Lily Tuck has range. She has written historical fiction set in South America — her novel “The News From Paraguay” won the National Book Award in 2004 — and low-key realist short stories about contemporary life. These works move with ease and a kind of persuasive expat familiarity between the south of France; Thailand; Cambridge, Mass.; and a dude ranch in Nevada. Her prose style shifts with the subject matter but has also gotten leaner over time; it runs closer to the bone.
Her new novel, “The Rest Is Memory,” published at the age of 86, is set in Poland during World War II and follows a young Catholic girl, Czeslawa, into Auschwitz. It’s a very different kind of historical fiction from “The News From Paraguay” but uses some of the same techniques: Both books wear their research heavily because Tuck wants it to show. Part of the flavor of her style is a high fact content.
“The Rest Is Memory” contains frequent footnotes to Tuck’s historical sources (“Gutman and Berenbaum, ‘Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp’”), as well as an author’s note that describes the seed of the project: an obituary in The New York Times of the Polish photographer Wilhelm Brasse (1917-2012), “who took over 40,000 pictures of the prisoners at Auschwitz.” One of them was a 14-year-old girl named Czeslawa Kwoka.
Brasse himself is a character in the novel, though maybe “character” is the wrong word for it: Much of the prose is occupied by thumbnail historical sketches, of people and towns and businesses. Czeslawa grows up near Zamosc, “a perfect example of a Renaissance town”; upon its founding in the late 16th century, immigrants, including Jews, were “given equal rights” and exempt from paying taxes for 25 years. Later, the Germans renamed it Himmlerstadt, after the Nazi politician.
We learn that the region is known for its slivovitz production and digress, by way of Czeslawa’s communion dress (hand-sewn by her grandmother), into a brief aside on the Polish tradition of lacemaking. Every year, the village of Bobowa holds a bobbin lace festival. During the war, it was the site of one of the Germans’ smaller concentration camps. “No talk of lacemaking then,” Tuck comments. Her subject, really, is not just Auschwitz but the deliberate decimation of a country’s identity. She quotes a speech from Hitler: “I have put my Death’s Head formations at the ready with the command to send man, woman and child of Polish descent and language to their deaths, pitilessly and remorselessly. Poland will be depopulated and settled with Germans.” Czeslawa is Tuck’s imagined version of one of those children.
“This is a work of fiction based on fact,” Tuck writes in an author’s note, and she is careful to point out the elements of invention: the roses in the garden of the Auschwitz commandant, nurtured by his “unconscionable wife”; Czeslawa’s favorite childhood game (jacks); a brief encounter with a boy who takes her for a ride on his motorcycle and tries to kiss her. The overwhelming force of the novel comes from the sense it conveys of the relentless march of historical events. Every character is going to die, by gas or injection with phenol, or from dysentery, or because they were beaten or attacked by dogs and too ill to recover from the resulting infections. And the stories themselves are broken up by lists of facts: the Polish writers, for example, who died in the war, or the identification numbers of the real young women interred with Czeslawa.
None of this makes for easy reading, but it’s part of Tuck’s great skill that the story never loses momentum under its own emotional weight. Every page contains something interesting as well as moving: a brief history of a best-selling children’s author, Janus Korczak, who wrote one of Czeslawa’s favorite books, “Kaytek the Wizard.” (Memories of it keep her company in the camp.) Korczak was the director of a children’s orphanage in Warsaw and was sent to Treblinka with all of its children — a witness saw him holding two of them by their hands as they were marched away.
The challenge is that when the facts are so heavy, any attempt to fictionalize them, to enter imaginatively into the lives of people living through things that are unimaginable, can feel like a violation. Yet without access to imaginative sympathies, what’s the point of writing a novel about them? Tuck’s solution is to furnish Czeslawa’s life as sparsely as possible, with a few objects (a Bible she carries with her to the camp), a few incidents, a few memories. The bulk of her daily life is occupied by verifiable experiences of camp suffering. It’s a deeply impressive achievement from a wonderful writer and loses none of its power from the fact that the ground has been well covered. As the author of “Kaytek the Wizard” once advised: “Don’t refuse a child if he asks you to tell the same story over and over and over again.”
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