Skip to main content

Review 26: But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens

But You Did Not Come Back
But You Did Not Come Back by Marceline Loridan-Ivens is a short but extremely striking memoir. ‘Memoir’ isn’t entirely correct – it’s a love-letter of sorts to the memory of her father, from whom she was separated during the Holocaust.

If this sounds sad – it is. Despite its opening line I was quite a cheerful person, you know, in spite of what happened to us, this is a hauntingly heartwrenching, powerful and upsetting read. It explores in-depth the psychology of the Holocaust survivor, and just how they can start to try to piece things together after they were so comprehensively blown apart.

This isn’t done, as Primo Levi does, through comprehensive and detailed retellings of the camps, and how they worked, although she does recount some anecdotes. Loridan-Ivens instead focuses on the relationship with her father, whom she saw just once after being sent to different concentration camps and how that aborted relationship turned into a driving force that stayed with her throughout the ordeal, and her life.

While this is in translation – and although she's a French citizen she clearly doesn’t identify with France, having been sent to the camps by French officers collaborating with the Nazi regime – she nevertheless writes in a style that feels deeply Gallic in its approach. An example: she talks about being separated from her father at just 15, saying I had so little time to save enough of you within me. There is an essence of French nihilism that threads throughout the book – understandable, given its subject.

Following her miraculous survival, she clearly wants to move her life on, and yet can’t let her past experiences go. She wants people to understand the experience she went through, but how could anyone who hadn’t done so truly understand? Eventually she finds herself channelling her efforts into supporting revolution around the world, contrasting her earlier discussion of the camp prisoners as only able to live minute-to-minute, without the optimism or energy for revolt, with her desire for oppressed people around the world to challenge their oppressors.

Ultimately, this ends not with certainty, but with uncertain hope. At the time of writing, she was 86, having spent the majority of her life as an activist and award-winning film maker, and yet she still needs more validation that her life had given value. She asks someone the question Do you think it was a good thing to have come back from the camps?, and when asked to provide her own answer, says …I hope that if someone asks me that question just before I’m about to die, I’ll be able to say, “Yes, it was worth it.”

A very sad, complex read.

--

This is my twenty-sixth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

JustGiving - Sponsor me now!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review 19: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman

I imagine a lot of unimaginative reviews of this book say something like, Eleanor Oliphant is not Completely Fine, contrary to the title! and then they laugh at their own tiny joke for four hours. You won’t find that here, even though it is both true and apposite. Instead you’ll see me saying: this is a really great book. Even forgetting the inspired name of the protagonist, which never stops sounding like the name of an elegant elephant, it’s really good. Eleanor Oliphant lives alone and has forged an existence for herself of work, trips to the local Tesco Metro, and gentle, vodka-infused oblivion on the weekends. She doesn’t deal well with people. In fact, Oliphant displays an almost total lack of empathy. At first, you suspect that she may be autistic, since she shows all the signs: difficulty relating to others, low tolerance for leaving her routines, having to learn the outward signs of emotions by rote and experience, rather than innately understanding the differe
2 comments
Read more

Review 7: Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The first thing you see when you open Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing is six pages of quotes from reviews saying how good it is. If you’re like me (and with any luck you’re not), you’ll think: talk about putting yourself under pressure . Happily, Gyasi more than rises to the implicit challenge set by her voluminous praise. The scope of her book - following two branches of an African family tree as they become separated by time and distance – is beautifully realised, with each chapter representing another generational step down. Homegoing is, in its clearest sense, about the reverberating impact of slavery on black people, both in the lands they were ripped from and the lands they were taken to. But the core theme that ties the book together is connection between those two strands of people. The title could be considered a reference to ‘returning’ to Africa, but I think it’s more powerful when considered as more abstract – the re-binding of the strands of people who have been separa
Post a Comment
Read more

Review 1: Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, by Anna Funder

My rating: 5 of 5 stars I am hungover and steer myself like a car through the crowds at Alexanderplatz station. How could you not love a book that begins like that? Early on in Stasiland , Anna Funder discusses the ‘puzzle women of Nuremberg’. This is a group of underfunded people (both men and women, oddly) who spend their days piecing together the scraps of documents the Stasi hurriedly shredded at the end of their regime. It feels like an apt analogy for Funder’s book itself – she carefully and brilliantly pieces together a view of what it was like to live in East Germany, and the effect it’s had on its citizens decades after the Berlin Wall was wrenched down, from snapshot interviews, research and her own experiences… despite the fact that most people she encounters would rather sweep it under the rug and pretend it never happened. I came to this book knowing that East Germany was run as a Communist surveillance state, but little else. That was no problem.
1 comment
Read more