Plunder by Menachem Kaiser (suggested reading txt) 📗

we are presented with the entries that Abraham has just been contemplating writing; we are reading those scraps of cement packaging. The entries are relatively short and headed by the location—​that is, the concentration camp Abraham is in—​and day of the week. Though I think it’s safe to assume that at least some of what’s being presented as diaristic is artifice—​I can’t imagine that recovered scraps, hidden for months underneath a latrine, would be perfectly legible (and Ostoja himself seems to admit as much)—​I don’t believe that this detracts at all from the effect.

The book thus shifts from memoir to diary, from postwar recollection to intrawar experience, even on some level from book to artifact, and I wonder: Does, or should, this shift impact how we read, how we receive? Do we “trust” the diary more? Is this mode more authentic because less time has passed between occurrence and recording? Is it more raw, more real, less edited, less mediated? Or does it just appear that way? In a manner that I don’t think is accidental—​or even if it is accidental I don’t think it’s any less pressing—​Abraham’s book, a book explicitly concerned about the writing of itself, raises sticky questions about memory, narrative, mediation, and myth.

Once Abraham escapes—​without his pencil, without his scraps of cement packaging—​the headings are dropped, the mode reverts to memoir, it’s once again recollection.

Ostoja and Abraham worked on the book for a year, until 1948. But for maddeningly vague reasons (“The circumstances were such . . .”) the book was not published in Poland until 1962, fifteen years after Abraham first showed up at Ostoja’s office. It’s possible the delay had something to do with Soviet censorship. But who knows.

By this point, Ostoja tells us, Abraham is long gone. He moved to Israel years ago. Ostoja claims that he and Abraham corresponded for a while but then Abraham stopped responding, and left no forwarding address. Ostoja does not know where Abraham is, does not know how to reach him, does not even know whether he is alive. “Maybe I can find him and then he will know that this, what he wrote—​as though in his own blood, daily enduring death, agony, and torture beyond human comprehension—​has seen the light of day.”

In 1962 Abraham was alive and well and living in a suburb of Tel Aviv.

Ostoja makes it sound as if he and Abraham had simply, innocently fallen out of touch, that their relationship had faded blamelessly, as relationships do. I am skeptical. Abraham goes AWOL and in effect severs himself from a book he risked his life to write... ? It is hard not to see Abraham’s decision to disappear (from Ostoja, that is) as somewhat deliberate. At the very least, clearly there is a lot more to this story than what Ostoja is telling us: the nature of their relationship, in both a professional and personal sense, is elusive. Throughout the preface Ostoja repeatedly gets details about Abraham wrong. For example, he writes that Abraham’s “whole family—​wife, child, brother—​all died” in the war and that he had distant relatives living in Israel. But Abraham’s entire family didn’t die—​two siblings survived—​and it wasn’t a distant relative who was living in Israel but his sister. Maybe Ostoja forgot or maybe for some reason Abraham lied to him, but the impression one is left with is that of two men, author and editor, way out of sync, more than a decade out of touch, their only link a long-dormant book project that belongs to both and to neither. Indeed, at times Ostoja’s preface feels like it’s being written about an entirely made-up version of Abraham:

“How did you know that you wouldn’t die?” I asked, moved. He smiled gently and wagged the stumps of his fingers, lost in the camps.

“I didn’t stand a chance,” he replied. “But I had faith. I was deeply convinced that I would survive.”

He owed his salvation not only to his faith, but also to a whole set of extremely fortunate circumstances, and, above all, to his amazingly resilient character, the strength of his nerves, and his indomitable physical health.

Maybe this conversation or a conversation resembling this conversation did in fact happen. (Though unless Ostoja kept detailed notes, I’m not sure why we should be expected to trust his recollection: it had been fifteen years since Ostoja met this “simple man,” whom Ostoja admits he was skeptical of and initially uninterested in publishing.) But even so, this is a reading that surrenders to or at least overindulges mythos and sentiment in a work that allows for neither. Abraham was deeply convinced that he would survive? He owed his salvation to his amazingly resilient character? Abraham frequently prays that he will die. He lies down in front of a moving train.

There is a disconnect, clearly. I’ll take it further—​not only did a schism open up between these two men, but also the book itself split into two. Ostoja had his version, and Abraham had his. I mean this in a more literal sense than you think I do.

When Abraham immigrated to Israel he brought with him a copy of the Polish manuscript and had it translated into Hebrew. Bein Hamitzarim, or Dire Straits, was published in Israel in 1952, a full decade before the Polish. Ostoja, clearly, was unaware. Bein Hamitzarim is presented as a standalone work: Abraham excised the backstory—​no preface, no acknowledgments, no Ostoja. The translator is given a byline but there’s no mention of what the original language was.

A cursory examination reveals Bein Hamitzarim as a relatively faithful translation of Za Drutami Śmierci, or, more specifically, of the manuscript that would eventually become Za Drutami Śmierci. Za Drutami Śmierci and Bein Hamitzarim tell the same story, in more or less the same style, using more or less the same language.

Yet they are different books: they exist on different planes. They entered distinct worlds with no tether between them: Za Drutami Śmierci was published without Abraham’s knowledge, Bein Hamitzarim without Ostoja’s (and I am