The Living and the Lost by Ellen Feldman
Another winner in the immersive tales of war sequelae that
Feldman does so well.
‘The Living and the Lost’ shows us immediate post-war Berlin
through the eyes of Meike, a young Jewish woman working for the Allie denazification
program while searching for her remaining kin and stumbling—sometimes literally—across
her own half-buried past.
Meike (now called Millie) and her brother David were
separated from their parents and younger sister when the family was fleeing to
America before the war. Fostered by an American family friend of their father’s,
they became well-educated, well fed naturalized American adults. Now back in
Berlin, Meike is working for the Americans and David is serving with them as an
interrogator, both trying to sort the ‘good Germans’ from the ‘bad Nazis’ while
not quite believing in the existence of the former. Many of their co-workers
are German Jews, the lucky few who escaped Europe and are now back with their hopes,
their losses, their terrors. The surroundings—half familiar streets and parks,
the other half unrecognizable ruins—mirror their internal landscapes.
The imagery is unsparing but never wallows: gaunt survivors
both from the camps and in the bombed and crumbling cities; women raped so many
times sex has lost all meaning, willing to trade it to anyone for a bite of
food or a chance to sleep warm that night; Allied soldiers well fed and
hard-hearted against a population that conspired to actively aid or passively
look away from atrocities committed in their name; ‘the licentiousness of those
who’d gone so numb to pain and death that only a moment of pleasure, or at
least gratification, could light a spark of life.”
The strength of the character Meike is that she is at once a
recognizable, fortunate Americanized woman with whom modern readers can readily
identify and an internally shattered escapee from the Holocaust that rended
families, communities, and countries on a scale never previously documented.
She walks in several worlds---her post-war current life, her Berlin childhood,
her American adolescence, her life as a Jew in each of those countries, her simultaneous
and emotionally fractured existence as a guilt-ridden survivor/refugee, a
vengeful victor, and a damaged victim of unimaginable losses—and takes the
reader with her every step of the way.
Helping to delineate the many inner and outer conflicts is Meike’s
American schooling. She gets into a women’s college on a scholarship specifically
for Jewish girls who have a strong academic background and is amazed by the freedom
of her American-born roommate to openly identifies as Jewish when Meike has learned
for a decade to hide every visible sign of her Jewish heritage out of shame and
fear. The Star of David on a gold chain is
“Clear as daylight, as blinding in its own way as the maidenhair tree outside
the window. And Barbara didn’t even seem to be aware that she was wearing it.”
This was before she and David both learned that in America,
even if you escape Nazi Germany, you are still a Jew, and there are still
places you are not welcome.
David is subjected to schoolboy bullying and discrimination while Meike soon
realizes that her peer group of Jewish students is being comfortably ghettoized
on this enlightened American campus: only rooming with each other because upstanding
American families don’t want their daughters sharing with Jews. She and
David go on holiday with the Bennetts, her American foster family, and they’re
asked to leave the resort because the place retains its firm No-Jews policy even
while America is sending GIs and materiel to Europe to fight the regime that
wants to destroy them.
Having grown up in constant terror, witnessing terrible
things and becoming psychologically more hardened on her journey to America, Meike
“could never get over the feeling that the Bennett’s were the juveniles in the
equation. For all their experience and worldliness, their admirable
achievements and considerable success, they were two cosseted babes in the
wood, unacquainted with terror, innocent of horror, strangers to guilt, except
the generic kind common to well intentioned people of their class.”
But the kindly, clueless Bennetts’ connections get Meike and
David good education and eventually help them on their way back to Berlin.
It's a fascinating journey both internally and externally.
Post-war Berlin is crowded with angry or sullen or defeated Germans, with many thousands
of Displaced Persons both civilian and liberated from concentration camps.
Housing is in short supply, food scarce, and every commodity imaginable has a
price on the flourishing black markets. Surviving Jews burn with understandable
rage against the Germans who went along as much as against those who fomented
and committed the atrocities. Arrogance and preconceptions from Allied soldiers
and civilian advisors often fuel further misunderstanding and resentment from
the conquered, the liberated, the shell-shocked, and all the other human
flotsam of the war.
Threads of pregnancy and child-rearing are woven into the
fabric. Following years of catastrophic losses of lives, each new one feels
like it should be celebrated. Yet so many babies are the result of Soviet mass rape,
or the unwelcome price of the struggle for food and shelter, or relics of wartime
affairs that are soon forgotten by soldiers on their way back to the lives they
left behind. Babies die, Meike learns, almost as easily in the peace as they
did in the war. And in the post-war baby boom is laced with both hope for a new
start and terror at making more hostages to a Fate so recently proved not only
fickle but utterly without mercy.
As I’ve seen in other Feldman novels, the many social and
political and personal complexities are captured neatly in vignettes that offer
glimpses into the turbulent times and the people wracked and drifting through
them, all while supporting the main narrative of Meike’s physical and
psychological search. There are both losses and wins along the way, people
found and reunited only to face new struggles from which they, or their
relationships, may not emerge victorious, or at all.
It's a human-scale look at a turbulent time and place—unsparing
yet sympathetic—through the eyes of a traumatized but ultimately hopeful survivor.
Highly recommended.
St. Martin's Griffin/ St. Martin's
Publishing Group
On Sale: 09/07/2021
ISBN: 9781250821812
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#StMartinsGriffin #BookReview #Berlin #WW2 #AlliedOccupation #LivingAndLost
#Holocaust #hope #survival
