Ithaca, New York, where Cosmo died—the same sanatorium to which Adelwarth, with all the discipline of a lifetime, and in a strange act of replication, later delivered himself to paralysis and death.
The yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue, the Solomons, Seligmans, Wallersteins, Mrs. Litwak and the succahs on the Lower East Side—this is how Sebald chooses to shape the story of the emigration to America of his Catholic German relations. It is as if the fervor of Uncle Adelwarth’s faithful attachment to Cosmo Solomons were somehow a repudiation of Gershom Scholem’s thesis of unrequited Jewish devotion; as if Sebald were casting a posthumous spell to undo that thesis.
And now on to Max Ferber, Sebald’s final guide to the deeps. Ferber was a painter Sebald got to know—“befriended” is too implicated a term for that early stage—when the twenty-two-year-old Sebald came to study and teach in Manchester, an industrially ailing city studded with mainly defunct chimneys, the erstwhile black fumes of which still coated every civic brick. That was in 1966; my own first glimpse of Manchester was nine years before, and I marveled then that an entire metropolis should be so amazingly, universally charred, as if brushed by a passing conflagration. (Later Sebald will tell us that in its bustling heyday Lodz, in Poland—the site of the Lodz Ghetto, a notorious Nazi vestibule for deportation—was dubbed the Polish Manchester, at a time when Manchester too was booming and both cities had flourishing Jewish populations.) At eighteen Ferber arrived in Manchester to study art and thereafter rarely left. It was the thousands of Manchester smokestacks, he confided to the newcomer Sebald, that prompted his belief that “I had found my destiny.” “I am here,” he said, “to serve under the chimney.” In those early days Ferber’s studio, as Sebald describes it, resembled an ash pit: “When I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust … that process of drawing and shading [with charcoal sticks] on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust.”
And in 1990, when Sebald urgently undertook to search out the life of the refugee Max Ferber and the history of his lost German Jewish family, he seemed to be duplicating Ferber’s own pattern of reluctant consummation, overlaid with haltings, dissatisfactions, fears, and erasures: “Not infrequently I unravelledwhat I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralyzing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of the narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable act of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages.… By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘final’ version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.”
All this falls out, one imagines, because Sebald is now openly permitting himself to “become” Max Ferber—or, to put it less emblematically, because in these concluding pages he begins to move, still sidling, still hesitating, from the oblique to the head-on; from intimation to declaration. Here, terminally—at the last stop, so to speak—is a full and direct narrative of Jewish exile and destruction, neither hinted at through an account of a loosely parallel flight from Lithuania a generation before, nor obscured by a quarter-Jew who served in Hitler’s army, nor hidden under the copper roof of a German synagogue, nor palely limned in Uncle Adelwarth’s journey to Jerusalem with a Jewish companion.
Coming on Max Ferber again after a separation of twenty years, Sebald is no
The yeshiva on Amsterdam Avenue, the Solomons, Seligmans, Wallersteins, Mrs. Litwak and the succahs on the Lower East Side—this is how Sebald chooses to shape the story of the emigration to America of his Catholic German relations. It is as if the fervor of Uncle Adelwarth’s faithful attachment to Cosmo Solomons were somehow a repudiation of Gershom Scholem’s thesis of unrequited Jewish devotion; as if Sebald were casting a posthumous spell to undo that thesis.
And now on to Max Ferber, Sebald’s final guide to the deeps. Ferber was a painter Sebald got to know—“befriended” is too implicated a term for that early stage—when the twenty-two-year-old Sebald came to study and teach in Manchester, an industrially ailing city studded with mainly defunct chimneys, the erstwhile black fumes of which still coated every civic brick. That was in 1966; my own first glimpse of Manchester was nine years before, and I marveled then that an entire metropolis should be so amazingly, universally charred, as if brushed by a passing conflagration. (Later Sebald will tell us that in its bustling heyday Lodz, in Poland—the site of the Lodz Ghetto, a notorious Nazi vestibule for deportation—was dubbed the Polish Manchester, at a time when Manchester too was booming and both cities had flourishing Jewish populations.) At eighteen Ferber arrived in Manchester to study art and thereafter rarely left. It was the thousands of Manchester smokestacks, he confided to the newcomer Sebald, that prompted his belief that “I had found my destiny.” “I am here,” he said, “to serve under the chimney.” In those early days Ferber’s studio, as Sebald describes it, resembled an ash pit: “When I watched Ferber working on one of his portrait studies over a number of weeks, I often thought that his prime concern was to increase the dust … that process of drawing and shading [with charcoal sticks] on the thick, leathery paper, as well as the concomitant business of constantly erasing what he had drawn with a woollen rag already heavy with charcoal, really amounted to nothing but a steady production of dust.”
And in 1990, when Sebald urgently undertook to search out the life of the refugee Max Ferber and the history of his lost German Jewish family, he seemed to be duplicating Ferber’s own pattern of reluctant consummation, overlaid with haltings, dissatisfactions, fears, and erasures: “Not infrequently I unravelledwhat I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralyzing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of the narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable act of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages.… By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a ‘final’ version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched.”
All this falls out, one imagines, because Sebald is now openly permitting himself to “become” Max Ferber—or, to put it less emblematically, because in these concluding pages he begins to move, still sidling, still hesitating, from the oblique to the head-on; from intimation to declaration. Here, terminally—at the last stop, so to speak—is a full and direct narrative of Jewish exile and destruction, neither hinted at through an account of a loosely parallel flight from Lithuania a generation before, nor obscured by a quarter-Jew who served in Hitler’s army, nor hidden under the copper roof of a German synagogue, nor palely limned in Uncle Adelwarth’s journey to Jerusalem with a Jewish companion.
Coming on Max Ferber again after a separation of twenty years, Sebald is no
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