Tales of Grabowski by John Auerbach

Review Essay by Nancy Sherman

I ’d never heard of John Auerbach, but when his posthumously published book appeared featuring a preface by Saul Bellow, I took it up in response to the more famous writer’s high praise. Bellow’s characterization of his friend as a “born story-spinner” perfectly describes the voice behind Tales of Grabowski: the book is gripping, vivid, a genuine page-turner despite its difficult subject.

Auerbach was a Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivor who settled in Israel and wrote in English; he met Bellow fairly late in his long, turbulent life. Much of Auerbach’s working career seems to have stemmed from the false identity he assumed during the war and which he describes in Tales, that of a Polish stoker tending the fires of voracious boilers in the ports and ships of Nazi Germany. After the war he worked on Swedish ships; in Israel he was a fishing boat skipper; and for fifteen years he served as an engineer in the Israeli Merchant Marines. He also wrote twelve books of fiction.

Tales consists of two novellas, “Transformations” and “Escape,” and three short stories; the latter offer something like footnotes to the longer pieces. The inclusive narrative is that of twenty-year-old David Gordon, a Jew who escapes from the Warsaw Ghetto carrying the identity papers of a dead man, one Wladyslaw Grabowski. Introspective and sensitive, Gordon spends the time leading up to his escape reading philosophy books borrowed from a neighbor’s library – Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer. His ghetto friends are artists and intellectuals and fervent Yiddish-speaking communists who are clearly doomed to perish along with their ideals. Slowly, the need for action dawns on Gordon, and with cold deliberation he prepares for his transformation to another life.

Grabowski arrives on the scene already tough, wary, and purposeful, exuding the confidence born of desperation. Physical strength and intelligence protect him from the ever-present Gestapo and countless other threats. As a “volunteer” worker in Danzig, this Pole is just one of the vast population of despised foreigners who fuel the Nazi war effort with their labor. Auerbach’s detailed depictions of the teeming camps in which these laborers eat and sleep, of their backbreaking jobs, of their friendships and intrigues, form the backdrop of Grabowski’s precarious progress from job to job, danger to danger, risk to risk.

Throughout the journey, Grabowski’s survival depends on the utter excision of Gordon’s sensibility from his mind and heart. On this point there’s possible no self-indulgence, no weakening of resolve; as far as he’s concerned, it’s Gordon who is the dead man. As hardships turn to cruelties and cruelties become tortures, this determination — to remain wholly Grabowski — seems only to increase. If we’re unable to conceive of a will this strong, it’s because we can’t fathom the horrors that created it. It requires a perverse strain of creativity: “I cannot refrain from comparing my wartime experiences and transformations with…theatre,” says Auerbach in one of the book’s appended pieces. “I had to reconstruct the life of this individual from the beginning to the end in order to become a viable double.”

Auerbach endows his story with the suspense and intrigue worthy of a thriller. Defiantly, Grabowski doubles his risk by agreeing to act as a spy for the Allies within the confines of the busy shipyard. The cloak-and-dagger subplot features a mysterious Argentinian operative, a barmaid with a heart of gold and unsuspecting friends, and lends a compelling specificity to the narrative. Each character, including Grabowski, is fully depicted as a distinctive personality whose response to the war is determined, inevitably, by self-interest.

The outcomes of Grabowski’s enterprise are dire, and Auerbach, in the three sections that follow the main narrative of Tales, is unsparing in his expression of existential exhaustion. “My wife…would like me to live forever, but I prefer to be damned to hell for eternity rather than live this mess again,” he says in “Episodes in Autobiography.” But what continues to fascinate him is the power of the human mind to create or erase a life as surely as a bomb or gun. He lived long enough to participate in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, and to write it all down. As Bellow tells us, “He should be read by all good readers because [he] is full of sympathy and never writes without strong feeling…. He has that gift of being able to communicate instantly with those whose antennae are prepared to receive rare frequencies.”

—Nancy Sherman

Excerpts

Grabowski, speeding to Danzig on the night train, pragmatic, and richly endowed with that sense of reality his creator badly missed, could not refrain from some critical observations. What a sissy that David was! What a mess all these philosophical books produced in his mind! What confusion! What self-pity! Masochistic orgies fanning the consuming fires of pain; the pleasures of endless microscopic studies of the dissection of one’s suffering; and the constant claims on fate, on his bad luck. Of course, anybody caught up in this Ghetto could honestly be called a bad-luck man – lots of people were sharing that same fate.

After a while, Grabowski thought, one became insensitive to the suffering of others; and a little bit later, one grew indifferent to one’s own. Then, it was easy to die. Germans were great as cultivators of indifference; they knew how to bring people to that stage by scientific methods. Great philosophers and great inventors. One could conquer the whole world in this way. David, in his inexcusable childish naiveté, could never understand how the same people who had produced Kant and Schopenhauer had also given birth to Hitler, and then rallied to him with such enthusiasm. Well, Grabowski concluded, at least David had had the good sense to die at the right moment and to produce me. (p. 59)

He felt very lonely. Much more lonely since he had met Rosti. But hadn’t he been conditioned by David, before his creation, to bear loneliness? And even before, hadn’t David, young and inexperienced as he was, started discovering the basic facts of human loneliness?

It is one thing to study something theoretically, and another to practice. Oh, yes, they were different things. Grabowski, sitting in the crane’s stokehold during the nightshift, listened to the low, steady hissing of steam in the ancient pumps and pipes, and stared at the bright flame of the carbid lamp. The fires in the boilers were banked, covered with ashes. Early in the morning, he would throw in a shovel full of fresh coal. The flames would spring up, come to life suddenly. Cleverly feeding them and cleaning, he would build up a roaring fire, raise steam, and when the dayshift fireman came at seven, he would find everything ready. (p. 151)

He’d been created with a very clear purpose; not so the buddies around the table. They seemed so much freer, seldom burdened with thinking. Therein lies the great injustice, he thought: David could have at least have spared me this. Yes, but on the other hand, how to fulfill this purpose, this destiny without the capacity to think? Therein lies the ambiguity of the situation. What would be the ideal solution? Selective thinking, perhaps. But this is impossible and David knew it. He was not so stupid, after all. As a palliative, he passed on this power of will, power of control. Grabowski felt he must keep things under control, including the thoughts, when they become insubordinate and start running in forbidden directions. Curb them. (p. 209)

Questions for Discussion

1. Describe the young David Gordon. Is his assumption of a Polish laborer’s identity believable, in practical terms?

2. How do Gordon’s experiences as a soldier and ghetto dweller contribute to his growing self-awareness and resolve?

3. Grabowski gives up relatively safe, comfortable situations to fight against the Germans as a spy. Why?

4. Women are often depicted in the book as political radicals, neurotic wives, or whores. What effect do they have on Grabowski’s evolution?

5. Are Rosti and Rita sympathetic characters? Elena and Bob? Grabowski himself?

6. Is it really possible to assume the identity of another human being as completely as Grabowski does?

7. Memory and dreams are intrinsic to Auerbach’s narrative and to his art. Are they redemptive, or merely functional?

8. In spite of its realistic detail, the ending of “Escape” could be called symbolic, even allegorical. In what ways?

The Jewish Reader is a publication of the National Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.

Editor: Nancy Sherman