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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