Geata Póeg na Déanainn

Telling the stories of survivors before it’s too late September 28, 2023

This post is part of a series of articles that I previously published in various Australian newspapers when I was working as a reviewer between 2001 and 2012. The vast majority of these do not exist in digital format, and I’ve decided to reprint them here for digital preservation. Much of what is said in these republished reviews does not represent my current thinking, but rather my understanding at the time of writing and original publication. The titles of the posts are the titles that were given to the articles by subeditors upon publication.

The 60th anniversary of the end of World War II has provoked a rush of books. At the same time, the anniversary reminds us that those who lived through the terrible war years are dying: this will be the last generation to have direct contact with Holocaust survivors, for example. This sense of urgency, that the stories of survivors must be passed on, drives the new books of two Australian authors, Nicole Plüss and Ursula Dubosarsky.

Plüss’s novel, Hope Bay, explicitly uses this theme, jumping back and forth between occupied Holland and a modern-day Australian coastal town. The link is Olga, an elderly Dutch woman, who in her youth was heavily involved in the Dutch resistance during the German occupation of her country. After the war years she moved to Australia, with her younger sister, and terrible memories, and many secrets.

In the present time, Olga strikes up an unlikely friendship with Possum, an Australian teenager. They are united by their shared love of nature and their sense of outrage at humanity’s denial of responsibility in its destruction.

However, Plüss’s passionate belief in the fact that one big horror is made up of millions of little acts of complicity, and turns too large a part of the story into a soapbox-style rant. The Dutch-resistance half of the story is much more interesting, and if Plüss had reined in her anger, the novel could have been a more thoroughly satisfying exploration of the importance of memory and a reminder of the wisdom gained through experience. As it is, this theme does shine through, but it is dwarfed by the impassioned outbursts of Possum, the author’s mouthpiece.

Theodora’s Gift, Dubosarsky’s offering, is a quieter and more powerful book altogether. It carrries on the story which she began in The First Book of Samuel, the CBC Honour Book in 1996, in which Dubosarsky wove together the stories of sensitive, emotional Samuel, his Holocaust-survivor grandfather Elias, and their unconventional but loving family.

Theodora’s Gift takes up the action one year on, continuing the story about the complicated, creative Cass family. Theodora and her younger half-brother Samuel watch uneasily as their family begins to fall apart. Their father, the opera singer Elkanah, has visions which leave him terrified, and he impulsively moves to the country with his first wife Pearl. Meanwhile, his second wife, Samuel’s mother Hannah, takes to her bed in despair, and Elias, Samuel’s grandfather, is dying. The quiet decay of the family is mirrored by events of the present and memories of the past: it is September 2001 and the children are bewildered by the hatred which seems to them to have come from nowhere and to have taken over the world.

Hovering at the edges of the narrative is the Holocaust and traumatic legacy it left Elias. There is a sense of urgency in the book, a fear that Elias (who symbolises all who survived through the terrible years of Nazism) will die before his memories can be entrusted to the next generation. But the book’s message is not that simple. At its heart is the story of one family, whose tensions reflect the pains of the past and the chaos of the present.

These are two very different novels on very similar themes. Dubosarsky’s succeeds while Plüss’s fails because she does not shout her message loudly, but allows it to whisper in the margins, waiting for the reader to notice it. Theodora’s Gift is a beautiful book for its quietness, for the elegiac stillness which harmonises perfectly with its emotional clarity. Hope Bay is a good book. But, with more thematic subtlety, it could have been a great one.

This review first appeared in the 14 May, 2005 issue of The Canberra Times.