FICTION
‘‘Among the Living”
By Jonathan Rabb
Other Press
$26, 306 pages
When we first meet Yitzhak Goldah, the emotionally fractured protagonist in Jonathan Rabb’s “Among the Living,” the Czech expat wonders if there’s an English word to describe his overwhelming sense of exhaustion.
It’s 1947. The 31-year-old refugee has finally reached Savannah after a long train ride from New York. But his real troubles began years earlier, when a different locomotive carried Goldah and his family from Prague to Terezín, the infamous Nazi concentration camp.
At the book’s outset, the sickly exile looks “like a sail still holding its shape even after the wind has died away.” Stirring metaphors prove to be the lifeblood of Rabb’s disquieting novel. “Among the Living” crams in an ambitious cross-section of issues: survival guilt, xenophobia, the impossible predicaments refugees face and the deep divisions of a small-town Jewish community.
Having endured three years of German and Russian captivity, Goldah travels to Georgia at the behest of Abe and Pearl Jesler, distant relatives he’s never met. His first glimpses of the verdant landscape reminds him of the American magazines he read while recuperating in a London sanatorium.
“It was the smell of sodden land and untamed growth and, he thought, were he to toss a seed in the air, it might sprout even before touching the ground.”
Goldah, who worked as a journalist before the war, keeps his powerful observations to himself — not that he can get a word in edgewise with the Jeslers. Abe’s guided tour of town reiterates that “here there were Jews — vital Jews — who made the city what it was.” Yet even after a roll call of local Yachums and Hymies, the Jeslers warn that a foreign-sounding name like “Yitzhak” might seal his fate as an outsider. They’ve already decided to call him “Ike.”
A generation older than Goldah, the Jeslers seem to regard his situation as a mitzvah, a moral obligation — but also an opportunity to expand the family business. He moves into the spare bedroom and goes to work in Abe’s shoe store, where the African-American employees introduce him to some hard truths about the segregated South.
Pearl Jesler, long past the window of motherhood, at first treats Goldah like a surrogate son. The taciturn refugee takes the smothering in stride, though resents being a novelty for her social gatherings.
At the first party in his honor, a rabbi advises him to remember that he’s once again among “Jews who are alive.” Privately, Goldah feels his temper rising. “What was it that he was meant to reclaim? Rage and despair, indignation and longing? There had been none of these things in the camps because there had been nowhere to hold them. Such things were kept safe only in the pockets of the living.”
Later, a barrage of questions from Pearl’s clique almost pushes Goldah to the edge. His complex reaction leaves the reader contemplating notions of grief and victimhood in a troubling new light.
“And there it was: The question that always came. How this? How could they be so inhuman? … What they really wanted to know was: How could you let something like this happen to yourself?”
Goldha’s response shuts down the interrogation. “It wasn’t the guards who were inhuman. It was us.”
He argues that the camps effectively obliterated prisoners’ sense of self worth, making them compliant and disposable. This may explain the character’s uncomfortable numbness for the first few chapters, though a later revelation hints that his emotional disconnection goes back further.
The glacier begins to melt once he meets Eva De la Parra, a young widow whose husband was killed in battle. Their speedy affair sets tongues wagging and brings out the worst in Eva’s mother, who delivers an “unspoken threat with such gentility” that Goldah almost misses it.
The problem turns out to be tribal. The Jeslers are Conservative. Eva’s family is Reform. As one character puts it, “That’s a whole different kettle of fish.”
Eva’s father extends an olive branch by inviting Goldha to write for his newspaper. His take on the situation comes as a surprise: “I can’t imagine the SS officer who put you on that train asked which synagogue you were affiliated with. I know that. And I know it must make us seem rather small in your eyes, and maybe I’m not so sure I wouldn’t agree with you.”
Rabb, who teaches creative writing at the Savannah College of Art and Design, is best known for his historical thrillers set in Berlin. While this novel is clearly more literary in its sensibilities, the author can’t resist introducing complications that muddle some of the core themes. This is especially obvious when another refugee shows up: A frail, scarred woman claims to be Goldha’s former fiancé, who he believed had died in a camp. An ensuing love-triangle storyline pulls the novel away from, say, Isaac Bashevis Singer territory and more toward the land of Douglas Sirk melodrama.
Other subplots involve racially motivated violence and acrimony between Jewish businessmen and Irish port workers. These developments may highlight the book’s interest in prejudice but somehow feel beside the point.
More effective and chilling moments come when Pearl reveals her true character. She brags about her home being “a far cry from the shack they had lived in when they were first married … with the Greeks and the blacks and the smell of human smallness.”
Later, as she spews venom over the star-crossed courtship, she calls Goldha “a little Czech Jew.” At first confused by her spite, Goldha recognizes something familiar in her expression, “rage, constrained in the narrow slits of her eyes” — a chilling echo of Nazi soldiers barking orders into boxcars.
