Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick Read Free Book Online Page B

the German
Wandervogel
hiking movement, which must have had a lasting influence on him from his youth”), Paul Bereyter is nevertheless a lonely and increasingly aberrant figure. In the thirties he had come out of a teachers’ training college (here a grim photo of the solemn graduates, in their school ties and rather silly caps) and taught school until 1935, when he was dismissed for being a quarter-Jew. The next year his father, who owned a small department store, died in a mood of anguish over Nazi pogroms in his native Gunzenhausen, where there had been a thriving Jewish population. After the elder Bereyter’s death, the business wasconfiscated; his widow succumbed to depression and a fatal deterioration. Paul’s sweetheart, who had journeyed from Vienna to visit him just before he took up his first teaching post, was also lost to him: deported, it was presumed afterward, to Theresienstadt. Stripped of father, mother, inheritance, work, and love, Paul fled to tutor in France for a time, but in 1939 drifted back to Germany, where, though only three-quarters Aryan, he was unaccountably conscripted. For six years he served in the motorized artillery all over Nazi-occupied Europe. At the war’s end he returned to teach village boys, one of whom was Sebald.
    As Sebald slowly elicits his old teacher’s footprints from interviews, reconstructed hints, and the flickering lantern of his own searching language, Paul Bereyter turns out to be that rare and mysterious figure: an interior refugee (and this despite his part in the German military machine)—or call it, as Sebald might, an internal emigrant. After giving up teaching—the boys he had once felt affection for he now began to see as “contemptible and repulsive creatures”—he both lived in and departed from German society, inevitably drawn back to it, and just as inevitably repelled. All his adult life, Sebald discovers, Paul Bereyter had been interested in railways. (The text is now interrupted by what appears to be Paul’s own sketch of the local
Bahnhof
, or train station, with the inscription
So ist es seit dem 4.10.49:
This is how it has looked since the fourth of October 1949.) On the blackboard he draws “stations, tracks, goods depots, and signal boxes” for the boys to reproduce in their notebooks. He keeps a model train set on a card table in his flat. He obsesses about timetables. Later, though his eyesight is troubled by cataracts, he reads demonically—almost exclusively the works of suicides, among them Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Klaus Mann, Koestler, Zweig, Tucholsky. He copies out, in shorthand, hundreds of their pages. And finally, on a mild winter afternoon,he puts on a windbreaker that he has not worn since his early teaching days forty years before, and goes out to stretch himself across the train tracks, awaiting his own (as it were) deportation. Years after this event, looking through Paul’s photo album with its record of childhood and family life, Sebald again reflects: “it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back”—but now he adds, “or as if we were on the point of joining them.”
    Two tales, two suicides. Yet suicide is hardly the most desolating loss in Sebald’s broader scheme of losses. And since he comes at things aslant, his next and longest account, the history of his aunts and uncles and their emigration to the United States in the twenties—a period of extreme unemployment in Germany—is at first something of a conundrum. Where, one muses, are those glimmers of the Jewish ghosts of Germany, or any inkling of entanglement with Jews at all? And why, among these steadily rising German-American burghers, should there be? Aunt Fini and Aunt Lini and Uncle Kasimir, Aunt Theres and Cousin Flossie, “who later became a secretary in Tucson, Arizona, and learnt to belly dance when she was in her fifties”—these are garden-variety acculturating American immigrants; we know them; we know the smells