The Jerusalem Post - The Jerusalem Post Magazine
Postponing death
What makes some overcome evil, while others are coopted and destroyed?
At the beginning of Keep Saying Their Names, his fifth novel (recently translated from Norwegian into English), Simon Stranger reminds us that according to Jewish tradition a person dies twice: the first time, when his or her heart stops beating and brain stops functioning; the second time, when the name of the deceased is spoken out loud, written down, or thought about for the last time.
In Keep Saying Their Names, Stranger tries to postpone the second death of Hirsch Komissar, his great-grandfatherin-law, a Norwegian Jew murdered by the Gestapo in 1942 in retaliation for sabotage by the resistance, a victim of “forced atonement.” Moving back and forth in time, the novel examines the boutique fashion shop Hirsch ran in Trondheim with Marie, his wife; Hirsch’s arrest; the escape of two of his children to Sweden; the brief and brutal life of Henry Oliver Rinnan, the notorious Nazi collaborator; the decision of Gerson Komissar, Hirsch’s son, soon after World War II ended, to move his wife and two daughters into the beautiful two-story house in Falstad with a walled courtyard, originally designed as a school for the mentally impaired, that had been used by the Rinnan Gang to torture and kill members of the resistance; and Stranger’s discussions about the Holocaust with Rikke, his wife, and their children.
Keep Saying Their Names is divided into 26 chapters, one for each letter of the alphabet. Stranger uses this approach as a point of entry into the myriad meanings of unfolding events.
“H is for hands. Hands tying a shoelace. Hands lifting a child up to the apple blossom,” he writes. “Hands gripped round a whip. Hands that become fists smashing into someone’s jaw. Hands that are bound together with rope... Hands stroking cheeks. Children’s hands against a windowpane.”
Surprisingly, given the stated purpose of his book, Stranger spends far more time on Henry Rinnan than on Hirsch Komissar. Intent, it seems, on explaining Rinnan’s life choices, Stranger provides a detailed account of his childhood in Levanger, a small town in Norway.
The son of a poor shoemaker, Henry, we learn, was much shorter than his peers. Tormented at school by bullies, Henry could not protect his little brother from their taunts. As an escape, he reads about cowboys, concluding that “the strong take everything they want.”
EMPLOYED WHILE a teenager by his uncle in a store that sold hardware, automobiles and gasoline, Henry grows in self-confidence, begins driving cars to impress his friends, dreaming of sex with women who look like Greta Garbo, and stealing from the cash register. Burning with a desire to be someone important, he enlists in the Norwegian Army, but after his country is defeated and occupied, throws in his lot with the Nazis.
“If everyone in Levanger could just see him now,” Stranger writes. “He drives around with his own chauffeur, earning ten times the average wage and can get hold of everything he wants.” Rinnan has learned he can “live by another set of rules, a different kinds of freedom, where everything is free-flowing.” He can – and he does – drink, take drugs, take prisoners, and take lives.
Stranger’s portrait of Rinnan’s rise and fall is compelling. But his foray into popular psychology does not adequately address the familiar, complex, but perennially important question he asks about victims as well as victimizers: “What makes some grow stronger from such adversity and evil, while others break down, demoralized, crippled or destroyed?... What you are made of? Being loved?” Or his question about what made Norwegian resisters “risk their own lives helping refugees like Gerson.”
Toward the end of Keep Saying Their Names, Stranger reveals that Rikke, his wife, urged him to make sure that the novel “is a call to look ahead, an opportunity for reconciliation and forgiveness.”
It is not easy to find in his narrative many reasons to forgive, but as Stranger acknowledges that “the war destroyed the potential of so many people and so many dreams,” he makes a stab at reconciliation. “Nevertheless,” he writes, (forgetting, perhaps, that he had asked how many people were never born because of the Holocaust), “it was from the destruction that my own family emerged.” As did the families of Hirsch’s other children, all whom survived, and in their own fashion, thrived.
R is, indeed, for Reconciliation. For Remembering. And, for worse and better, for Retribution. It is difficult, however, to add reconciliation to consolation as one reads about the sadistic and murderous behavior, arrest, trial and execution of Henry Rinnan, who apparently died without remorse. It is, alas, difficult as well to remember Hirsch Komissar, who appears in his own story mostly as a victim.
In the end, Simon Stranger probably gets it right when he declares, “X is for the things that will remain a mystery.”