Other People’s Houses
Read Other People’s Houses Online
Authors: Lore Segal
Other People’s Houses
A Novel
Lore Segal
For my Mother, Franzi
Contents
1 • Vienna: A Liberal Education
3 • Liverpool: Mrs. Levine’s House
4 • “Illford”: The Married Couple
7 • “Allchester”: Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon
8 • London: Frocks, Books, and No Men
10 • Santiago de los Caballeros: Omama and Opapa
11 • Ciudad Trujillo: Don Indalecio Nuñez Aguirre and I
Foreword
In 1938 a particularly noisy special train from Vienna—it carried the frenetic atmosphere of a school bus—was stopped in Germany to be checked for contraband. The passengers fell silent with fear, as if each one secretly suspected herself of being the smuggler. Then the signal was given to pass on, and all at once the cars began to vibrate with singing and cheers, just as though a school
holiday had suddenly been declared. And, in a macabre way, so it had, since all the passengers were Jewish schoolchildren, and all of them had been expelled—from school, from home, from country. Their excursion was named the Children’s Transport (the parents were to follow later), but it might more accurately have been called the Children’s Pilgrimage. For some—those who debarked in Holland—it
was a delayed pilgrimage to the death camps. For the rest—among them Lore Groszmann Segal, the author of these memoirs, then ten years old—it was a pilgrimage toward a joyless England and the disabilities of exile, and, more poignantly, toward a permanent sense of being human contraband.
The story starts out with comic contraband: a
Knackwurst
bought at the last minute in Vienna as a delicacy
for the child’s journey is bitten into but left uneaten in her luggage. It begins to stink. The smell is a perceptible passenger on the train, crosses the Channel, and takes vivid and unmistakable refuge in England. The perpetrator of the stink—i.e., the child who has not eaten the sausage—is obsessed with the condition of being inextricably linked with rot and with the still more guilty condition
of being a smuggler. She pretends innocence of the stink while the search for its source goes on all around her—ho-hum, obviously the thing belongs to someone else. She hides it. She tries to bury it and fails. It pervades and overwhelms. Finally it is discovered:
… the brown paper bag had been taken out and torn open, and my guilty sausage lay exposed to the light. It was ugly and shriveled,
with one end nibbled off. The thing had lost the fierce and aggressive stench of active decay and had about it now the suffocating smell of mold; it thickened the air.… One of the English ladies was standing looking at it, her nose crinkled. The seven children were sitting looking at me, and I died there on the spot, drowned in shame. The waters closed over my head and through the thumping and roaring
in my ears I heard one of the little girls say, “And it isn’t even kosher.”… I stood and roared with grief.
The anecdote is droll without being funny—a species of gallows humor that establishes the remarkable tone of this narrative and also serves as a reverberating comment on the tale as a whole, rich in biographical suggestiveness: a Viennese family capable of buying a
traif
sausage is, by
that token alone, likely to be an “assimilated” family, and a family with these propensities is equally likely, in the Vienna of the 20s and 30s, to be middle-class and secularly cultivated: so it is not at all surprising to learn that the father, a sober figure of deep dignity, is chief accountant in an important bank, and that the mother has an elegant and sprightly command of a Blüthner piano.
But in the exile of England the rot begins: the father decays into a bumbling and sickly gardener, of whom the child is ashamed; the mother becomes a house servant, but turns this bravery into obsequiousness and tries to persuade the child to pander to her rescuers. Nor is this the end of the parable; it also anticipates the quick adaptability and contemplative stubbornness of the child herself. Catapulted
from
Knackwurst
to
kashruth
—her first English benefactors are the Levines, an Orthodox Liverpool family—she responds by punctiliously waiting out the very last second of the six hours that must precede milk after meat. But what the tale of the sausage most yields, through Segal’s controlled and expertly deadpan ironies, is, simply, guilt and grief. What it does not yield, curiously, is what it
might most easily have succumbed to: vulgarity and sentimentality.
The subject matter of these memoirs is rife with sentimental possibilities: the survival of a refugee child among various sets of strangers who house and feed her but continue to regard her as a smuggled, and therefore not quite legitimate, item. The shallow terrors of such a story do not partake of the Holocaust and its horrendous
and always accelerating bibliography; they are purely domestic, and if they derive from anything at all, it is from standard post-Dickensian bathos. There is nothing new in an introspective and very intelligent child being sent to live among unfeeling persons of inferior culture who nevertheless have an unanswerable worldly power over her. Only—and here is the conclusive difference—the adventures
of Segal’s Orphan Annie are pervaded and overwhelmed by the Hitlerian stench. This remains true, even though she falls among generally kindly people: after the Levines, the Willoughbys, a family of small sensibility who employ her parents as a domestic “couple”; after the Willoughbys, the Hoopers and the Grimsleys, raucous working-class households; and finally Miss Douglas and Mrs. Dillon, who,
with their house tea-with-the-vicar and their quiet garden, emerge not quite intact, and rather savagely, out of all the genteel English novels of all our childhoods. But the Hitlerian stench is there, all the same; it swirls in the air, and comes to rest not on suffering, but on its bedfellow, sufferance. Over the child’s survival and tenacity hangs a guilty awareness that her life, having been
granted, must not be taken for granted.
It is undoubtedly this awareness which gives Segal’s book its extraordinary—one might say its peculiar—tone. It is dry, cold, literal, even numb. Its comedy is without sympathy or hope. Its sadnesses evoke not pity but writhing shame. To speak of this writer’s “objectivity” is to describe only half her strange achievement. Most of all, and in underground
and oblique fashion, she is saying something acutely complex and unresolved about the nature of guilt and the grief that follows the knowledge that it cannot ever be expiated. In Segal’s retrospective vision of guilt, the parents are forced by brute necessity to cast out the child; the child, unable to surmount the father’s degradation and despair, cannot love him; he dies, and her grief is not
for his death but for her own absent love. Nor can she love any person or place that is not illumined by a somehow specious literary (hence imaginary or ideal) coloring; of reality she expects nothing. She loves herself least. She has been made to understand that she must be grateful for merely being alive, and instead, perhaps out of self-preserving spite, she aspires to a life beyond guilt and so
brilliant that it is attainable only in images and symbols. Oxford is one such symbol: her uncle Paul’s idealized Viennese youth, steeped in poetry and student wanderlust, is another. But her own youth is spent in severe loneliness at the prosaic University of London, and afterward in tutoring and store-keeping with her grandparents on a sluggish island in the Caribbean, waiting for the American
quota to come through. America, above all, falls short of this hopeless image of arcane but stupendous beauty—New York is only another dun island in a chain of asylums and exiles: “I, now that I have children and am about the same age my mother was when Hitler came, walk gingerly and in astonishment upon this island of my comforts, knowing that it is surrounded on all sides by calamity.”
In the
end, then, Segal’s reminiscences are not so much about her life as about her time—our time. Her voice is inconceivably cold, and her book is inconceivably moving, because she sees her own guilts clearly, however unwillingly. The English with whom she sojourned were right all along. Her life is owed (though not to them), and it is not to be taken for granted, just as our lives, by implication, are
owed and not to be taken for granted. We owe ourselves to those who did not climb aboard the Children’s Transport, who stayed behind and were surrogates for us. We owe ourselves but we cannot give ourselves: the guilt is inexpiable, and does not invite comment. This is what Segal appears to be really saying underneath the plain surface of her narrative—that in our time, in the face of everything
that happened to those Others, we must question the legitimacy of our very lives; and that we are, at bottom, through the simple fact of our survival, human contraband which history, for one reason or another, has allowed to get through. All of this is the essential statement of
Other People’s Houses
, and it explains why, despite plainness, without comment or cry, Lore Segal agitates as fiercely
as though she were dealing with unspeakables. It explains also why her book falls as far as possible from the maudlin, and why her voice is loveless but complete.
—Cynthia Ozick
Preface
I did my first writing—I mean writing that understood itself to be
writing
—when I was ten years old. I was one of five-hundred Jewish refugee children housed in Dover Court Camp on England’s east coast. We were waiting to be distributed among English foster families.
Before I left Vienna, my father had stood me between his knees and said that I must ask the English people to get my parents
out of Austria—also my grandparents, also my aunt, and my twin cousins. I said that I would.
I was being sent on an experimental children’s transport to test whether the Nazis would allow a trainful of Jewish children to cross the border. My mother has since told me that she had urged my staying, our living or dying together. My father had determined that I must get to safety, and that I would
save them. My mother says that after they came home from the railroad station my father went to bed and lay ramrod stiff for two days.
That winter of 1938 was one of the coldest in English memory. I sat in my coat and gloves and wrote a letter. It was a tearjerker full of symbolisms—sunsets, dawns, and the rose in the snow outside the window, “a survivor,” I wrote, “wearing a cap of snow askew
on its bowed head.” The letter made its way to the refugee committee, which found my parents a job and got them the sponsors and visas to emigrate to England, proving that bad literature makes things happen. On my eleventh birthday, in March 1939, my parents visited me in Liverpool, where I was living with my first foster parents. They went on to the south of England, and their job as “a married
couple,” that is, a cook and a butler.
My letter had another effect: I had become, without knowing it, a writer. I remember walking around that cold camp, in love with my own words, rehearsing over and over my purple sunsets, thrilling to that clever frozen rose.
I did my second piece of writing later that same year. It frustrated my foster parents (in the book I call them the “Levines”) and
all their visitors, that a refugee from Hitler didn’t understand Yiddish however loudly they spoke it. It frustrated me that no one seemed to understand what might, at that very moment, be happening to my parents. I bought one of those school books with a purple cover and a white label with a red border in which English school children do their homework, and I filled its thirty-six pages with my
Hitler stories. It was the novelist’s impulse not to explain or persuade but to force the reader’s vision: See what I saw, feel what it felt like. It was also my first experience of the writer’s grief that what happened on the paper was not what I had intended. As poor J. Alfred Prufrock puts it, “That’s not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all.” So I added several sunsets. Ruth, the youngest
of the Levine daughters and my particular friend, got someone to translate it into English. It made Mrs. Levine cry. I sat and watched her.