Havazelet drills down into family denial

“Bearing the Body” by Ehud Havazelet, Picador, November 2008, paperback, 304 pages, $14, also in hardcover.

By KATIE SCHNEIDER

article created on: 2009-02-15T00:00:00

As children, Sol’s sons didn’t know about the Holocaust. A survivor himself, he wouldn’t tell them. He wrote to strangers expressing condolences, but never sat down to explain it to his own boys.

How would it have been possible even to bring up such things with “small boys with their big eyes and their shining dreams?”

Then the gifted boys grew up to be callous men, outwardly sure of their place in the world, inwardly haunted by ghosts they didn’t understand.

Ehud Havazelet’s award-winning novel “Bearing the Body” is the story of a father and two sons.

Sol Mirsky is an elderly Holocaust survivor.

Nathan, drinking his way through his medical school residency, is his younger son. Daniel, his elder son, is a war protestor and drug addict who has just died a violent death.

Sol and Nathan are both in shock.

In Boston, Nathan destroys whatever might be left of his relationship with his long-term girlfriend.

In New York, Sol clutches at a gym bag as a mugger tries to steal it away. When Nathan arrives at his father’s apartment, neither takes comfort in the presence of the other. On the contrary, they circle each other like men about to deliver blows.

It is no better after they fly to San Francisco, ending up at Daniel’s former apartment, meeting Daniel’s girlfriendand her young son.

Sol thinks it is a mistake that he has come. He is disoriented, one foot in the Old Country, one foot in the New, in spite of the fact that he’s lived in this country for decades.

Nathan, suffering from a different kind of disorientation, cannot sleep. Of the many disasters in his life, this one threatens to push him over the edge.

Both men cope by wandering through the streets of San Francisco.

Nathan makes his trek in the middle of the night, utterly spent. His usual comforts–drinking and womanizing–have failed him. In the end, he has nowhere to go but back to Abby and her apartment, back to his brother’s letters and the wreckage he left behind.

In a parallel journey, Sol staggers under the weight of present and past. As much as his children might want to blame him for his failings, he cannot be other than he is. He trudges up San Francisco’s famous hills, hat on head, heavy coat on his back, sweat dripping down his forehead.

Neither father nor son asked for the burden of the Holocaust, yet the silent weight of it is almost too much for them.

Havazelet, who has taught creative writing at University of Oregon for the past decade, has acknowledged in previous interviews that he is a slow writer. It is a trait that readers should appreciate. His meticulous devotion to craft reveals itself in moments large and small.

“Bearing the Body” is filled with dozens of fleeting realizations, glimpses caught out of the corner of one’s eye. These moments advance the story, it’s true, but they also serve a different function, expanding the reader’s awareness of what it is to be human.

The nurse who cares for Sol in the hospital, the terminally ill girl in Daniel’s high school, the little boy who knows that Daniel won’t return–they make up a three-dimensional world. In Havazelet’s universe, everyone is vulnerable. Gentleness is a counter-point to violence. Forgiveness–while by no means certain– becomes a possibility.

“Bearing the Body” won the 2008 Ken Kesey Award for fiction, part of the Oregon Book Awards. It has been lauded by The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. The praise is well-justified.

Havazelet understands something profound about families, the way history and memory color the here and now. He has written a book that neither blames nor absolves either side, but feels deeply for the frailty of everyone.

This story made possible by a grant from the Judith and Edwin Cohen Foundation.