed reaction to Auschwitz. That made it murder, not suicide, and allowed him to remain a hero. One can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one's past. I think he said that, though he didn't mean it in the Freudian sense. Then too he thought a lot about suicide. He talks in particular about an Austrian philosopher tortured by the Gestapo. This man, Amery, unable to forget what he'd been through, became incapable of finding joy in life, in living itself. That makes me feel that I am on the right track in soaking myself in whatever pleasure I find. Just now a great flock of starlings went by, turning the sky dark with the beating of wings. Off to a new roosting place, I suppose. Primo found solace reciting Dante's Ulysses canto in which, if I remember correctly, Ulysses wants to sail to the ends of the known earth. Was hubris his sin? It was enough to see the rabbi recite the kaddish to throw me back to that awful day. Back then, another spring morning, Hannah couldn't stop crying. Primo had called her in despair a few days before his death, and she had responded to him as if he had a headache, lecturing him on setting an example for the rest of them, the survivors. "You couldn't have known," I told her. It seemed impossible that the man who had looked at the worst human beings can do to each other, that this man had done violence to himself. SAVED BUT DROWNED the newspapers trumpeted. TURIN MOURNS THE MAESTRO. But his funeral itself was like a silent movie. There were no noisy speeches. The widow in black and dark glasses walked behind him. So did she, of course, Gabriella. "Delayed homicide," the rabbi had called it, so that he could be buried with honor. The Jews, like the Christians and Muslims, think of suicide as a sin and bury suicides in a separate unconsecrated part of the cemetery. Hannah thought it wasn't the camps that had destroyed him; she insisted it was a love problem, an affair with a German woman. This seemed strange but she insisted, though she wouldn't tell me how she knew. And just now there was a biography that hinted at the same thing. His sister hated it, of course, and I put both biographies away somewhere and now I can't find them. I have some bookshelves set under the gable windows. I put them there when I was agile enough to crawl in and retrieve them. Anyway, I thought that Primo was worn down by the difficulties of living virtually imprisoned by his aged blind mother. Living with her was as much a litmus test of character as living in the Lager. Copyright ©2014 by Brenda Webster. All rights reserved. After Auschwitz: A Love Story, is published by WingsPress and available wherever fine books are sold or directly from the publisher. All WingsPress titles are distributed through Independent Publishers Group at 1-800-888-4741 and available at IndieBound.org