In the Shadow of No Memory

Memories and their unreliability animate Rooms for Vanishing, a new novel by Stuart Nadler that faces the Holocaust and its effects from a respectful, reluctant distance. Told across decades in a series of surreal vignettes—a dead girl is seen wandering London, a man takes a nighttime stroll across New York with a ghost—the novel follows a Viennese family of survivors who have been scattered across the world, each believing themself to be the sole surviving member.

Sonja, the daughter of the family, was sent to England on a Kindertransport, and we follow her as an adult in 1979. Her child, Anya, has recently died, leading to her husband’s eventual mental break and disappearance—convinced he has seen Anya alive, he sets off to look for her, leaving Sonja alone. As far as she knows, she has no family left. After the war, she learned that her parents and her baby brother Moses were killed. Forever separated, she imagines finding everyone she lost:

I pressed my ear against the wall. . . . I had the thought that everyone else was doing this too, that my mother and my father were pushing their own ears against the walls of the dead, that they were listening for whatever heartbeat travels by way of the living.

As Sonja sets off on her own search for her husband, she feels her sense of identity collapsing in a way reminiscent of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, whose protagonist (also saved via Kindertransport) finds his memories and identity deserting him. Watching herself in the audience of a concert recording, Sonja dissociates. “I saw that it was not me at all,” she thinks, “but instead a woman who looked a good deal like me.” Fruitless searches for family and unsettling encounters with doppelgängers animate much of Nadler’s novel.

In 1966 Montreal, Sonja’s mother, Fania, works as a lonely masseuse and helps recent immigrants with their English. Shunted out of Europe by death, she struggles to come to terms with loss:

Our program wants us to say this part aloud. . . . They are dead. Sonja dead on a train, Arnold dead in a forest, Moses dead after being pried from my hands as I stood. My small Moses. Sweet-smelling Moses. Six months of life and that is it. Born, I think sometimes, to accompany me to the end of life, as Virgil accompanies Dante.

But did the mother die or the daughter? Or are they both alive? Here the surrealism creeps more urgently onto the page.

Sonja remembers another girl dying on her train, but Fania received a letter claiming Sonja died. A maddening and gripping ambiguity lurks over the fate of Nadler’s characters. Fania thinks:

I understood the truth of it, that everyone had been survived into different futures and that I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over to meet them.

Nadler keeps it unclear whether the characters are literally in different timelines or if the ruptures of the Holocaust have made it feel that way.

Fania strikes up a relationship with Hermann, an English student she tutors. He, too, lost
all of his family in the war and, when he lived in Israel,  found himself haunted by visions of his son:

I thought I saw him across the water from me. . . . I searched and could not find him. But then, on the beach in Eilat, looking across the Red Sea to Aqaba, I see him again, my boy with his shell, standing and listening, and so I drive there. I take my motorcycle through the wadis where I wouldn’t find him.

Eventually, Fania comes face-to-face with a copy of herself: a client who looks just like her. Like Fania, she has two children—Sonja and Moses—and a husband named Albert. She even lives in Fania’s old house. Their eventual confrontation, like all the confrontations in Rooms for Vanishing, offers Fania further heartache and little closure.

Even as the characters are all living deep in the wreckage of the Holocaust, its horrors exist only vaguely in the background. The memory of an eviction and “a million years” spent in cattle cars are some of the closest descriptions we get. Nadler himself is writing from a perspective of no memory. Holocaust stories will continue to be told, but will they be pastiches of horror, or will they successfully reflect the emerging new reality of Jews who live with the shadow of, but not with, the Holocaust?

Surrealism isn’t the only option, of course. Yishai Sarid’s 2017 novel, The Memory Monster,took a satirical approach to memory. The unnamed narrator, a historian of the Holocaust, becomes obsessed with the gory details. He proudly discusses the “meticulous precision of my book, which would help readers fathom the extermination process . . . ‘through facts growing clearer in all their horrendous glory as the years go by.’” Sarid’s compact novel is short, grim, and funny. The narrator gives tours of concentration camps to Israelis, but he balks at the idea that the Holocaust can be personally meaningful—rather, it should simply be accepted for all its horror. Ultimately, Sarid’s satire suggests, there is no particularly good way to remember the Holocaust.

Nadler isn’t satirizing anything. Each of his characters spends a good deal of time thinking about their aloneness—in rooms separated from their families, or on trains traveling away from each other. Resonant metaphors, but their impact breaks down with repeated use.

There are some moments of humor in the book. A friend of Fania’s complains bitterly about trying to find family through the “Office of Hopelessly Vanished Refugees, or in the Department of the Impossible, or in the Ministry of Erased Babies, or whatever they’re calling it these days.” She visits her village in Europe where a Holocaust movie is being filmed and rants that it’s about the heroic Gentiles, not the Jews:

The Jewish people in the movie are nothing but a large group of weeping people in dirty clothing slowly shuffling into train cars, into gas chambers. Occasionally, there is a solitary Jewish boy playing the violin, or playing the piano, or singing—always something very tragic and also very musical.

One might argue that in Rooms for Vanishing, survivors are nothing but a large group of weeping people in dirty clothing. But Nadler paints his characters with such intimate care that it’s easy to empathize with, and believe in, them as they teeter on the border between sadness and madness.

If the novel plays on the edge of surreality with Fania and Sonja, it dives in with Moses and the father, Arnold. In 2002, we meet Moses, raised near Prague but living in New York City and expecting the birth of his first grandchild. His life and survival are a mystery to the reader—and to himself as well.

When he meets his grandson, he sees on the newborn’s face “the expression of a man on the verge of losing a memory, a man who knows eventually, minute by minute, that his knowledge of the past will peel away from him.” Moses himself clings to a hazy past and is met by a friend’s ghost—Ambrož, a poet murdered by the Soviets in Prague.

In a section that also owes much to Austerlitz, Moses travels to his hometown and visits his mother—who may be dead, or dying, or not even his mother at all. Nadler occasionally drops hints that his characters might exist in each other’s lives. Fania reads a translation of Ambrož’s poems, Moses learns of a talented masseuse in Toronto, and Sonja has a telling encounter on a New York City subway with a man near her age.

Near the end of Moses’s tale, Nadler explains how he survived. His mother—who may be only a stranger or a ghost—tells him that her son was murdered. A Nazi soldier, in an act of twisted kindness, brought her another baby to raise—a baby named Moses. It’s a bluntly told tale, and perhaps Nadler would have been better off refusing to offer the details to the reader.

The novel’s hopelessness culminates with Arnold. At ninety-nine years old, he is still in Vienna, still waiting for his family’s arrival. Miraculously, he begins receiving emails from a British woman with Sonja’s history. This is not Arnold’s first time searching for family or encountering doubles. In Miami once, he saw a woman who looked like Fania:

I follow her for two miles north to Surfside, where she buys flowers in a shop near the water, and then goes into an apartment building near Bay Drive, where I watch her go inside, and where I see the lights go on inside an apartment on the fourth floor. And so for days I return to this building to wait for this woman who is obviously not Fania, I know this, or I think I do.

Amazed at his good fortune, Arnold plans to meet his possible daughter at the train station, but she never arrives. Arnold spends a year waiting and imagines hordes of people waiting with him for his daughter—a whole community:

By January, there are dozens of us . . . spouses, the parents of their spouses, the neighbors of these parents, the rabbis of these neighbors, congregants of these rabbis, and then photographers who document the congregants and the rabbis and the neighbors and the parents and the spouses and the brothers and everyone else who has decided to join me in waiting.

Arnold is ultimately left mourning with the past and given little hope for a Jewish future. Throughout Rooms for Vanishing, the loss of Jewish life in Europe is mourned perhaps more than the loss of Jewish lives. All of Europe is a cultural graveyard, and characters miss “the old Europe, the Europe where the Jews are alive.” The new Europe is a place where “there were no Jews but . . . there were Jewish candles.” It’s a grim conclusion, but fiction need not always be hopeful.