A Dramatic Sifting of History

By DONALD WEBER

Bearing the Body
By Ehud Havazelet
296 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

Unspeakable memories haunt Ehud Havazelet’s Jewish-American families, ill at ease even in the suburban comfort of leafy Queens or soggy rural Oregon—places where Havazelet sets the sequence of emotionally lacerating stories in his previous book, Like Never Before. Havazelet’s late 20th-century landscape is shadowed by the trauma of modern Jewish history, embodied in the nightmare of the Holocaust and its legacy for subsequent generations—even to those who remain unaware of its active presence.

The trauma remains only partially repressed. It looms, ready to spring, latent within Havazelet’s twisted souls “frozen by grief,” “frozen with loss.” The trauma of memory (and with it, the memory of trauma) can be unhinging: in Like Never Before the Torah scholar Max Birnbaum, scarred by guilty memories of a brilliant older brother seized by the Nazis before his helpless eyes, is always “bracing for grief.” Unconscious of family history, his American son David nevertheless remains trapped in an abyss of sorrow: he is “a boy constantly on the edge” and “a boy who carries anger like a stone in his pocket to caress.” The Birnbaums, sadly, “were not a family for touching.” Father and son remain “together and apart, always.” They search for a site of spiritual and emotional balance; but the possibility of generational reconciliation will forever elude them in an alien—and alienating—new world.

In its evocation of a Jewish-American family bent by the weight of history, immobilized by uncompleted mourning, Like Never Before ranks among the most important works to appear in recent years. In his richly realized first novel, Bearing the Body, Havazelet probes even more deeply his core theme of unforgiving generations riven by guilty memories, struggling to reach across the emotional chasm that separates an embittered father from his angry sons.

Readers familiar with Havazelet’s Like Never Before will recognize in Bearing the Body the middle-class Queens world of Sol and Freda Mirsky, Holocaust survivors, and their energetic American-born sons Daniel and Nathan, the embodiment, in Sol’s eyes, of New World Promise. The novel’s brief prologue opens with an image of Daniel as a fiery young radical, at the barricades of Hamilton Hall during the Columbia student uprising of April, 1968. Watching Walter Cronkite report the news of campus rioting on television, the Mirskys happen to spot their son on television, self consciously preparing for his imminent arrest: “And before he was dragged down, two cops in face shields, another red-faced and cursing, they saw him look at the camera and smile.”

By beginning with 1968, Bearing the Body aims for a wider historical canvas. (In this respect Daniel is a figure out of The Whole World is Watching, Todd Gitlin’s canonical study of the 1960s' media-generated personality.) Havazelet is thus drawn, perhaps in the spirit of E. L. Doctorow, to Daniel as an actor in history, representative of his '60s generation: a Jewish son in earnest, if unfocused, rebellion against all forms of authority, outraged by the facts of social inequity.

Yet Daniel is no red-diaper baby, born of Communist-leaning parents, disillusioned with the failure of America. He may be a self-styled “hotshot insurgent,” an “Aquarian golden boy” with a need to “dazzle” women with his compelling voice and charismatic personality, but he is also “Daniel Chaim Mirksy,” named in memory of his dead uncle, his father’s older brother, who met (as we discover late in the novel) a horrendous fate in the concentration camps.

The ghost of Chaim Mirsky hovers over the family as an unspoken but palpable presence: Sol is haunted by the memory of his brother’s death and his own inability to change the past (“something never healed” in Sol, the outcast Daniel later reflects). Yet the shadow of Chaim remains, inscribed in the American face of Sol’s first-born son. Daniel is unaware of this family resemblance and its tragic history; a rebel to the core, he resists the claims of heredity. In an astonishing sentence about Daniel’s relation to Chaim and the burden of Mirsky genealogy in general, Havazelet writes: “Another history, not his, not one he’d ever know, sifted its weight over him like ash.”

The powerful drama of Bearing the Body involves the mysterious murder of Daniel years later, in 1995, in San Francisco, and the emotional journey made by an embittered father and his spiritually lost younger son to discover the meaning of Daniel’s estranged life. Daniel dies a drug addict, living with a young woman named Abby and playing the role of surrogate father to her son, Ben. The news of his death jolts his brother Nathan, now a doctor living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Leaving his hospital responsibilities and without a word to his partner Janet (whom “he tried to love” and treats brutally), Nathan flies out to San Francisco with Sol in search of answers to Daniel’s murder. “I just want to understand,” Nathan helplessly tells the investigating detective. It turns out that the meanings of Daniel’s shortened life are contained—literally and figuratively—in his ashes.

At some level Bearing the Body feels like a mystery novel, inviting readers to piece together the fraught, occulted meanings of Mirsky family life; it challenges us to recuperate their complex emotional history in relation to the Holocaust, to the American “1960s” and, finally, to the bewildering present. Havazelet distills the family’s emotional life via a pastiche of narrative fragments: a father’s nightmares; unread letters between brothers; transcriptions of Nathan’s therapy sessions; a closet full of guilty memories that continue to haunt; the revelation of family secrets.

We discover, for example, Sol’s sense of horror and shame at witnessing a scene of filial rebuke when, at the height of 60s protesting, Daniel and Nathan joined in solidarity with the striking workers at Sol’s shoe factory. “Then he saw them, his sons, and the shock made him stagger, like a blow from behind.” Sol loses his balance in part because he feels betrayed: “his two boys standing in the sun and smiling.” But the truly staggering blow floors him from the past. In protest, the striking workers have piled shoes into a huge mound which become, in Sol’s dislodged memory, an uncanny image of the horror of the camps (here Havazelet nods towards the great story by his early teacher, Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s “Killing the Bees”). Unhinged by history—“to see this again,” he groans—Sol banishes Daniel. “To me,” the father spits in rage, “you’re dead.”

At one level, then, the Mirskys are rent by history, torn by an act of perceived parricidal rebellion staged by the smiling counterculture (recall Daniel happy to be arrested at Columbia). In the end, however, Bearing the Body aims for a deeper interpretation of the family’s story of estrangement. Havazelet enacts what might be called a ritual of healing through revelation: he begins to unravel layers of connection between Sol and Daniel, between Daniel and his namesake “Chaim,” between the sordid past and the haunted present, affiliations that remain unavailable to the actors themselves.

Daniel doesn’t know that his father corresponds with Holocaust survivors about the fate of their loved ones, or that Sol, his heart moved for an imagined “son,” needs to chant the prayer for the sick, the “El Moleh Rachamim,” for the young boy in a hospital bed next to his. [Sol flies to San Francisco with an untreated shoulder infection, the result of being mugged in Queens, which puts him in the hospital.] Daniel doesn’t know that Chaim raged unto death against the powers that be in the camps. Sol doesn’t know that privately Daniel raged against the Holocaust (“These photographs are unbearable.... How, then, how are you supposed to be prepared to see murder in your neighbor’s face?”). Daniel doesn’t know the trauma his father continues to bear for not protecting Chaim, and Sol’s self-tormenting vow, “to take memory in the body and carry it, forever.”

In a characteristic act of theatrical revenge, while high on drugs, Daniel tells his girlfriend Abby to have his body cremated and have his remains sent to his father. “If I die, just do it, and send the fucker my ashes.” Ironically, Daniel’s antic desire becomes the source of healing, of the beginning of repair. In Bearing the Body everyone is weighed down with remorse and guilt, with the regret of things spoken and unspoken, above all with the burden of family histories known and unknown. In the end Sol literally bears his son’s ashes through the streets of San Francisco. “The Hebrew word for burial,” we’re reminded, “means ‘accompaniment.’”

Havazelet concludes Bearing the Body with images of potential healing, of forgiveness and reconciliation. In the end the surviving Mirskys, father and son, provide each other with a point of long-delayed emotional balance. Memories begin to flow. “They hurt, these memories, but Sol allowed them.” And Daniel’s ashes enter history as well, in the form of Sol’s archaic shtetl memory of performing tashlich, the ceremony performed at the start of the Jewish New Year: “holding his ancient grandmother’s hand as they walk to the stream in Dubossar, New Year’s Day, Chaim, already at the grassy bank, tossing bits of bread into the water as the wheezy rabbi chanted, in Sol’s pockets more bits of bread, his turn next.” Daniel’s ashes become the symbol of the possibility of redemption, the anticipation of renewal. Bonded with his namesake in memory (ashes to ashes), in death the son helps the family heal. We need to remember the unbearable past, Havazelet’s remarkable novel teaches us, in order to move on in the present. So we can bear the future. “Chaim,” after all, means “life.”