by Eva Figes
Granta Books, 184pp, £14.99
Review by TOM ADAIREVA FIGES IS ESSENTIALLY A NOVelist, one whose characteristic clarity makes her tales both engaging and piquant. Journey to Nowhere marks a departure.
While
its narrative is essentially no more – and no less – true than those of her 14 preceding fictions, it isn't a novel. It draws on facts. Part autobiography, part memoir, the book speaks fiercely and with courage – and risks reproof – concerning the evolution of Israel, its fraught creation, its recent history, and its treatment of Palestinians, while examining the meaning of what it is to be a Jew.
Figes herself is a secular Jew, a woman of great independent mind, born in Berlin before Hitler's rise, but raised and educated in London. Here she divulges how those early years were shaped by Hitler's rule and by migration to England. But this is the story, too, of the family's housemaid, the penniless Edith, who, having been left to face her fate among the Nazis, a decade later wrote from Palestine where she'd hoped to find a new life, asking the family for her old job back. In truth, it was the cry of a lonely woman reaching out in desperation for belonging. The family took her in.
Edith returned to what proved domestic isolation, marooned in London, consigned to quarters, with only young Eva in whom to confide. Their quiet relationship, the wellspring of this book, is described in poignant, moving detail – the teenage scholar doing well in her English exams, her prospects starry; the maid, by instalments, revealing the truth about the horrors and privations of wartime Germany and, more startlingly, the truth about the prejudice and malaise among the diverse groups of Jews thrown into the melting pot in their new middle eastern home among the Palestinian Arabs.
Young Eva Figes (then called Unger) has the novelist's gift of imagining from others' points of view. Almost alone among her family, she empathises with Edith's plight, just as, years before, as a wide-eyed child, she had asked her father (who'd been in Dachau) what their family would have done if they hadn't been Jews. She understands that many Germans were coerced into Hitler's maelstrom of fascist war crimes, caught in the slipstream of the war.
As Edith confides the details of her wartime penury and precarious existence, it becomes clear that she was helped in evading detection by many non-Jews. She relates her friendship with another survivor, Elsa, the one who persuades her to go to Palestine.
There Edith finds mostly misery. She's on the receiving end of other Jews' anger, being told she isn't wanted and called "sabonim" (soap), because the Nazis were supposed to have made soap out of Jewish corpses. German Jews were berated for their physique ("not fit for work") and Polish Jews were treated much worse.
Sixty years on, Edith is dead. Yet she lives on in the troubled mind of her erstwhile confidante. There remains, writes Figes, "a debt I cannot repay except by dedicating this book to her" – and by undertaking a reassessment of all that happened after the war. "I had to find out about the creation of Israel. What I discovered during the process of my researches appalled me. I have always thought that the creation of Israel was a catastrophic mistake, perhaps the worst of the 20th century ... I did not expect to find out that the creation of Israel was the result, not of global remorse, but of continuing anti-Semitism."
These are huge claims, and by a process of aggregation, layer on layer throughout the narrative, Figes marshals her assault. She details the process whereby the post-war displaced Jews were shunted to Israel, serving the needs of President Truman, and how a reluctant Labour government in Britain, being mandated to keep the peace, had taken the brunt of terrorist Zionist attacks throughout Jerusalem and beyond.
It is a devastating and devastated picture. Continuing Jewish repression of Palestinian Arabs is flayed for good measure. She refers to the Gaza Strip as "a concentration camp". Figes's anger is both palpable and scintillating. Zionists will condemn her, of course, without reading the case she makes. She isn't writing it for them. She is clearing a debt, addressing history, with no satisfactory ending. Which gives the book a tragic dimension that makes its pain the more unforgettable and profound.
• Eva Figes is at the Edinburgh book festival on 10 August.
The full article contains 768 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
