E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten
Karpf The War After
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30784-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-30784-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Anne Karpf is an award-winning journalist, writer and sociologist. Her most recent book is The Human Voice: The Story of a Remarkable Talent (Bloomsbury). She co-edited A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity (Verso), and teaches at London Metroploitan University.
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My family was big on coats. Throughout my adolescence and well beyond we’d spontaneously combust into spectacular rows about them. My parents, always convinced I was a season behind (dressed for summer in the autumn, autumn in the winter), would ‘tsk’, then openly lambast me for the thinness of my coat: ‘You can’t go out like that, you’ll freeze.’ I’d deny that my coat was inadequate with as much vigour as if my very self had been called into question, while strangling my own doubts about whether I’d be warm enough. They’d plump up their attack with medical warnings – ‘You’ll catch pneumonia’. I’d counter with a furious adolescent assertion that I could look after myself. It would end either in screams or a fraught expedition to buy a new coat.
Virtually none, in their view, was thick enough. How many sheep gave their fleeces for my parents to be satisfied that I was sufficiently warm I couldn’t say. And despite my protests, I too secretly subscribed to the belief that the only way to avoid refrigeration was by wearing bulk. When, at fifteen, for the first and only time I made a skirt, I used a fat felt – the kind of material that lines roofs in blustery places. The seams required industrial needles, and the hem was like a sandwich.
I never really understood what lay behind their obsession with trussing me in wool – one which seemed to go far beyond normal, even normal Jewish, parental concern – until many years later when I was going out with a friend. It was winter and cold, and she wore a thin shirt and an even thinner jacket – on my parents’ scale its warmth rating would be somewhere near that of a bikini, I found myself asking her if she wasn’t cold. Apparently this hadn’t ever occurred to her. I learned that her father was a military man, and saw his children less as a family than as a squadron: he believed in toughening them up. It wasn’t quite Basic Training, but they were expected to learn to survive without complaint. As a consequence, feeling cold had never been included in her alphabet of sensations. I, on the other hand, as a result (I’m sure) and not a cause of my parents’ concern, felt constantly cold or, if I didn’t, was anxious that I might.
And so it dawned on me that cold wasn’t just a meteorological fact but also a psychic state. My parents experienced the post-war world as cold, both in their bodies and minds. Cold for them was life outside the home, cold represented what awaited you when you went out. They could control the temperature in their own place (and rightly considered the English, in their freezing houses, barbarians); but if the gemütlichkeit of a Jewish home signified safety, anything in the icy beyond could make you ill. The air outside was a polluting miasma, a kind of alien non-chicken soup, and you needed to take a little Jewish warmth out with you. You had to take inside out.
About the dangerous outside my sister and I learned early. I can’t remember when we were first told about the war. I sometimes think that maybe we were never told; it just seeped into our home, like some peculiarly mobile fog, and took up residence. The house and our parents seemed layered with a kind of subcutaneous sadness. The large, old, heavy pieces of furniture shipped from Poland contributed to the sense of gloom which schoolfriends much later confirmed. This was not a home to which you invited loud or uncomplaisant playmates. Or where several children simultaneously squealed. This was a serious house. Our social lives unfurled largely at the homes of our schoolfriends.
We were told stories about the war, and saw the number inked into my mother’s arm. I remember little: both my sister and I have almost no memory of our childhoods – our remembered lives began properly at about the age of thirteen. Before that it’s all gummed up, with only the odd sensation or incident showing through, like fragments of newsprint in papier mâché. Or a dream maddeningly just beyond recall. It’s as if we never really had a childhood, and perhaps in some sense this was so.
But I do know that death was alive and present in our home. My parents had a few rescued pre-war photo albums containing group pictures of chillingly merry people. They would point out who was who and how they died. With so few living relatives dead ones had to suffice, so my sister and I heard countless stories about the Jóseks and Jadzias, the Mileks and Natans. They were spoken of vividly, as if they might walk through title door at any moment. But these reminiscences only confirmed the deep caesura in the family’s continuity. Looking back, it sometimes seems as if we’d been cast adrift in Britain, or abandoned on one bank of a river with all our necessaries on the other. But if we felt a profound sense of erasure, we strenuously tried to busy it away. So I was never able to identify the lack, to name it let alone meet it, since all of our energies went into stopping and plugging it.
It seemed as if from birth I was obsessed with death. My parents tried to assuage this but almost certainly fuelled it by lying about their ages. It wasn’t vanity so much as anxiety that made them lop off a few years, and their confession to the subtraction when I was around eight or nine only persuaded me that there was something risky in being the age they now admitted to. My sister Eve was charged with breaking the news of the death of a large neighbour to me: because of my preoccupation with death she was told to stress the woman’s obesity as the cause of her drowning in the bath. Both my father’s age (fifty when I was born) and my parents’ past made them seem fragile: in rows Eve’s trump card was ‘You’ll give Daddy a heart-attack’. (If I’d known he’d live to ninety-three, I might have won more of them.) So pervasive was our anxiety about our parents’ dying that when the fairies we dreamt up reached 100, they began the life-cycle all over again but now in reverse, returning to nought. An incidental effect of this was that, at certain stages in their lives, the child fairies found themselves to be older than their parents.
Outside began in earnest when I started school, a grimy building smelling of boiling cabbage and bleached toilets, and utterly alien to the mittelEuropean knädel-and-strudel atmosphere of home. I was like an astronaut stepping out on to the moon, but it was a small step for humankind, and a vast one for me. In my first week, the teacher distributed a malt tablet to each child. I didn’t know what it was but already I doubted my ability to ingest it. I tried and gagged. I got permission to go to the cloakroom to try again. To my horror in my fumbling the pill dropped down the sink, leaving behind a terrible moral dilemma: should I confess to the teacher? I didn’t, and after school rushed home to persuade my mother to give me a note excusing me from further pills.
This is my earliest and one of my most resonant memories; I recoiled from those malt pills like a kosher child first tasting pork. I think going to school felt like abandoning my parents (or being abandoned by them). The pills were part of a frightening foreign culture, little pellets of Englishness; refusing them was a rejection of that alien world beyond my parents’ house.
In fact, until I was eleven, school was a digestive nightmare. My policy seemed to be nil by mouth. I couldn’t abide milk and had to be excused from this too. And school dinners were beyond the pale. For years I remembered one of the earliest as a fried egg on top of a rice pudding – unlikely even in the culinary ruin that was a mid-1950s London state primary school. But the very preposterousness of the memory is eloquent: they were giving me absurdly dissonant things to swallow. I found a simple way of refusing. I would go home for lunch – a brief return visit to the safe place. And so I did: while my friends and peers were gulping down their school dinners unperturbed – for them it was just a prelude to playground handstands – I, until the age of eleven, made a daily extra journey to and from home. I think I was trying to reassure myself that it was still there.
School was alien not just nutritionally but also linguistically: in those days there was no conception of encouraging a pupil’s mother tongue. So I went from a home where, between them, my parents could get by in eight languages (Polish, English, German, Russian, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Spanish, with a smattering of Yiddish), to a resolutely monolingual world, one where my parents’ foreign accents, inaudible to me, were regularly remarked upon. My mother was often asked if she was French – presumably because this was the nearest foreign country, and so could conveniently stand for Abroad.
Leaving home was always frightening and felt wrenching; it wasn’t so much a leaving as a forcible extraction. My anxiety invariably announced itself in my feeling sick, and this became a shameful insignia of childishness. Parties, picnics, holidays, outings of any kind – all were marked, to the exasperation of my sister and parents, by my feeling (and sometimes being) sick. If the outing involved leaving my parents for any length of time, the sickness would be all the less resistible. Family reminiscences are still scattered with the reproachful refrain ‘and then you were sick’. They put a high premium on coping, and disapproved of these gastric displays of fragility.
I, for my part, was deeply ashamed of my inability to go robustly into the world, and tried to bludgeon my...
