Michigan Author Turns Fact Into Fiction

Barbara Stark-Nemon has written an unusual novel, and what makes it even more surprising is that, while the author has invented dialogue and imagined the scenes described, the main character’s life follows very closely the story of an actual person, Stark-Nemon’s great-aunt.

Kläre is eighteen years old when we first meet her in the opening chapter of Even in Darkness. The year is 1913. On vacation with her family, she is contemplating a marriage proposal from a serious young lawyer, and by the end of the chapter, on the eve of the First World War and in the face of her brother’s enlistment in the army, she has decided to put away girlish fantasies and marry the formal and unromantic Jakob Kohler. He will be a good husband.

The years follow inexorably: 1923, 1928, 1932, and life in Germany grows more and more difficult, but Kläre and Jakob have two sons, the boys have a large and loving extended family, as well, and Kläre’s life flows with relative calm. She is happy to take up again an old friendship with Amalie, whose fiancé was killed in World War I and who has now married a widower with five children. The younger son, Ansel, does not live with his father and stepfather but in a Catholic orphanage; however, he does meet Kläre on a visit home to his family.

In 1933 a written directive comes to Bernhardt Steinmann in his publishing house: “On April 1, 1933, all Party members and associated agencies or services will boycott Jewish stores, doctors, and lawyers.” Steinmann’s first concern is for the Jewish authors whose work Berendt Verlag is committed to publishing, but he and his mother also have more personal concerns, and his first chance encounter with Kläre Kohler soon takes on deeper meaning for them both.

As the situation in Germany steadily worsens, Kläre’s older son, Erwin, is able to go to England where he eventually joins the British army; the younger, smuggled out of Germany, arrives in Palestine (not yet Israel), changes his name from Werner to Avraham, and gladly takes on the task of helping to build a new nation. Meanwhile, back home, Kläre and Jakob are seized and taken for “relocation at Theresienstadt, where Kläre and her mother were both relieved and dismayed to be reunited after the mother’s earlier seizure -- relief at finding each other alive, dismay at knowing neither would be spared the sufferings and dangers of the concentration camp.

It was Kläre’s training in massage that had introduced her to Bernhardt Steinmann’s household. In Theresienstadt the same skill ensures her family’s survival when the camp commandant calls on her to be a maid in his living quarters: because she holds a certificate of massage training and the commandant suffers from headache and neck pain, Kläre is able to bring back to her mother and husband a few extra morsels of food. They survive.

Not the end of the story.

What I have told you is only the sketchiest outline of what takes place in the Kohler family prior to and during World War II, but it is the character of Kläre – based, remember, on a very real person – and the author’s skill in conveying the depth of her personality that makes this story as deeply moving as it is. Kläre’s decision to remain in Germany following the war and the life she makes for herself following the death of her husband are unexpected and almost incredible. So successful is the fictional recreation, however, that the fantastic seems somehow inevitable.

“I didn’t want this book to end!” said the customer-friend who addressed me, the day after she finished reading it, as “Goddess of Books.” The accolade was an exaggeration, but when I had the privilege of reading this novel in manuscript, I didn’t want it to end, either. Additionally, I was impatient to share it with customers and friends in my bookstore, so the April 2015 release made me very happy indeed. 

2014: Barbara at far right, me next to her, dog stealing scene

And now a greater happiness is in store, because Barbara Stark-Nemon will be at Dog Ears Books next Wednesday, August 5, at 7 p.m. to read from her book and have what I know will be a wonderful conversation with the bookstore audience that evening. I urge everyone who can possibly make the event to join us! It will be a memorable evening.

Journey Into a Broken Heart

The Family: A Journey Into the Heart of the Twentieth Century, by David Laskin

NY: Penguin, 2013

Paper, $17

A strange, unlikely, and in the end a false family legend sends David Laskin back into his family’s past, the legend quickly abandoned for a true story – or rather, several true stories -- much more complicated and compelling. His great-great-grandfather, Shimon Dov HaKonen, a scribe in the village of Volozhin in the Pale, in the part now called Belarus, is the beginning of a dynastic trail that branches in three different directions. One leads to the United States, another to Israel, and the third ends there at the place of beginning, as the branch of the family that stayed in place is overcome by the Holocaust.

How can one review such a book? It is well written, with fully dimensional, engaging characters (i.e., real people), but with every page we turn, we know what is coming. It’s not like reading a novel or even the personal memoir of someone whose life is unfamiliar to us. We are told from the beginning that the family members in the Pale did not survive, and we have read and heard accounts of the atrocities committed in those places and those times. And yet there is a strange, irrational hope as one reads, as one turns pages, that maybe a miracle will --. But no, what’s past is past, and all of them died, perishing in ghastly, unspeakable circumstances. But it is precisely in speaking—and then writing--of the circumstances, of the lives and deaths, that the author reconstructs what happened to these lost relatives, in order that the stories of their lives and deaths will not be lost.

The American stories are of success, for the most part, most notably in the case of Itel, who became in America Ida Rosenthal, founder of the legendary Maidenform Bra company. At last count, the author tells us in his epilogue, the American branch of the family numbered 101. Stories from Israel tell of the founding of a pioneer family, which numbered 32 at the time the book was written.

The further I read in The Family, however, the more I found myself becoming still, willfully contained, trying physically I suppose to barricade myself, so to speak, against the shocking reality both of the historical past and so much of the world’s present. The maps in the book of Eastern Europe and the Middle East focus on places once again torn by hatred and cruel strife.

Is it the privilege of having grown up in the United States that allows David Laskin to cast the stories of his family in universal terms? For me, this “journey into the heart of the twentieth century" reveals a heart broken time and time again. As Stephen Daedalus said to the dreadful Mr. Deasy, the pompous, self-confident, anti-Semitic headmaster in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” It was the more astonishing to read Laskin’s even-handed last pages since I was going back and forth between the book and, drawing deep breaths and trying to sort out current events, an article called “The Liberal Zionists,” by Jonathan Freedland in the August 14 issue of the New York Review of Books. What Laskin writes in his epilogue is undeniably true but can be difficult to acknowledge when one’s relatives have suffered horribly for religion or ethnic background, and as I read the following paragraph again, I am once more astonished by it.

The pulse of history beats in every family. All of our lives are engraved with epics of love and death. What my family gained and lost in the twentieth century, though extreme, was not unique. War has touched all of us. Fate and chance and character make and break every generation. The Shoah was not the only genocide America is not the first land of opportunity nor will it be the last. Warring peoples have fought over the Holy Land for thousands of years, all of them claiming to have God on their side. In a family history written by Palestinian Arabs, Chaim and Sonia and their fellow Zionists would be oppressors; the Koran, not the Torah, would be the holy book; Jerusalem would be a besieged, stolen city. Open the book of your family and you will be amazed, as I was, at what you find.

Now, will I have the courage to read Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel?

Laskin is right. We are all touched by both love and death, we have all gained and lost, and no one in today's world has been untouched by war. Broken hearts are never made new, unbroken, but with enough love and good fortune they can mend time and time again, and so families and countries go on. We go on as individuals, too, for whatever span is given us. 

It's a soft, rainy, late summer morning. I'm here now. Wherever you are, you're there now.