Holocaust horror unravels
Young Eva is present when her grandfather, Joseph Silk, dies. She mourns a version of him: the great and celebrated painter, upstanding Englishman, beloved filial substitute for her own misplaced father. But this version of him is not complete, not totally true.
Eva struggles against Silk’s wish for total assimilation and begins to uncover a past he attempted to obliviate: a Hungarian Jew forced to endure the midnight of the century. In the gap where Silk was, Eva begins to learn. An immersion in misery. An endless index of the forgotten. Camp names. Labour battalion graves. Colour codes. Escape routes.
This is the architecture of British writer Kim Sherwood’s astounding, troubling debut Testament, part of the subgenre of Holocaust memorials that emerged after Daniel Mendelsohn’s 2006 work The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million and includes Heather Morris’ recent The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Diana Wichtel’s now-seminal Driving to Treblinka.
Testament is a novel of vast traverses: London, Berlin, Hungary, Paris, Serbia. Sherwood introduces a third-person account of Joseph Silk’s story between Eva’s explorations, both narrative strands pirouetting until they meet at the close. But that is nothing compared to the difficult mental and emotional territory it treks, exploring the necessity of lies to those who wished to protect their children from trauma.
“What’s a man without memory?” Silk’s brother asks, echoing Primo Levi. “Happier,” Silk replies.
Sherwood’s prose is immaculate and sharpened for maximum poignancy. It might “whiff of the lamp” to those who adore “realism” and prize “story” over “style”, but the author proves that style is an inalienable part of the moral universe of fiction. Consider her elegant variations: “I think of the pink blossom Van Gogh painted from the window of his madness.” Or, “A creaking floorboard protests that I am walking away from him.” Or one of the most gorgeous sentences I’ve read recently: “He is a shedding bird, feathers dropped over the seamiles of his determination, and now he comes to them with his bones exposed.”
What these kinds of Holocaust memoirs share, whether fiction or nonfiction, and what Testament exemplifies, is the shadow history casts upon futurity. The immense burden of the past. “It is important to visit the living,” one character says, “before we are stone.” There is a crucial mantra repeated throughout and it bears remembering: “We are here because history doesn’t happen in the past tense.”
Heisa shedding bird, feathers dropped over the sea-miles of his determination.