The Seven, a Family Holocaust Story by Ellen G. Friedman

Author:Ellen G. Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press

My mother’s mind has shifted to Nyuvchim. She is stuck on Sonia’s love life. Leibel in Brest and the Russian officer in Nyuvchim. In the midst of the story that cost her her family and home, my mother wants to think about romance, about lovely Sonia with her suitors. Sonia the songbird who, along with Dov, gave European popular music to backwater Komi SSR. In the formal black-and-white photo I have of my father’s family, Sonia is placed next to Dov, who is probably standing on a riser because he looks tall. Her long, dark hair is styled with finger waves on top and on the side and then, given what I can see—I am guessing—the back of her hair is rolled at the base of her neck in the style of the time. Her eyes are fixed on something outside the frame of the photograph, already disconnected from the family, or so it seems to me. Her ears are not pierced as my mother’s are in this era, and she is not wearing a string of pearls around her neck like her sister, Rachel, pearls perhaps given to her by Simon Drexler, who could afford them. Sonia, the Juliet of this Jewish history, though the analogy falls apart as soon as I try to make it. Literature, unlike life, is carved by the writer for a purpose. In Shakespeare’s play the dispute between families is paid for with the lovers’ suicides. Then their tragedy is redeemed by the cosmic understanding and healing the shock of their deaths inspires. Peace, tranquility, and a world that makes more sense follows. The heartbreaking love story of my poor Juliet, Sonia, brought no enlightenment. She was consumed, as were so many, by the extravagant malady that was Nazi Germany, the consequences and lessons of which we are still puzzling over.

Her murder and that of millions of others has deepened our understanding of the absurd, has made it more present. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the absurd is our constant. That is not a restorative lesson, as in Shakespeare where tragedies lead to the return of equilibrium. The sea change produced by the Nazi horror transformed what it means to be human. Against the break the Nazis wrought, the West and the people in it are changed. The recovery from tragedy depicted by artists such as Shakespeare is a reminder that art is not life. Art and literature have limits that history does not. My mother understood that and wanted to remember the honey, to suck out the little bit of it that was there and savor it. Sonia and her lovers. My mother and the beaus of her youth. They are precious drops of sweetness in a bitter world.

I:Well, anyway, there was very little food on this train given to us. We were dirty. Filthy. When the train stopped, people need to relieve themselves. Was no shame. Everybody was under the wagons and doing what they have to do. There was no shame between men and woman.

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