ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

As you can see from my reviews of Anita Brookner’s novels which are within the obituary I wrote on the occasion of her death in 2016, I thought I had her ‘pegged’ as an author of bitter-sweet stories of intelligent middle-class older women reflecting on their poor choices and their wasted lives.  These women were emotionally stilted, isolated from society and disappointed by men.  I admired her writing, her brilliantly perceptive descriptions and her often droll style, but I always had to be ‘in the mood’ to read a Brookner.

But…

An episode of Backlisted (about Raymond Chandler, of all people!) began as usual with the chat about who’d been reading what, and Andy Miller told the listeners about a Brookner novel I didn’t know, quite different to the others I had read:

Latecomers, he said, is an incredibly moving book about two men who came to England as evacuees on the Kindertransport. At first it seems like a book about the friendship between these two men, and about their lives and their families.  But gradually you realise that Brookner is sketching a portrait of the effect of a terrible wrench away from home and family on a whole life.  This trauma, he said, is rendered with great emotional and intellectual control.  It appears elegant, subtle and understated, but it’s incredibly ambitious.

Latecomers was on the TBR with a bunch of other Brookners that I’d found at Diversity Books.) January 27th is Holocaust Memorial Day 2023, so I decided to retrieve it from the shelf…

But first, a word about another book I’ve read about the Kindertransport experience.  Years ago, at the Melbourne Writers Festival when it was at the Malthouse, I met the author of Serry and Me, Kindertransport & Beyond (2001) by Elfie Rosenberg.  She had been just eight years old when in 1939 she was smuggled out of Nazi Germany with her fifteen-year-old sister and not reunited with her parents until eight years later.  My most vivid memory of our conversation over lunch was her ambivalence.  She said that she felt that compared to what others suffered in the Holocaust, her experience was ‘not so bad’ and that it had taken some persuasion for her to contribute her story to the Write Your Story Makor Project (now run by the Lamm Jewish Library of Australia.

Kindertransport, The Final Parting, by Frank Meisler, Hamburg Dammtor station (Wikipedia)

Elfie had stayed with a kindly family in Gloucestershire, and she had the companionship of her sister, but the trauma of the separation and her parents weeping on that last night stayed with her forever.  And what she has in common with all other victims of the Nazis, is the horror that the country of her birth was implementing a monstrous genocide in pursuit of their absurd Aryan fantasy of a master race.  In what must also have been a terrible wrench for Elfie’s parents, they sent her to safety because her life was at risk.

It is this persisting trauma that Brookner portrays with such finesse.  Her characters Hartmann and Fibich bond at boarding school over their shared experience of the Kindertransport, neither of them ever to see their family again. Yet they build a successful life in Britain, going into business together, printing greeting-cards and then running a photocopier business which enables them to live comfortably. They marry, and have children, and their very close friendship means that they live in the same block of flats and socialise with each other regularly.

Hartmann appears to come to terms with his losses by denying them.  Nostalgia he thinks, is only for the securely based.

However, no man is free of his own history. Hartmann was no exception.  But in the interests of damage limitation he had struck a bargain with the fates: he would, in so far as he could, employ the maximum good will at his disposal in an effort to screen out the undesirable, the inadvertent, those shocks against which the mere mortal is powerless.  He would, he had long ago decided, be deliberately euphoric. (p.7)

He lives a life of pleasure, enjoying good food, elegant clothes and a light-hearted, optimistic approach to the future.  He has a rather ditzy wife called Yvette, who is preoccupied with the kind of domestic ambitions that were common for women in the 1950s, which suits him fine. They have a quiet, biddable daughter who produces grandchildren for Hartmann to love.

Fibich, on the other hand, suffers from chronic anxiety.  Hartmann was twelve when evacuated, Fibich was only seven.  His last memory is of his mother fainting at the train station, and this melancholy image haunts him. Where Hartmann — through his effort of will — chooses not to remember, Fibich cannot remember anything except the distress of this last moment, and an image of himself as a very small, very plump boy, engulfed in a large wing chair which he knew to be called the Voltaire, feeling lazy, replete, and secure in the dying light of a winter afternoon.

Fibich marries the undemanding Christine, who bears him a son both prodigy and prodigal but he fears the future, he is plagued by dreams, and he is troubled by his envy of Hartmann who seemed so easily to accept the world as it was.  He knows he cannot recapture his lost life, but he yearns for the essential part, the part that would have explained his character and would have furnished him with a lineage [that] was irrevocably missing. 

As a boy boarding with Hartmann’s Aunt Marie who had providently married an Englishman, he would walk the Heath with Hartmann, wondering if this life would ever end, since he knew he could not go home again. 

His terror and despair were without measure.  Sometimes, in the evening, he would forfeit his place in front of the electric fire and disappear to be sick. Aunt knew this, though it was never mentioned.  It was Hartmann who took care of him, although Fibich was adept at being sick without anyone noticing.  ‘Sit here, Thomas’, Aunt would say, as he came back, white-faced, into the drawing-room.  ‘Sit down and get warm. You are quite safe here, you know.’ She was good in that way, never got alarmed or hysterical, so that the symptom passed as he got older, although he always had a sensitive stomach and loathed unusual food… (p.31)

He always remembered her kindness, that she would put extra sugar from her ration into Fibich’s cup. 

As the novel progresses, other traumas are revealed, which puts into perspective the characterisation of the wives, Yvette and Christine.  They are of their time, Yvette’s amorousness devoted entirely to herself and the always uncertain Christine, too ready IMO to suffer in silence.  But they have back stories too: Yvette’s in anti-Semitic France is so shocking that Hartmann reassesses his retirement plans.

I wonder what prompted Brookner to tackle this theme, mid-career and almost half a century after the Kindertransports began…  Was there an anniversary event that piqued her interest? Did she meet someone with a devastating personal history? Was it whataboutery? did someone say to her, instead of writing about all those women and their discontents, what about writing about the tragedy of trauma rather than missed opportunities? Or was it that she (1928-2016) was part of that generation that lived through the war and amid the flood of postwar migration, felt the need to examine a different sort of latecomer: the unaccompanied child refugee?  Perhaps she wanted to give voice to those who suppressed their Holocaust experience because it was ‘not so bad’…

Because really, the lifelong trauma for those children of the Kindertransport was catastrophic.

Image credits:

Kindertransport, The Final Parting, one of a series of group sculptures by Israeli architect and sculptor Frank Meisler (himself a Kindertransport evacuee)  (1925-2018), Hamburg Dammtor station By Alraunenstern – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53777182

Author: Anita Brookner
Title: Latecomers
Publishers: Flamingo, (Harper Collins), 1992, first published in 1988
Cover design: detail from Basket of Flowers, by Jan van Huysum in The Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
ISBN: 9780006545224, pbk., 191 pages
Source: personal copy, purchased from Diversity Books

Please note that in the interests of social cohesion,
comments on all books about the Holocaust or set in Palestine or Israel,
and books written by Palestinian, Israeli, and Jewish authors are closed for the duration.
I have taken this action because of intemperate comments made by readers
who have ignored requests to refrain from commenting on the current conflict.