I’m home recovering from successful surgery (yay!), and although I really couldn’t have hoped for things to have gone any better than they did, I am not planning to stray far from these four walls for awhile. So I’m likely to miss next week’s “Six Words on the Jewish Life” event at 92Y Tribeca here in NYC, but that doesn’t mean that you have to miss it. Even better–you could be one of the performers! See this Tablet post for the announcement.
THE LAST BROTHER
Nathacha Appanah; Geoffrey Strachan, trans.
Graywolf Press, 2011. 176 pp. $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-55597-575-3
Review by Erika Dreifus
Nathacha Appanah, whose author bio tells us is “a French-Mauritian of Indian origin,” has thrown extraordinary light on a little-known episode. In 1940, a group of Jewish refugees from Europe landed at Haifa—then still under British Mandate—only to be deported to Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean which France had ceded to Britain more than a century earlier. Once arrived in Mauritius, the Jews were detained at the Beau-Bassin prison.
In Appanah’s novel, a young Mauritian boy (Raj), whose vicious father is employed at the prison, encounters a Jewish orphan about his age (David). Raj, too, has endured unthinkable tragedy and loss. The boys’ life-changing friendship blossoms during their overlapping stays in the prison hospital. It forms the focus of the novel, which is told as Raj’s recollections.
It is a vivid and heartbreaking story. More than 120 Jews died in exile on Mauritius. At the end of World War II, most of those who survived opted to live in “Eretz”—that land they had sought from the start, that land that David longs for, that land that is utterly unfamiliar to Raj before these strange, pale prisoners enter his awareness.
“I do not know if I ought to be ashamed to say this,” narrator Raj confesses, “but that was how it was: I did not know there was a world war on that had lasted for four years and when David asked me at the hospital if I was Jewish I did not know what it meant. I said no, being under the vague impression that, because I was in the hospital, being Jewish referred to an illness. I had never heard of Germany, in reality I knew very little. In David I had found an unhoped-for friend, a gift from heaven, and at the start of this year of 1945 that was all that counted for me.”
I do not know if I ought to be ashamed to say that I had never heard of the Jews interned at Beau-Bassin. But in The Last Brother, I have found an unhoped-for lesson. A gift.
This review was published initially in Jewish Book World, Fall 5771/2011. My thanks to the publisher for a complimentary review copy.
OK, Shabbat is still a day away, but I’m going to be offline for awhile (click here for an explanation), so I wanted to post this today.
Shabbat shalom, everyone. See you next week.
Thanks to Stephen Walt (of Harvard) and John J. Mearsheimer (of the University of Chicago), the phrase “Israel Lobby,” often enough translated into “Jewish Lobby,” has become almost as commonplace in American leftist discourse as the phrase “Jewish syndicate” was among the French right during the Dreyfus Affair.
Just one sentence from Adam Kirsch’s superb Tablet review-essay, the general subject of which is “the American Jewish response to Sept. 11” and “the anti-Semitism, trauma, and mourning that still linger after the attacks .”
The terrorist attack on and subsequent massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics began in the early morning hours of September 5, 1972.
Although I was too young at the time to be aware of what had happened, I learned later about the episode. The 1992 anniversary brought extensive commemorative coverage, which I followed intensely. About a decade later, I researched the events still more extensively and incorporated them in my story, “Homecomings,” in which a woman who left Nazi Germany as a young adult returns to Europe for the first time in September 1972. The story won the David Dornstein Memorial Creative Writing Contest for short fiction on Jewish themes, and, in a revised form, appears in my collection, Quiet Americans.
Here is a brief excerpt from “Homecomings.”
May the memories of all the victims be for blessing.
They switched the television on. The screen showed athletes, winning more medals. Sunbathing by the pond. Playing ping-pong.
But there were bulletins. About something else. Something beyond comprehension.
Black September, the group was called. At least one Israeli athlete was dead. No one knew exactly how many were captive in Building 31, in that sunshiny Olympic Village.
Between the competitions—“How can the Games go on like that?”—she and Daniel and Simone kept asking each other, when they could speak at all, and when they weren’t mesmerized by the images of trucks marked with the all-too-familiar “POLIZEI” that suddenly seemed to fill Munich’s streets—they absorbed the interviews.
Including the one with the Israeli prime minister. More than anything else, more than appearing angry or vindictive or even fearful, Mrs. Meir looked deeply dejected. Grieving. But that old determination showed in her not-altogether downcast eyes when she refused to negotiate with the terrorists.
“If we should give in,” she said, her voice steady and sure, no Israeli would be safe. Ever. Anywhere. What had happened to the Israeli team during the night, she declared, what was currently underway, was nothing except “blackmail—of the worst kind.”
Simone sighed. “She’s right.”