“Memory,” wrote the Holocaust historian Peter Novick, “has no sense of the passage of time.” It denies its own sense of “pastness,” insisting on its continuous presence.
Indeed, for the Altermans — the fragmented Jewish family at the heart of “Rooms for Vanishing,” Stuart Nadler’s dirgelike new novel — memory is infinitely recursive. They shuffle the earth in a trance of grief, slaves to their memories, and even more so to their hope. The postwar world is a tundra of trauma and pain and little else besides.
“Rooms for Vanishing” follows the lives of Fania, Arnold, Sonja and Moses Alterman across decades and oceans as they search for one another in the long shadow of World War II. Abandon your hope at the door: It becomes clear early on that each Alterman exists in a separate, mutually exclusive timeline wherein he or she is the family’s lone survivor, a form of narrative mischief that more than once reminded me of Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife.” But whereas Roth’s postmodern novel parts the curtains to reveal a grinning authorial trickster, Nadler’s use of parallel dimensions is murkier.
The novel begins in London with Sonja, who was saved from the Nazis by the British rescue operation Kindertransport; she is searching for her missing husband, Franz, an orchestra conductor. Franz, she suspects, is following a tip from an acquaintance that their daughter, Anya, long dead from a terminal illness, was spotted in a travel advertisement for Vienna — Sonja’s birthplace and the black hole at the center of the Alterman universe. Whether Anya is somehow still alive, and whether the laws of time and space are mutable, is one of this book’s tensions.
Nadler then introduces us to Sonja’s mother, Fania, who immigrated to Montreal after the war and works as a masseuse. “If I press just slightly in the right spot,” she muses, she can “put a patient in mind of the past, of a room, for instance, that has been exploded, or incinerated by bombs, or raided by soldiers.” Rooms, walls and partitions of all kinds loom large in this novel. Fania, whose infant son Moses was murdered by Nazis, still hears him crying “from just beyond the wall of my apartment … but I can’t move through walls to get to him.”
The third timeline features an adult version of Moses, who is haunted by the ghost of a friend. Curiously, Nadler spends so much time detailing the bureaucracy of ghost life that any sense of mystery is squashed. And the final timeline — focused on Arnold, a centenarian, and his letter exchanges with his rediscovered daughter, Sonja — raises too many questions about the permeability of the timelines to be fully affecting.
Nadler writes in a register of formal mysticism that can be pleasantly sorrowful at times, overwrought at others. His characters often speak in wispy homily, making proclamations like “A secret always needs a strange ear, or else the secret loses its power and it dies” or “When one is waiting desperately for someone to appear to them from a crowd … what one is really waiting for is to jump from one skin to another.” A few of these might be acceptable, but nearly every character in “Rooms for Vanishing” speaks this way. Even a skilled writer like Nadler can’t always make fresh the tediousness of longing, or liberate the Altermans from reading as players in a post-Holocaust parable.
Still, there are moments of deep emotion in this ambitious novel. Fania’s chapters are moving, and listening to her pelt Hermann, her language-immersion partner, with Yiddishkeit zingers is a welcome relief from the book’s inconsistent world-building and gloom.
Even 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, many Holocaust survivors are still living with the hope of becoming whole again, which may well be Nadler’s point. There are no happy endings — only infinite variations of sorrow.
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