Gwen Edelman

Highly atmospheric, and the cover alone is worth the price of this slim volume but Holocaust stories have been told much more convincingly and much less obliquely. The self-absorption of the Warsaw Ghetto survivor/now famous writer returned to the city of his youth after 40 years is hard to swallow and the small and large secrets that spill between him and his wife and fellow survivor seem trivial. The wife's naivete is simply unbelievable.

What, in the end, was the point? You can't go home again? Our lives are built on lies? When you can't bear yourself any longer, take another shot of vodka? The author's skill with words doesn't quite make up for the hollowness of the story.… (altro)

This second novel by Gwen Edelman—like her first, War Story—explores powerful emotional twists in the lives of Holocaust survivors.

Jascha has become a respected London novelist most famous for a book about the war; his wife, Lilka, is also a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, where they met as young adults before escaping separately and being reunited in England after the war. At Lilka’s urging, Jascha accepts an invitation to speak in Warsaw and the pair travel by train to their old homeland, where the changes time has wrought, the defensive attitude of the Poles, and the secrets each of them have been keeping about what they did to survive bring back old conflicts and resurrect emotions they’d thought long forgotten.

There’s nothing simple about genocide, and Edelman has the ability to focus on the individual complications, both emotionally and psychologically, while also illuminating the larger social and cultural forces that keep us from fully understanding our past. Both honest and hopeful, The Train to Warsaw is a reminder that our life stories are never quite what they seem.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: http://litrant.tumblr.com/post/87884256431/the-past-its-never-gone-the-train-to-...… (altro)

The Train to Warsaw is an interesting work in both content and style. Jascha and Lilka, Jewish lovers who met in the Warsaw ghetto, escaped separately, and reunited in London years later are the passengers on this train. Jascha has become a famous writer and is invited to Poland to give a reading. He has no desire to return to the country that nearly killed him—and did kill so many. Lilka, with fond memories of prewar Warsaw, wants to return “home” and convinces him to accept the invitation. Of course, the home she remembers ceased to exist years ago.

The plot of this novel is predictable: Jascha and Lilka remember the horrors of the past, and on their journey both reveal parts of their stories to they’ve hidden from one another for more than forty years. But the fact that the reader can predict the overall arc of the novel, doesn’t make it any less engaging. Edelman presents these two characters with such care and specificity that their experiences seem new precisely because these are their experiences.

A major theme here is complicity: the complicity of the Poles who handed Jews over to the Nazis for the benefits this would bring them; the complicity of the Jewish police within the ghetto; the complicity in the suffering of others that no ghetto resident could avoid. Both Jascha and Lilka view their survival as a betrayal of sorts. They lived when so few did, and both lived because they found ways to construct new, non-Jewish identities for themselves.

Jascha and Lilka keep their sense of complicity close at hand, probing it the way one probes any physically or emotionally painful area—to confirm the pain and to keep reminding one’s self that the pain has been survived, if not escaped.

The Polish nation they return to, unlike them, is determined to forget the past. When Jascha challenges his Polish audience by reading a particularly devastating section of one of his novels set in the ghetto, everyone finds a way to distance herself or himself from the genocide. The young say they weren’t born then; the old say they suffered as well during the occupation; those in the middle claim they were too young during the war to have any kind of responsibility. And the reader, of course, is left to wonder if such deliberate forgetting may lead to repetition.

The novel is composed primarily of conversations, both in the present and the past, and because Edelman doesn’t use standard dialogue formatting (no quotation marks here), the reader is forced to be attentive to the shifts in the narrative being constructed. The prose is deceptively simple, obscuring at first the fractal-like complexity of events, time, and emotion.

This is a book that can be read in an evening, but one that will require a much longer period than that to fully absorb—the sort of book that remains satisfying long after one has finished it.… (altro)