Recently, I sat down to re-read the Canadian poet Anne Michael’s testament to the life of Jakob Beer; translator, poet, survivor of the Holocaust.  ‘Fugitive Pieces’ is a book as much about love as it is about war – the things that can heal us, the things that can keep us alive.  I originally read it in a time of personal strife and the memory of its excoriating clarity has stayed with me ever since as one of the books that truly changed my life, as if, in helping document destruction, it also offered a path in how to put life back together again.

Michaels writes with a kind of harrowing detail about the Holocaust itself; the lives taken, interrupted; as Beer reads by way of escape about Houdini, he thinks of the Jews all over Europe climbing into bins, chests, boxes, under floorboards, behind walls to disappear; escape acts from discovery and capture.  She writes about the mentalities that facilitated and enabled such horrors – the dehumanisation, the labelling of one class of people as a subhuman other, where the treatment is justified as somehow the normal rules don’t apply.  When you believe your victim is more animal than man, a problem to be dealt with, an inconvenience to be ushered out of sight, normal morality flies.

Jakob Beer was smuggled to safety in the back of a car bound for a Greek island where he hid, as a boy, for and from the rest of the war, soothed to sanity by the narratives of his Greek protector Athos, emersed in a world of geology, poetry, archaeology, a thousand scraps of integral and arcane knowledge of polar explorers, ancient mariners, the aurora borealis, landscapes that lie hidden in time, one below or rising up from the other.  It deals with what masks things, reveals them, how meaning can be extracted from a stone.  It goes without saying his story from that time forward was a search to learn to live with such times, to somehow learn to be fully human in the face of the atrocities he lived through, in the face of such incomprehensible loss.

Amid all of this, it is inevitably, and quite brilliantly, a book about language.  How new tongues can put us at a distance from our past, how we can put them on like a new set of clothes, like a kind of invisible cloak, how we can be dislocated both geographically but also phonetically, which can make any eventual homecoming all the more profound.  Jakob, from necessity, became a kind of linguistic shapeshifter – his Yiddish giving way to his protectorate Greek, later to the English of his newfound home in Toronto.  It certainly fed into his work as a translator.  But if Michaels deals with the heaviest of themes, she can also have the most playful of touches, nowhere better evidenced than in her palindromes (“Yreka Bakery” of a friend’s establishment and “are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”). 

In an echo of Athos’s – and Jakob’s own – diving into layers of history; acutely personal and metaphysical by turns, Michael’s delves some precarious waters.  She documents how a man can be saved in every sense, can find his way back into a life truly lived despite decades of wading through psychological mires.  Of how our decisions can save us, of how we can truly embrace what life can place in our path.  Michael’s charts the trajectory of Beer’s excursions into the depths of his family’s past, gives some account of how we can learn to release ghosts, and parts of ourselves in the process.

But perhaps her greatest lessons can be more immediate.  She writes about the forces of history, the gradual instant, events and what leads to them as almost geological phenomena, where many years of gradual influence can amount in the occurrences of a single day.  She writes of how one generation’s trauma can be transmitted to the next. 

And so, this winter, as violence repeated itself with such terrible intensity, I found myself turning to such a work.  Not for perspective exactly, but from a kind of raw acknowledgement of horror, from wondering where to go in the face of inhumanity, from wondering if it is possible at all to be alive in the knowledge of such things and yet be human, to try and fathom how at all we can respond to such bloodshed with any degree of real depth of mercy in the face of the scenes we have seen.  

Can we learn anything at all from documenting historic atrocity and, more than that, the way out of it, the way in which a path can be found to eventual healing; a signpost perhaps of the long road ahead for survivors?  We can all be too easily caught up in narratives of victimhood; blame the other, identify ourselves as underdogs, fall into spiteful traps of ‘them or us’, fail to see the story from the far side of the fence.  

Perhaps acknowledgement of historic trauma can help somehow to find the way beyond it, that our criticisms are not compromised by lack of respect, of compassion, that we can still recognise historic hurt.  We can never forget the cruel tally of what happened in Europe which all told was not so very long ago.  If pain can ever have a purpose, it may be in its ability to keep the memory fresh, to help us not to repeat or to permit the repetition of history’s mistakes and tragedies.  Perhaps it can serve to remind us that any apparent other are really as close as our kin, our very own blood if we can only lift the veil of trauma to see clearly our mistakes, our potential, just how we might learn to let live.