Memory, Amnesia, and Writing

By TIM BRADFORD

This week, in anticipation of my upcoming trip to the Koret Jewish Book Awards as this year’s recipient of the Young Writer on Jewish Themes prize, I started reading Tony Eprile’s The Persistence of Memory, the winner in the fiction category. Eprile's protagonist is Paul Sweetbread, a Jewish boy from South Africa with perfect recall. This turns out to be a social curse but a very interesting character trait. It’s also a great narrative challenge: Eprile must convince the reader that Sweetbread really does possess such an ability; if Sweetbread has ever seen it or done it, he must be able to recall it perfectly for the reader. Eprile is obviously a courageous and talented author, and it is both comforting and disturbing to realize that perfect memory might be more of a curse than faulty memory. All of which has set me to thinking about the role of memory in relation to history, my own family, and my novella-in-progress.

For the Koret Award, I proposed to draft a novella based on the two most renowned events associated with the Vélodrome d’Hiver, an enclosed stadium in Paris: track bicycle racing, especially the six-day races of the 1920s and 30s, and la grande rafle du Vel d’Hiv, the roundup and seven-day detention of 7,000 foreign Jews in the Vel d’Hiv before deportation to Auschwitz in July of 1942. The novella will focus on two main characters, a French track cyclist and an East European Jew working in Paris, from the mid-1920s to the destruction of the velodrome in 1959, and I will relate their stories through passages of poetry and prose. I will also incorporate historical documents and photographs from archival sources in Paris—thus, the “hybrid” style of this novella, which permits the inclusion of a wide variety of perspectives and prevents any one perspective, or memory, from being taken as the final word.

The genesis of the idea for this novella reveals a bit of why I chose this style and how the various elements relate to my personal life. In 2002, while taking a fiction-writing workshop at Oklahoma State University, I was inspired by a passage on track bicycle racing from Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast to draft a short story about a young American cyclist in Paris in the 1920s. I should note that I have a decent command of French, a fascination with this time period in France, and five years of serious bicycle racing experience to draw upon. I know—“can remember” is actually truer nowadays—the delicious rhythm of having my legs power around in perfect circles to propel me over 30 miles an hour for miles at a time, and I also know the mercurial swiftness with which a crash can happen, the agony of washing one’s “road rash” the first time, and the weeks of healing that can be involved afterwards. It seemed like this short story would need just a bit of outside research to shore up some of the details, but that research led to something unexpected.

I can still remember the first time I struck upon la grande rafle du Vel d’Hiv online, which led to a site that focused on something very different from cycling. The roundup of the Vel d’Hiv involved Vichy French complicity, Nazi duplicity, and severely inhumane conditions inside the stadium for a week during a hot spell in July. Many people died of medical complications. Others committed suicide by jumping off the second tier. A few escaped. Since I had approached this place from a completely different perspective, I was shocked. I knew of the Vichy French collaboration during the Holocaust, but somehow the illustrious cycling history of the Vel d’Hiv removed it in my mind from anything to do with that. Suddenly, the greater weight of this historical event seemed to eclipse all that came before. How could a place contain such dramatically opposite energies and not explode, either literally or psychically? I was hooked into learning more, and as I learned about things like Salvador Dali’s performance art piece inside the Vel d’Hiv the week before it was torn down and the relatively recent acknowledgement by the French government of the Vichy government’s complicity in la rafle, the idea for the novella came into being.

My relationship to Judaism is one element of my novella related to forgetting and remembering on a personal level. I am not a practicing Jew and am linked to the people and history through what feels like a distant blood connection. My mother’s mother’s parents escaped from the pogroms in Russia to America in the early 1900s. (My Jewish friend from Israel said, “Then you’re Jewish,” when she heard this detail.) But my mother’s mother, my grandmother, converted to Christianity, and not a stitch of the Jewish religion or language was passed along to my mother. This effacement of ethnic and religious memory was, for many, seen as a matter of bartering old identity for new opportunity during the first half of the 20th century. Still, small, unusual links survived. My grandmother, who is Pentecostal Holiness, to this day wears a combined Crucifix/Star of David, and I was the only child in my decidedly non-Jewish neighborhood who grew up eating matzo omelets and matzo ball soup without his mother consulting any “ethnic” cookbooks. My mother also told me of our Jewish heritage and even referred to our “Jewishness” at times, usually culinary or pecuniary. I look forward to “remembering” this forgotten side of my heritage as I work on my novella.

My plan is be in Paris from late September to late March as I do research, secure reproduction rights, and visit the site where the Vel d’Hiv once stood, the nearby memorial, and some six-day races. Then, we (“we” being my wife, a veterinarian and the best French speaker in the house, and our two sons) will go to the Bay Area, where, as part of the Koret Award, I will be writer-in-residence for a quarter at Stanford University, my undergraduate alma mater. The familiar smell of eucalyptus trees and the sight of red-tiled buildings will be welcome. So, this coming year will be one of old and new themes and places in my life. I am familiar with cycling, French and Stanford, but I am less than familiar with Judaism, Paris, and the role of being a Young Writer on Jewish Themes. Either way, I sincerely welcome this opportunity to reconnect with old memories and cultivate new ones while bringing a long-standing idea to life through the art of writing, a delicate balance between remembering what one knows and forgetting one’s self enough to be able to inhabit new places, characters and perspectives.