I shouldn’t have bothered.
The book is highly regarded and reviewed by others. Indeed, a quote from The New York Times is prominently displayed on my paperback copy: “You do not ‘read’ The Wall -- you live it.”
Yeah, sure. As it turns out, there is a very specific reason why I had a hard time ‘living’ The Wall. Its subject matter is compelling -- the story of a group of Jews imprisoned in and attempting to escape the Warsaw Ghetto imposed on them by the Nazi regime in the 1940s. But its frame is distracting and needlessly complicated.
We are reading, supposedly, a secret journal kept by one of those Jews -- Noach Levinson -- discovered later and now being edited by an editor who is never named nor even described. This editor interrupts the story frequently with his own parenthetical comments, but most disrupting of all is this little gimmick:
In the case of each note, the reader will find first the date of the events therein described, and then the date of Levinson’s entry. Levinson was careful in every note to designate his source, and these attributions have been kept. Where the note was based on his own observation or opinion, he used, as this volume uses, the initials N.L. The reader will notice that a number of passages are marked with a star (✡). The passages are all taken from the context of a series of interviews that took place on May 9-10, 1943.
You probably didn’t follow all of that. I surely didn’t when I first read it in the Editor’s Prologue. But essentially what it means is that there is no logical, chronological flow to the story you’re about to read. Levinson is always, I suppose, writing in the past tense, but sometimes he is chronicling events on the very day that they occurred, with almost no benefit of hindsight, and sometimes he is reflecting back on events that happened days, weeks, or maybe months before -- and throughout all that confusion, the editor is interrupting with tidbits of context and knowledge, either from the very end of the story when the starred interviews occurred, or with the historical perspective that he has, living as he does, years into the future after the story’s events. It is, from the perspective of chronology, a mess.
Whenever I stumble across a novel that adopts an artificial frame like this -- and there are many of them, it being something, I think, of a literary tradition -- I can’t help but ask myself why. Why are you doing this? What is the point? Why not just tell a story, from beginning to end, with a detached if not omniscient narrator? Do you think that’s artificial? Do you think the reader will question the validity of your story? Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret -- the only time a reader examines the frame of a story -- as in who is this narrator that is speaking to me and how does he know the things that he knows -- is when you adopt one of these artificial frames for your story. The Wall is a clear example of a novel where the frame overwhelms the story, and does little more than remind the reader that he is reading a novel. In this reality, there is no possible way to ‘live’ The Wall. One can only ‘read’ it.
Having said all of that, there was still something of interest here. For me, that was the character of Dolek Berson.
He was born, he tells me, thirty-two years ago, here in Warsaw. His father was religious and stern; a glove manufacturer; moderately prosperous. Dolek was an only child. His parents sent him to Heder and Tarbuth schools, but he also had a good secular education, at first from tutors and later in a Polish Gymnasium, where, he now says, he learned a certain flexibility about his Jewishness: he sometimes defended himself in fistfights and sometimes passed off abuses as if they had not been offered. As a small boy he was rather fat and was therefore the butt of both Jewish and Polish teasing. He became, as a consequence, more skillful than most of us in the use of the timely retort, the opportune lie, the slow-absorbent insult, and the vituperative retreat. He also practiced up on boxing, at his father’s insistence; this he hated.
He showed a musical talent by the age of seven, when he began piano lessons. Possibly his playground tortures made him more friendly with the piano than he would otherwise have been; at any rate, he practiced three and four hours a day when he was only ten. His diligence at the piano was not, however, altogether spontaneous. He says that when his mother discovered that he had some talent, she pushed him and pushed him and pushed him; she always used to say she wanted people to know what a Jewish boy could do.
When I first came across this biological sketch of Dolek Berson, by far the longest that I can remember any character being given by our first layer narrator, I thought I had stumbled upon something important.
As he grew into young manhood, Berson rebelled more and more against the religious atmosphere of his home, and so began to run away, like so many of our generation, from his Jewishness. This was when he went to Bonn to study. While there, thanks partly to his ability in music, he was pretty well assimilated and was accepted by his University acquaintances as a Pole. His mother died while he was out of the country.
After his return from Germany, Berson worked for four years in his father’s glove factory, and disliked it: working down from the top, he says. This career was ended by his father’s death and the sale of the plant. Berson then tried a number of kinds of work: as a newspaper reporter, a clerk in a millinery store, a messenger for a law firm (he studied at night, thinking he might eventually pass his examinations), and even from time to time in artisan trades, as an apprentice locksmith, as a cartwright, and in a bookbinding plant. All these changes of job account for his wide range of acquaintance, some of it apparently inconsistent with his background and education: his friendship with the baker, for instance. For one black period soon after his father’s death -- I could not discover the reason for this; there is some mystery -- he joined the Lumpenproletariat, the world of tramps, moving with them from town to town, eating in charity kitchens, sleeping in fifty-groszy dormitories, begging, stealing, and loafing. Certainly it was not poverty that drove him to this adventure, as he enjoyed a fair patrimony; curiosity, perhaps. Curiosity has in fact grown unusually stout in him. He is one of those people who think they are always learning: ‘That was good experience,’ he says of one job, or, ‘I feel that that was part of my education.’ He has taken up many kinds of out-of-the-way study, such as bookkeeping, electrical mechanics, astronomy, and so on. He remembers surprisingly much of these various bits of nonsense, if one can judge from random conversation in a prison cell.
This, I thought, is an everyman. Perhaps, if you’ll forgive the usage, an Every Jew. An collective example of the kind of person who will live (or die) in the Warsaw ghetto. His name, Berson, is even a clue, close as it is, to Person.
He married, five years ago, a girl who is frail and delicate, it seems, often sick and usually helpless, Childless.
Berson evidently reads a lot, though there are shocking gaps in his reading. No Goethe. No Gogol. No Peretz. He has read my books. He has read them carefully. (I would not be myself if I did not admit that this may be most of my reason for liking him.) In a long talk one afternoon he discussed what I had to say about the Bar Mitzvah ceremony in Customs: a really remarkable memory for details, but here and there he had missed the larger points altogether.
His judgment of people is spotty. Although he seems to be quickly offended -- Breithorn has got under his skin two or three times here in the cell -- he seems very trusting and generous, and he hates to believe badly of anyone. Of old Benlevi, for instance, he is extravagantly admiring. He refuses to understand that this once fine man has been victimized by his fate, to the point where he is now a name, an actor, and even a fraud. I acknowledge here an excessive severity on my own part. I seem increasingly to dislike everyone. Hence my surprise at feeling well-disposed towards Berson.
Once I saw this reading of the text, I was unable to unsee it, and I paid close attention to everything that was said about Berson and to everything he did. When Berson decides to join the local Jewish police force, initially responsible for patrolling the ghetto, the description of his thoughts and motivations become pregnant with meaning for the everyman.
He thinks the main reason why he considered becoming a policeman is that he yearns for order. The name of the police force appeals to him very much: Jüdisher Ordnungsdienst. Jewish Order Service. He wants to help restore order. I had not previously noticed any strong tendency toward tidiness in Berson, I must confess; though I can see how our present circumstances might have brought out this hidden quality, if he had it at all, since up to now the most obvious definition of being in a ghetto is: disorder. The Jewish district is, above all, chaotic. Only now do we begin to understand what happened during the past four or five weeks. Eighty thousand Poles moved out of this area, and one hundred and forty thousand Jews moved in. The street scenes have been dreadful: crowds and crowds of Jews with all their goods on small pushcarts wandering through the streets looking for homes: no, looking for less than that: looking for mere corners in crowded rooms. The office the Judenrat set up as a clearing-house for apartments was overwhelmed; one saw hand-written placards advertising for living space on the walls of coffee-shops and even in the streets. One could see lines of people waiting in the streets for God knows what for days on end. One saw bargaining and arguing everywhere. Groaning was our music. Everything was transacted in a whine. Dr. Breithorn’s many years of sourness were justified in one terrible event: the transfer of the Czysta Street hospital within the boundaries of the ghetto -- the parade of the sick and dying from a modern building, with the finest medical equipment, to two drafty buildings on Leszno Street. Instruments and laboratories had to be left behind. One can see hunger-panics in the streets every day. The Poles, against whom the Germans discriminate in rations, still get delicacies, such as 250 grams of artificial honey, 62.5 grams of margarine, 100 grams of dried peas, and one lemon, every week. Our people get bread and groats and, if they are wealthy, a little saccharine. Smuggling has begun, of course, but smuggling brings high prices. How long will our money last? Is there any wonder that Berson craves a little neatness.
Not just Berson, of course, but everyman, all of us, we all crave a little neatness. And order. An overwhelming need for order drives so much of what we do and what we’re willing to sacrifice.
Because soon after, Berson reflects on his choice.
But when Berson went to his room to take off his trappings, he looked in a mirror -- and he says he was frightened by what was reflected. He saw in the glass an apparition of cruelty. He suddenly remembered what it had been like to have a club in his hand all day. He remembered chasing a group of beggars away from his corner. He remembered what had happened when some Germans had come along: the only thing he had resisted was his own impulse to hobnob with them.
Berson has a theory. He thinks that because cruelty -- and there, in one word, I suppose, is the definition for this ghetto I have hunted for -- because cruelty has been inflicted on him, he now feels the need to pass the cruelty on to someone else. He said tonight:
-- I am like a cup. I’ve been poured full with a too hot fluid. It has to be poured out of me, before I crack.
It is on this level that I most enjoyed The Wall, but there, sadly, was not enough of this to really satisfy me.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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