Pain and responsibility through the generations
Testament
Riverrun, £14.99
Reviewed by Gloria Tessler
WHO IS the keeper of Holocaust memory? The victim? The second generation? Or the third? Hidden truths, perceived lies and the responsibility for both lie at the heart of Kim Sherwood’s epic novel, which examines the penetration of the Shoah into the third generation.
József Silk is a Hungarian Holocaust survivor but the now Anglicised Joseph has locked his memories away and is a successful Hampstead abstract artist.
Colour-blind through his experiences, everything — apart from the colour blue, and his love for his granddaughter Eva — is grey to him. Even the colour of the blood of Hitler’s victims is “all leached grey with sores”. But, on his death, Silk leaves a web of lies about his true experiences in Hungarian labour forces and the camps, which entangles his dysfunctional family and which Eva, now the custodian of his history, must unravel.
She flies to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, where Felix, the young curator, wants her permission to exhibit
Silk’s testament.
Eva prefers to maintain
Silk’s privacy out of her deep love for him but, as the story of three generations moves across Eastern Europe, she realises that the weight of historical truth falls on her alone to divulge. And thus faces that fundamental question: who are the keepers of memories?
Silk’s story is not unusual. Many survivors kept silent until the approach of old age. Some never spoke at all. What is exceptional about Kim Sherwood’s compassionate, poetic and deeply researched novel, is the way she interweaves the twisted threads of his story: the tragedy of his parents’ murder and that of his younger sister; and his complicated relationship with his surviving younger brother László — they compete for the love of the young musician Zuzka, who played in Theresienstadt while her mother was sent to Auschwitz. Sherwood has taken on the major tragedy of the 20th century with a psychological insight rare in a writer who is not yet 30. She has not flinched from revealing graphic details about the Holocaust, and her description of Silk’s homecoming to find his family gone and his home requisitioned by strangers, is almost unbearably poignant.
Rescued and rehoused in the Lake District and, later, London, the young survivors still face alienation and deepseated prejudice. József, who once “longed to hear a Magyar tongue shape his world, just once before exile”, must now balance Jewishness and Zionism against a new English identity.
Sherwood sees parallels between refugees from Nazism, cold-shouldered in Britain by ignorance or misunderstanding, and today’s refugees escaping their own broken homelands and dying in the Mediterranean, echoing others who had died in the Danube in József Silk’s time.
“In the background, the Danube is vertiginous, threatening to swallow me,” Sherwood writes. “We are here because history doesn’t happen in the past tense.”
Gloria Tessler is the JC’s obituaries editor Kim Sherwood: compassionate
She doesn’t flinch from the graphic details