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PARTISAN REVIEW
reader is left by this unhappy legacy with much to reflect about on a
subject we might call the egotism of grief.
The abundant fiction of Czech novelist Arnost Lustig grants us
insight into the impact of Nazi Germany on the lives of individual Jews
that the intellectual and the journalist, by the very nature of their disci–
plines, could not offer. Lustig is an expert at patiently reconstructing the
details of what James called the "fictive picture," so that the doom
threatening the Jews of Prague eases into the story amidst a plethora of
mundane concerns. The literary imagination need not record the flood
that overwhelmed European Jewry as a sudden catastrophe.
It
has the
leisure to portray the gradual and unsystematic erosion of individual
mental peace, followed by ever more severe instances of physical dis–
tress. In
The House of Returned Echoes
Lustig unfolds the family plea–
sures and economic pursuits of his protagonists before and after the
incursion of Nazi Germany into Czechoslovakia, enabling us to trace
the paralysis of the individual will as it slowly grasps how few and futile
are the gestures of protest or avenues of rescue still available to it.
Throughout he manages to maintain sympathy with his victimized char–
acters, whose diminishing space to maneuver is shaped not by loss of
initiative but by the ruthless intentions of their Nazi masters. Only the
world of fiction could provide such a richly textured account of how
hope, delusion, skepticism, and inertia combined in the Jewish commu–
nity to mask the dangers that mounted their relentless incremental
threats despite the bland reassurances of the enemy.
Lustig rephrases the recurrent question in Holocaust discourse about
how the Jews "allowed" their ruin to engulf them so easily. One possi–
ble response he explores is that they were undone by their own decency.
Encountering for the first time a mindset driven by a culture of exter–
mination, Lustig's characters fail to identify its inner evil because they
continue to measure the foe by the familiar values that invigorate their
own lives. Temporarily discarding his Jewish star, Lustig'S main protag–
onist takes a train journey to the country, simply indifferent to the risk.
"The trip itself is like a promise," he thinks, "and if you have chosen
the destination yourself, rarely can anything go wrong. Who would
choose to take a trip into danger? He liked to travel by train.... It
reminded himself of something. It brought out memories." The ironic
gulf between his innocent reflections and our post-Holocaust knowl–
edge exposes the vulnerability of an imagination inspired by the unfet–
tered certainty of choice.
When Emil Ludwig and his wife and children take their last train trip,
from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, the husband has long since relin-
