longer that uncomprehending nervous junior scholar fresh from a postwar German education—he is middle-aged, an eminent professor in a British university, the author of two novels. Ferber, nearing seventy, is now a celebrated British painter whose work is exhibited at the Tate. The reunion bears unanticipated fruit: Ferber surrenders to Sebald a cache of letters containing what is, in effect, a record of his mother’s life, written when the fifteen-year-old Max had already been sent to safety in England. Ferber’s father, an art dealer, and his mother, decorated for tending the German wounded in the First World War,remained trapped in Germany, unable to obtain the visas that would assure their escape. In 1941 they were deported from Munich to Riga in Lithuania, where they were murdered. “The fact is,” Ferber now tells Sebald, “that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark.” Thus the latter-day explication of “I am here to serve under the chimney,” uttered decades after the young Sebald loitered, watchful and bewildered, in the exiled painter’s ash-heaped studio.
The memoir itself is all liveliness and light. Sebald recreates it lyrically, meticulously—from, as we say, the inside out. It begins with Luisa and Leo Lanzberg, a little brother and sister (reminding us of the brother and sister in
The Mill on the Floss
) in the village of Steinach, near Kissingen, where Jews have lived since the sixteen-hundreds. (“It goes without saying,” Sebald interpolates—it is a new note for him—“that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbors and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all.”) Friday nights in Steinach juxtapose the silver Sabbath candelabrum with the beloved poems of Heine. The day nursery, presided over by nuns, excuses the Jewish children from morning prayers. On Sabbath afternoons in summer, before the men return to the synagogue, there is lemonade and challah with corned beef. Rosh Hashana; Yom Kippur; then the succah hung with apples and pears and chains of rosehips. In winter the Jewish school celebrates both Hanukkah and the Reich. Before Passover “the bustle is dreadful.” Father prospers, and the family moves to the middle-class world of Kissingen. (A photo shows the new house: a mansion with two medieval spires. Nevertheless several rooms are rented out.) And so on and so on: theblessing of the ordinary. Luisa grows into a young woman with suitors; her Gentile fiancé dies suddenly, of a stroke; a matchmaker finds her a Jewish husband, Max’s father. “In the summer of 1921,” Ferber’s mother writes, “soon after our marriage, we went to the Allgäu … where the scattered villages were so peaceful it was as if nothing evil had happened anywhere on earth.” Sebald, we know, was born in one of those villages.
In 1991—fifty years after the memoirist was deported to Riga—Sebald visits Steinach and Kissingen. (I almost want to say revisits, so identified has he become with Ferber’s mother’s story.) In the old Jewish cemetery in Kissingen, “a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movements of the air,” he stands before the gravestones and reads the names of the pre-Hitler dead, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthold, Seeligmann, Goldstaub, Baumblatt, Blumenthal, and thinks how “perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language.” He finds a more recent marker: a relative of Max Ferber’s who, in expectation of the outcome, took her own life.
The memoir itself is all liveliness and light. Sebald recreates it lyrically, meticulously—from, as we say, the inside out. It begins with Luisa and Leo Lanzberg, a little brother and sister (reminding us of the brother and sister in
The Mill on the Floss
) in the village of Steinach, near Kissingen, where Jews have lived since the sixteen-hundreds. (“It goes without saying,” Sebald interpolates—it is a new note for him—“that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbors and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all.”) Friday nights in Steinach juxtapose the silver Sabbath candelabrum with the beloved poems of Heine. The day nursery, presided over by nuns, excuses the Jewish children from morning prayers. On Sabbath afternoons in summer, before the men return to the synagogue, there is lemonade and challah with corned beef. Rosh Hashana; Yom Kippur; then the succah hung with apples and pears and chains of rosehips. In winter the Jewish school celebrates both Hanukkah and the Reich. Before Passover “the bustle is dreadful.” Father prospers, and the family moves to the middle-class world of Kissingen. (A photo shows the new house: a mansion with two medieval spires. Nevertheless several rooms are rented out.) And so on and so on: theblessing of the ordinary. Luisa grows into a young woman with suitors; her Gentile fiancé dies suddenly, of a stroke; a matchmaker finds her a Jewish husband, Max’s father. “In the summer of 1921,” Ferber’s mother writes, “soon after our marriage, we went to the Allgäu … where the scattered villages were so peaceful it was as if nothing evil had happened anywhere on earth.” Sebald, we know, was born in one of those villages.
In 1991—fifty years after the memoirist was deported to Riga—Sebald visits Steinach and Kissingen. (I almost want to say revisits, so identified has he become with Ferber’s mother’s story.) In the old Jewish cemetery in Kissingen, “a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movements of the air,” he stands before the gravestones and reads the names of the pre-Hitler dead, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthold, Seeligmann, Goldstaub, Baumblatt, Blumenthal, and thinks how “perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language.” He finds a more recent marker: a relative of Max Ferber’s who, in expectation of the outcome, took her own life.
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