East of Time

By Jacob G Rosenberg, Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2005, 220 pages, paperback, $26.95. Reviewed by Sue Bond in the May 2006 issue.

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This memoir is sometimes so painful to read that I had to stop and go away from it for a while. None of the people named within it had such a luxury.

It is a collection of stories set in Poland under the Nazis, in the Lodz ghetto, when the author, Jacob Rosenberg, was a boy. It is a series of largely chronological fragments that tell of the people he knew, his family, neighbours, friends and teachers, and what happened to them.

In his preface, Rosenberg tells the reader that he has used his memories and his 'storyteller's embellishment' in writing the book. He also writes of the strong need he felt to tell these stories, and to name the people he once knew, most of whom are long dead: 'perhaps it is the scriptual influence, or maybe the voice of my forefathers, to whom the mentioning of names was a sacred duty'.

The language he uses is exceptionally lyrical, poignant and also tough-minded. He does not spare the reader: in a visit to the author's school, the poet Moyshe Broderzon warns that beautiful words must not be used in place of wisdom. Rosenberg uses, amongst other things, the former to convey the latter.A repeating motif is the 'waterless river' of Lodz, called the Lodka, which the author remembers as heavily polluted. It seems a metaphor for the poison that is thrust into the lives of himself and those he loves.

There are the truly terrible memories of the 'hunt', by the Jewish ghetto police, for children under ten years, and adults over sixty-five, all of whom were taken away and murdered. But the people were told that the children were going to kindergartens, and would be looked after. Most knew that this was not the case, and some tried to hide them. There were other euphemisms for Nazi terror, such as 'resettlement' and 'special handling'.

Rosenberg writes of things that make you weep. But we have read of them before: there have been many books written, films made and documentaries produced that have portrayed in much detail the historical facts of Hitler and the Nazis. What this author has done is to write a very personal collection of memories from his childhood, a testimony to the lives of those lost from his own family and neighbourhood. He has written of them with exquisite beauty and painful tenderness, but not sentimentality. He has made each of these people he once knew live again. He has written them in poetic prose, lifted them out of the void of the forgotten, of darkness.

Amongst the cruelty is light. Rosenberg describes widespread poverty, but not poverty of the imagination or knowledge. There were inspiring teachers and storytellers: 'Language does not give birth to a story; a story must give birth to language'. There are moments of humour: 'Their intelligent sixteen-year-old daughter Gretchen, with whom I often played, was like a thin green twig a head taller than I, and to my great disappointment had no breasts'.

He particularly writes of his father who said to him something he has never forgotten: 'A slave to books... is a free man'. The family were celebrating a new book in the household, a Yiddish translation of Ignazio Silone's Fascism. Despite hunger, cold and deprivation, some families refused to burn their books to fuel the stove, as books were sacred and living things. The intellectual life was kept alive whenever possible.

There are tales of Jewish workers fighting back, of a man who could 'soften a stone with his singing' and a Marxist who did not know that 'revolutions change nothing, but merely replace one tyrant with another'.

Rosenberg creates heart-breaking images, and one of the most poignant is that of his father and mother: 'Hand in hand he went with her, through the bleakest tunnel and to its very end, to the night that awaited them there'.

Citation

• Sue Bond. 'Review: East of Time by Jacob G Rosenberg' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), May 2006. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 24 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Short-listed for ALS Medal; 2006 Arts SA Ward for Innovation in Literature and the NSW Premier's Award for Non-Fiction
  
  East of Time is a rendezvous of history and imagination, of realities and dreams, hopes and disenchantments. This extraordinary book unfolds in a succession of reminiscences that weave together into a shimmering tapestry depicting a lost world. The setting is Lodz, Poland, in the years between the author's childhood and early maturity, a period overtaken by the cataclysmic events of the 1930s an early 1940s. The narrative presents a powerful presonal testament and reflects the determination of an entire community to remain human in the face of its greatest peril, even at the last frontier of life.
  
  'East of Time is the most honest book about the nature of humankind that I have ever read ... Reading it has changed my life'. - Alex Miller
  
  'This Exquisite memoir chronicles suffering, but it also asserts and epitomizes the human spirit's power of creative regeneration. East of Time is a masterpiece'. - Richard Freadman

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