A grim yet sympathetic foray into post-WW2 Berlin

 

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

#Netgalley #EllenFeldman #StMartinsGriffin #BookReview #Berlin #WW2 #AlliedOccupation #LivingAndLost #Holocaust #hope #survival

Maiden Voyages:

Maiden Voyages: Magnificent Ocean Liners and the Women Who Traveled and Worked Aboard Them

by

Siân Evans

 

 

 You can almost hear those mighty steam whistles blow as this book sets sail into a lively recounting of the ships that changed history and the women who broke the sea's age-old bad luck superstition by working and/or sailing on them. It's part shipbuilding history, with digressions into major social and political upheavals of the era, but the true heart lies in the women's lives. These women are dynamic, making and breaking and remaking their careers upon the waves or while crossing them, their histories sometimes cautionary and often life-affirming.

The glamorous female passengers--famed for celebrity or notoriety--were deliberately courted by the liners' home offices, and by the author, to attract the eye. They range from the rich and scandalous Thelma Furness, twice divorced mistress of the Prince of Wales, to entertainer Josephine Baker, whose first transatlantic crossing brought her to Paris where she later made her name, and her longtime home. There was even an Olympic swimming champion who talked and taught her way into becoming the world's first ocean liner social activities director.

 

The women who waited upon them I found equally fascinating: crofters' daughters or German frauleins leaving their villages for domestic service afloat, and widows offered jobs by the company their husbands had worked for, who left their children in the care of relatives on shore for the demanding and sometimes dangerous jobs as stewardesses or chaperones on the sea. Those women, especially the stewardesses, were expected to  charm the passengers, be friendly with the officers, keep the lower decks in their place, and be on their feet and on call sixteen or more hours out of the twenty-four. They walked a narrow line between discouraging male advances to keep their reputations and maintaining an approachable air to keep the passengers and their shipmates happy with them.

 

One name you'll become very familiar with is that of Violet Jessop, later known as the Unsinkable. She was 24 years old and had been at sea several years before her first liner hit an iceberg and sunk out from under her feet (yes, that liner!). Surviving in a lifeboat with some women passengers and unaccompanied children, she was taken ashore and, along with the other surviving crew, soon shipped back to England where they all discovered their pay had been stopped the day the Titanic went down. By then they'd already been a few weeks without income, and since there were no unemployment or sick leave benefits available as well as no understanding at all of post-traumatic stress, Violet was back working on another ship within a very few weeks of her first--yes, first--sinking. 

 

The Titanic's iceberg encounter led to a dramatic shift in liner design and safety features, as well as crew training. Stewardesses like Violet had, for the first time, safety duties as well. Those stood her in good stead during WW1, when liner travel became a casualty of the U-boat threat and the demands of the military for shipping capacity, for she retrained as a nurse and was assigned to a hospital ship in the Mediterranean. Again her ship was sunk--fortunately before being loaded up with wounded soldiers. Nor was that the only converted liner to sink. Before the Armistice, more than 50% of the Cunard line's total tonnage of ships was lost. 

 

Post-war building booms brought the liners back into service for another grand period of service to the rich and the immigrant alike, and many's the former nurse who traded uniforms to stay at sea for a long and fulfilling career. This time more jobs were open to them. Not only as domestic staff and passenger attendants, they were hired as stenographers, hair stylists, masseuses, and anything else the competitive liner companies could dream up for the ease and comfort of their richest clientele. One holdout was the radio room. Even women who had been fully trained and certified as telegraphers were considered not responsible enough to man the telegraph rooms for many years longer.

All in all, this book is a fascinating look at the age of ocean liners through the eyes of women, all the way from the luxurious upper decks to the cramped crew quarters at the waterline. The author gives much credit to her great-uncle, a lifelong Cunard employee whose connections to old shipmates gave her an inexhaustible source of anecdotes, memories, and explanations for the ways of the great liners at sea.

Hardcover, 368 pages

Published August 10th 2021 by St. Martin's Press

ISBN

1250246466 (ISBN13: 9781250246462)

#oceanliners #history #WomenAtWork #Netgalley #MaidenVoyages #SianEvans