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PARTISAN REVIEW
his journal. Mter the destruction of his mother, father, and sister, Bella,Jakob
flees to the ancient bogs of Biskupin and sinks himself into clay with the fos–
sils, until one day he sees a lone digger.
Here is the electrifying start of their encounter: "I limped toward him,
stiff as a golem, clay tight behind my knees....So hungry. I screamed into the
silence the only phrase I knew in more than one language, I screamed it in
Polish and German and Yiddish, thumping my fists on my own chest: dirty
Jew,
dirty
Jew,
dirty
Jew."
The digger is Athos, a Greek archeologist-geologist. Athos hides the boy
under his clothes and takes him to his home on the island of Zakynthos.
There they embark on the adventure of survival together, despite invader
Germans.
Athos says: "I will be your koumbaros, your godfather, the marriage spon–
sor for you and your sons. . . .We must carry each other. If we don't have this,
what are we?"
Athos is true to his promise. Though the time on the Greek island is
haunted by grief, it is also an astonishingly tender, beautifully realized idyll.
Under Athos' tutoring, Jakob learns plants, stones, stars, the sea, the ancient
myths. When Jakob, who had been shattered into muteness, learns to speak
again, it is in the language of poetry, of English and Greek.
The fifty-year-old Athos turns out to be as great an exile from life as
seven-year-old Jakob. Athos possesses the gift of extracting poetry from the
natural world, and the bereft boy finds solace there, turns to it in his grief and
believes it responds to him: "Alone on the roof those nights.... I felt com–
passion for the stars themselves. Aching towards us for millennia though we
are blind to their signals until it's too late, starlight only the white breath of
an old cry."
So Jakob the orphan is rescued by Athos, who seems to the boy like a god
from the sea itself. And the boy in turn brings life-giving delight to his res–
cuer, the grieving, isolated man whose lover has died and who is in any case
in love with the past and in recoil from the barbaric present.
Anne Michaels' compassionate and empathic first novel thus recounts
how an old man and a boy save one another from the horrors of their time.
She is a Canadian whose two previous books are prize-winning poetry col–
lections. The interior life she creates for the brutalized boy who is at heart a
poet converts horror-numbed sensations into the sensuality of landscape,
earth's and heaven's: "If a chip of stone radiates its self, its breath, so long, how
stubborn might be the soul."
Aharon Appelfeld writes in one of his essays that the only authentic eye
with which to view the Holocaust is the child's; the child has no other life to
mediate what it sees. Appelfeld hin1Self manages to keep his novels framed
inside the shock. His characters remain, if not children, then as unrecognizing
