Gail Benick

Author of Memory's Shadow

The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

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The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain:  An Oblique Look at the Holocaust in Switzerland

When Rose Tremain, the celebrated British novelist, wrote The Gustav Sonata, she wanted to explore the issue of neutrality during one of the most turbulent periods in European history — the era of World War II. Where better to set a novel about neutrality than in Switzerland which has the oldest policy of armed neutrality in global affairs? The Swiss have not participated in a foreign war since the Treaty of Paris established the country’s neutrality in 1815. But, would Switzerland, bordering on Nazi Germany, be able to remain neutral when confronted with a possible German invasion? How would neutral Switzerland respond to refugees fleeing the Nazis?

Published in 2016, The Gustav Sonata considers Swiss neutrality from various angles. In an interview, Tremain stated that she was interested in examining neutrality not only as it unfolded in Switzerland, but “to create a person who is striving for a kind of a neutrality” and therefore refuses to engage with passionate feelings. To that end, she develops the character of Gustav Perle, a Swiss child growing up at the time of World War II. He adores his mother, but she is an angry, hostile widow who is incapable of returning her son’s love. Instead, his mother advises him to be like Switzerland and master himself.  Early in the novel, Tremain describes Gustav:

He never cried. He could often feel a cry trying to come up from his heart, but he always forced it down because this was how his mother had told him to behave in the world. He had to master himself. The world was alive with wrongdoing, she said…In this way, Gustav would be prepared for the uncertainties to come because even in Switzerland where the war hadn’t trespassed, nobody yet knew how the future would unfold. So you see, she said, you have to be like Switzerland. Do you understand me? You have to hold yourself together and be courageous and stay separate and strong. Then you will have the right kind of life.”

Gustav’s self-mastery is put to the test in his lifelong friendship with Anton Zwiebel, a talented Jewish pianist suffering from stage fright, which sabotages his career as a performing artist. As the story progresses, the intense friendship between the boys comes to define Gustav’s adulthood and exposes the pitfalls of remaining neutral. Gustav must ultimately choose between a bland existence of taking care of others or acknowledging his own needs and passions.

If Gustav learns self-mastery from his mother, the life of his father, Erich Perle, might have taught him the opposite tendency. Erich Perle served as the assistant chief of police in a small Swiss town in the 1930s. Following the Anschluss in 1938, when Nazi Germany annexed Austria, Switzerland closed its border to those entering the country without proper entry permits, particularly Jews from Germany and Austria who had a “J” stamped on their passports. As the number of Jewish refugees trying to enter Switzerland at the Austrian border increased and put pressure on local police officers to enforce restrictions against Jewish refugees, Erich Perle faced a moral dilemma. He could follow government instructions to send back Jewish refugees to face their likely death or breach the explicit orders of his government.

In the novel, Erich Perle chooses to assist Jewish refugees escaping Nazis persecution by stamping the refugees’ passports with a false date so that it would look as if they had entered Switzerland before the border had been closed to them.Erich Perle is unwilling to remain neutral. Instead, he risks his life, and by extension the wellbeing of his wife and son, Gustav. Swiss authorities discover Perle’s illegal activity and strip him of his position. Humiliated and dishonoured, Erich Perle dies of a heart attack before the end of the war.

Tremain based the fictional character of Erich Perle loosely on the historical figure, Paul Grueninger, who served as a Swiss police officer at the outset of World War II. Motivated by altruism, he disregarded official instructions and allowed desperate Jewish refugees to enter Switzerland by falsifying their arrival dates and treating their entry into Switzerland as legal. But, unlike the fictional Erich Perle, Grueninger took his altruistic stance several steps further. He impeded government efforts to trace illegal Jewish refugees and paid with his own money to buy winter clothes for needy refugees who had been forced to leave all their belongings behind.

When Swiss authorities discovered Grueninger’s actions, he was dismissed from the police force, his benefits were suspended, and he was brought to trial on charges of illegally permitting the entry of 3,600 Jews into Switzerland by falsifying their registration papers. In1941, the court found him guilty of breach of duty. He was deprived of his right to a pension, thrown out of his state-sponsored apartment, convicted of forgery and forced to pay the trial costs. Ostracized and forgotten, Grueninger lived for the rest of his life in difficult circumstances. In 1971, a year before his death, Yad Vashem bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on Paul Grueninger.

Neither Paul Grueninger nor the fictionalized father figure in The Gustav Sonata remain neutral when confronted with a humanitarian refugee crisis. But why did Tremain alter the facts and remove Erich Perle from the novel so early in the plot of The Gustav Sonata? The answer lies in the author’s oblique approach to the Holocaust, which provides the context for The Gustav Sonata, but not the main subject matter. Indeed, Tremain takes great care to keep the Holocaust off stage in this novel. She depicts the Holocaust in a muffled whisper rather than in a thundering roar. Most importantly, she makes the decision to tell a story about the Holocaust in Switzerland from the perspective of a Swiss family rather than a Jewish family. By killing off the Swiss father who is the character most impacted by the Holocaust, Tremain ensures that the events of World War II will not overshadow the hero’s journey at the core of this novel. That journey focuses on Gustav’s transformation from an emotionally closed, passive child to a fully realized adult with the ability to make active decisions about his life. He is capable of human agency, no longer needing to hide behind the shadow of neutrality.

Go Ahead and Strain Credulity: The Betrayers by David Bezmozgis

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In a recent review of The Betrayers, a novel by David Bezmozgis, the reviewer in the LA Times (September 18, 2014) criticizes the book for straining credulity. Of all the rented rooms in all of the small towns of the world, the Russian Israeli protagonist, Baruch Kotler, ends up in a room that is owned by the man who betrayed him to the KGB, Vladimir Tankilevich, the very man responsible for sending him to the Gulag for thirteen years. How plausible is that, the reviewer asks? Implausible. As Kotler’s mistress says to him, ‘The odds of … ending up a boarder in his house, are almost nil.”

Of course, the Yalta encounter between Kotler and Tankilevich is not a chance encounter. Bezmozgis consciously designs the meeting of these old enemies as a bashert moment, to borrow a Yiddish expression. It’s meant to be. Why else would the famed Kotler, who bears some resemblance to the prominent Russian-born refusenik Natan Sharansky, flee a fast-breaking scandal in Israel and seek cover in the Crimea? “If there is a Russian Jew in the world who doesn’t know who you are,” his mistress admonishes him, “I haven’t met him.”

Nevertheless, Kotler is determined to confront his Russian past. ”Call it curiosity. Call it instinct,” Kotler tells his mistress. “And I am a man who has followed his instincts.” To his credit, Bezmozgis makes no effort to hide the literary contrivance at work here. Instead, he uses it to his advantage to develop the personality of Kotler.

But if you are a reader that is swayed by the vagaries of history, then savour the way Bezmozgis depicts the Russian Jewish community of Simferopol, a town not far from Yalta in the Crimea. Every Saturday Tankilevich takes the trolleybus to Simferopol to go to synagogue because ten men are often not available to make a minyan or quorum required for Shabbat services. And when one Jew dies, there’s nobody to replace him. Moreover, the dwindling number of men who pray at the synagogue on Saturday mornings cannot read from the Torah scrolls. They’ve had no training. Only a lingering sense of piety or obligation leads these disheartened Jews to unlatch the ark and reveal the scrolls at all. Just once a year on Simchas Torah do they actually remove the scrolls from the ark, open a bottle of vodka and dance with the Torah on their shoulders. Bezmozgis spares no detail in illuminating the tragicomic fate of the poor Russian Jews of Simferopol: Nahum Ziskin, Moshe Podolsky, Isidor Feldman. His mission is to rescue these menu peuple, the small folk, before they slip through the cracks of history. By giving them names, he succeeds.

So what if the structure of The Betrayers strains credulity? The cameo appearance of the   Russian Jews in Simferopol is alive with actuality.

Reading Together: Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes

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BON tiein Canada final Dec 11 14There are so many ways to celebrate books and encourage communities to read together. From local book clubs to Canada Reads, the CBC’s annual battle of the books, these events transform the private act of reading into a communal practice. The goal is to start a collective conversation about books that can change perspectives, break barriers and illuminate issues.

In the winter of 2015, Sheridan College where I teach launched its own extended community reading event: Sheridan Reads. The multi-faceted initiative is designed to bring together students, staff and faculty with community groups, public libraries and service organizations in the area to discuss and celebrate the work of a chosen writer. We kicked off Sheridan Reads with Lawrence Hill’s historical novel, The Book of Negroes. Hill came to Sheridan to deliver the inaugural lecture on “Mining Creativity: Perspectives from a Novelist and Screenwriter.”

The audience attending the event experienced a frisson of excitement when the celebrated author made his appearance on the Trafalgar Road campus in Oakville. Hill was remarkably gracious, chatting with attendees, expressing interest in our lives, sharing information about his forthcoming novel. In his lecture, the same sense of candor prevailed. Hill told us that he learned the power of writing at a young age when he asked his father for a kitten. His father required him to write a letter stating why he should be allowed to have a kitten. “He gave me the kitten,” Hill said, “which was the most foolish thing he ever did because from that point on I kept writing letters whenever I wanted something significant.”

As expected, Hill conducted extensive research while writing The Book of Negroes. Although the protagonist in the novel, Aminata Diallo, is a fictional character, her story is based on historical fact. In his lecture, Hill noted that some of his most stirring findings were accidental. In one archival search, he happened to come across an historical painting from the 18th century showing the cruel march of African men, women and children to the slave ships. This visualization of the forced walk stimulated his imagination and became a powerful scene in both the book and the CBC television adaptation of the novel, which Hill co-wrote. Be opened to the accidents of research, he advised the audience.

The take-away from Hill’s lecture at Sheridan —and his books generally — is the basic truth that stories matter. “Some of us turn to stories in the way that others turn to religion,” he noted, suggesting that we seek comfort in narrative during time of crisis and stress. By telling stories, particularly our own stories, Hill believes we discover who we are, where we come from, where we’re going, what lessons we can draw from the past and how we want to live.

The need to tell our own stories may well explain Hill’s desire to write The Book of Negroes. The son of a black father and white mother who were human rights activists in the United States and Canada, Hill has written extensively on being black and black history, both in his fiction and non-fiction. In an interview prior to his lecture at Sheridan, Hill reflected on the transatlantic migration of the Black Loyalists who are portrayed in The Book of Negroes. “Imagine that — being stolen from Africa as a child, becoming enslaved …but getting back to the mother continent in the same lifetime.” He itched to dramatize one of the most astounding transatlantic migrations in history. And why not? As a black Canadian writer, Hill can embrace The Book of Negroes as his story, too.