We have understood, at least since Aeschylus, that wisdom is attained through suffering. But it is a truth powerfully reinforced by the experiences of Saul Friedländer’s generation: born into a prosperous, assimilated Jewish family in Prague in 1932, Friedländer had experienced by the age of sixteen more trauma, upheaval, and grief than many do in a lifetime. When Memory Comes, a memoir of his youth, written in a moment of comparative hope (at the time of Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel in 1977, in the run-up to the Camp David Accords of 1978), is valuable not simply for Friedländer’s inspiringly vivid and elegant account of his youthful travails, but also for his Tiresian clarity of vision, and for the forthrightness of his narrative. It is, if anything, only more relevant forty years after its initial publication.
Few have inhabited such diverse personae as did the young Friedländer: born Pavel, a Czech boy, he became “Paul” when his family fled to France in 1939, settling in Néris-les-Bains, “Vichy on a smaller scale minus the government plus the Jews.” Subsequently, placed in a Jesuit boarding school, Saint-Béranger, by his parents (who would themselves die in Auschwitz), he was known as “Paul-Henri Ferland.” Immediately after the war, having come to understand for the first time his Jewish identity, he was sent to a Russian-Jewish guardian in Paris, where he attended the Lycée Henri IV. From there, in the spring of 1948, he ran away to join Betar, “a youth movement with ties to Menachem Begin’s Irgun.” As a new Israeli, he took the Hebrew name “Shaul,” the French transliteration of which is Saul.
Internal confusion was inevitable along his journey, as was a sense of isolation. As a teenager, he refused meat at his first Passover Seder because it was Good Friday. Of his Catholic years at Saint-Béranger, he recalls that, unaware of his Jewishness, “I soon felt a vocation: I wanted to become a priest”; “I liked the austere simplicity, the intense devotion of the early mass at which I sometimes served.” He remembers, too, being part of the school’s majority, “faithful to the Marshal [Pétain] in every way,” that ostracized a young boy named Jean-Marc on account of his Gaullist views: “how happy I was to be able to share this fraternal warmth and look upon this proscribed youngster with scornful eyes!” Even in midlife, he acknowledges that “I still feel a strange attraction, mingled with a profound repulsion, for this phase of my childhood.”
From this unlikely extreme, with the revelation of his heritage and of his parents’ fates he turned, in 1947–1948, to fervent Zionism. As he abandoned his French schooling and his known world, he did so for reasons not wholly dissimilar to those behind his earlier enthusiastic embrace of Catholicism: “I was all alone in the world . . . To leave for Eretz [Israel] meant merging my personal fate with a common lot, and also a dream of communion and community.” Ultimately, an unmitigated sense of belonging would continue to elude Friedländer as an adult, and it is this very not-belonging that affords him so crucial a perspective.
He recalls a moment when, as a newly Jewish-identified teenager, he sought to conjure imaginatively an experience of the camps Belzec and Majdanek (which of course he had not seen):
It was only much later . . . that I understood that what was missing was not literary talent but rather a certain ability to identify. The veil between events and me had not been rent. I had lived on the edges of catastrophe; a distance—impassable, perhaps—separated me from those who had been directly caught up in the tide of events, and despite all my efforts, I remained, in my own eyes, not so much a victim as—a spectator. I was destined, therefore, to wander among several worlds, knowing them, understanding them—better, perhaps, than many others—but nonetheless incapable of feeling an identification without any reticence, incapable of seeing, understanding, and belonging in a single, immediate, total movement. Hence—need I say?—my enormous difficulty in writing this book.
THE LONELINESS OF the stateless, the singularity of fractured experience, is beautifully evoked in Friedländer’s prose. For this reader, his experiences afford a glimpse of the irretrievable lostness of the past that resonates in my own history, and more potently still, gives me some understanding of the loneliness of my father, just a year older than Friedländer, a colonial Catholic French child crisscrossing the Mediterranean during the war, even as Friedländer was forced into hiding in a Catholic boarding school in France. There exist, of course, countless versions, though few as harrowing, of the radical dislocations of which Friedländer writes: many people carry vividly intense early memories that cannot be shared.
Having been born in the United States, having paused briefly in Toronto at the age of four, I spent the chief of my childhood in Sydney, Australia, and we returned to Toronto, Canada, in early 1976. I recall powerfully the last taxi ride to the airport in Sydney, on December 27, 1975, squashed next to my sister and mother, running my fingers over the cracked black leatherette of the seat beneath my sticky thigh, breathing the hot summer air, looking out the half-open window at our neighborhood passing away, and thinking: Remember this: This is the end. You will never live here again, never be this person in this place again.
After several years in Toronto, where we learned all over the codes and ways of being, not just a new geography but the idioms, slang, clothing, and social orders of another culture, we moved once more to the United States, where, as I discovered, everything was different again: Australia and Canada, both Commonwealth countries, shared a common colonial heritage, however rebellious they felt themselves to be, and with that heritage, a particular awareness of the world beyond their borders. The U.S., on the other hand, philosophically distinct, proved an entity wholly absorbed in itself and its myths, a desire to welcome and ultimately subsume all who come here into a passion for its ideals. Above all, in coming to this country, we understood that we were to embrace this country, to let go of all that had come before.
It would be more than a decade before anyone in my life other than my sister understood about my lost life: when I first met him, I discovered with joy that my now-husband, being British, shared certain long-undisclosed ways that I had of seeing things, imprinted early in my Australian childhood. More than that, we understood each other’s classroom memories, television jingles (H.R. Pufnstuf!), particular snacks or characters in children’s books that had formed me, and that in the intervening years had seemed not only invisible but possibly imaginary. But the places of my childhood still existed, at least. I could go back, and did eventually, to walk the same streets and parks, speak to people I’d once known, and revisit a world that, while it had moved on without me, spoke of the constancy and solidity of life.
My father, on the other hand, whose childhood was shaped by the war, by the Before, During and After, could no more return to the sites of his memories than he could visit heaven. From the ages of almost five to nine, he was a boy in Beirut and, for some months, Salonica (now Thessaloniki); but Beirut was the home he remembered, all his life, as the home of his unquestioned happiness. Returning to Algiers in 1940, he could not fit in at school: he threw himself into his schoolwork, determined to succeed, but his mother wrote to my grandfather that he was lonely, and he himself wrote asking whether the family could move back to Lebanon. From Algiers, he would eventually move to Paris to study; from there to the United States, first for a fellowship year and then for his graduate degree. The summer that he and my mother married in Toronto —1957—saw the worst of the Battle of Algiers: his parents and sister had left Algeria also, by then, and none of them would ever set foot there again. My father’s legacy to us was rootlessness; my sister’s family and mine are dispersed across continents, probably forever. We have had instilled in us, as primary as breathing, that you can never go back.
FRIEDLÄNDER, SEEKING IN part to rend the veil, in part to understand his past—having fruitlessly attempted a Proustian conjuring with a strawberry milkshake in the Paris milk bar he’d frequented with his mother as a small boy: “though it brings back memories, [it] doesn’t summon up what I am looking for . . . No, really not . . .”—turned, with ardor, to history. His memoir’s title is the inversion of a quotation from Gustav Meyrink (author of The Golem, an Austrian writer and Prague resident who died in the year of Friedländer’s birth): Meyrink wrote that “When knowledge comes, memory comes too”; for Friedländer, in life’s path of self-discovery, “when memory comes, knowledge comes too.”
The essential and abiding lesson is that “Knowledge and memory are one and the same thing.” To bear witness to his multiple, incongruent selves amounts, for Friedländer, to acknowledging the experiences of others, whether they are fellow Jews or Palestinians or his Czech nanny Vlasta, who went on to work for the family of a German general. He has had the fortitude to examine clearly even the acts of the Nazis themselves. To bear witness is to recognize, in his young daughter’s face, the echo of his lost mother’s; or simply to evoke, with magnificent Tolstoyan precision, the details of a distant memory:
I must have been no more than three and . . . [my grandmother Cécile] was busy at the stove. I could hear her talking, I could hear the little repeated sounds of a wooden spoon tapping the sides of a pot and in the background the noise of flies circling the immense table; from time to time a brief silence announced that one of them had just gotten stuck on the ribbon of yellow flypaper, already studded with black dots, which hung from one of the beams overhead.
In a moment of self-doubt, Friedländer asks, “what are the values that I myself can transmit? Can experience as personal, as contradictory as mine rouse an echo here, in even the most indirect way?” This, surely, is a question for each of us, but all the more pressingly so for those with hybrid or complex identities. In a historical moment when many seem all too eager to revert to primitive tribalisms, the answer, unreservedly, is yes. Friedländer’s incapacity wholeheartedly and unthinkingly to “identify” is also his great gift. His liminal sensibility has enabled him, as a historian of the Nazi era, to seek out truths in their full horror and in their nuanced complexity; and as a citizen of Israel, to speak out for dialogue and justice even when—especially when—these calls have been unpopular. He records, too, the moments when, as with the young Jean-Marc in boarding school, he did not speak out, and has compassion for those failures also. That he sees the gamut of perspectives enables him to write, and to think, without vanity or superiority. A priori, to be aware of the “enormous difficulty in writing this book” is to insist upon a truthfulness that is all too rare.
MUCH HAS CHANGED since Friedländer wrote When Memory Comes, as becomes clear in its powerful new companion volume, Where Memory Leads; and yet inevitably, much has remained the same. Contemporary culture’s apparent unwillingness to embrace memory, and with it knowledge, risks leading us anew down dark paths. Jingoism and hate-filled rhetoric threaten in Europe and the United States, stirred by demagogues of scant, or nonexistent, moral character. Even in the face of these perils, Friedländer—the outsider who has chosen to embrace community—offers perspective and an individual course of action:
It took me a long time . . . to admit that a living community follows paths that are often impossible to predict and map out in advance, that dilemmas and contradictions are part of this journey, that at best the role of each individual remains to affirm certain principles that are essential to him, in an attempt to erect dikes along the shores, and guardrails along the edges of history.
Edgar’s words at the close of King Lear come inevitably to mind: “We that are young / Shall never see so much, nor live so long” (Act V, Scene 3). But just as Friedländer inverts Meyrink’s words, so, too, his book plays upon Shakespeare’s: in youth, he had already seen so much. And through his testimony, those experiences, and the wisdom born of them, will live on, hopefully for a long time.