Tag Archives: stories

Men in the Sun

That people are leaving their home countries because they want to find a better life somewhere else is a phenomenon that is probably as old as mankind itself. But to me it seems that the extent and speed of this migration has increased a lot in the 20th and 21st centuries beyond anything experienced before.

Apart from the increase of the number of migrants, there is something else that puzzles me about this development: the cynicism and application of double standards towards migrants. While those of “us” westerners who work for some time or permanently abroad (like the writer of these lines) are usually labeled “expatriates”, the words that are used to characterize someone who for good reasons is looking for work in a wealthy country of the West are “economic migrant”, “poverty migrant”, “illegal immigrant”, “asylum shopper” – and these are still the more friendly terms.

When during the existence of the Iron Curtain migration from Eastern Europe was extremely limited, and those who tried to flee were leaving their countries in very dangerous circumstances, these migrants were branded as heroes and freedom fighters who wanted to leave behind a terrible communist dictatorship; now when the same people leave their places for the same reason – an unbearable situation for themselves and their families – they are usually downgraded linguistically a lot.

And those who flee by boat via the Mediterranean to Europe, or to Australia via the Indian Ocean: they all could be saved, but better let them drown so that less of “them” cause “us” any trouble…Welcome to the world of hypocrisy! – the same world that doesn’t give a damn about the civilians and children that fall victim to the drone assassinations of the “West” and starts a discussion about the moral implications of this extra-legal killings on a large scale only in that moment when some of the victims happen by chance to be one of “us” (i.e. Christians from Western countries).

Forced migration, ethnic cleansing, the attempt to cross borders in search for a better life, and the situation of exile in general are important topics of the literature of the last decades. The story Men in the Sun by the Palestinian author Ghassan Kanafani is a classic in this respect.  

Three Palestinian men that lost their homes in Palestine during the events of 1947/48 (the Naqba, or catastrophe, as it is called by the victims) are in the center of the story. They lead a rather miserable life without any perspective in the huge refugee camps in Jordan, Iraq and other Arab countries. (As an aside: also the Arab countries apply double standards; while “the Palestinians” are usually considered the victims of Zionism/Imperialism, most of the real Palestinians are less welcome by these countries and still live in refugee camps, decades after their eviction. Only Jordan granted the majority of them citizen rights.)

Kuwait, in the early 1960s developing its oil industry, was in this moment for many of these men a kind of Promised Land. Once you made it there (illegally), you had – with a little bit of luck, connections and backshish – a chance to get an employment based on a temporary contract. A unique opportunity to support your beloved one’s in the refugee camps, pay for a decent education for your siblings, or prepare to get married.

Basra in Iraq was at that time the place from which many small groups left to make their way past the border guards through the desert. Smuggling refugees was (and is) a very profitable business, and so we witness our three main characters looking for an affordable and reliable guide.

Kanafani made a very good decision to introduce each of the three men, their background and their way of thinking, their different character and outlook on life in a separate chapter.

There is Abu Quais, the oldest of the group. A farmer by profession, who is missing his olive trees in Palestine and who hopes to make enough money in Kuwait to be able to buy saplings for a new olive grove somewhere. In his fatalistic, a bit stubborn way he seems very characteristic for the Palestinian peasant, or the peasant in general.

Then there is young Marwan, who stands up to the financial demands of a particular unpleasant businessmen who insists on a high advance payment and no guarantee for success for the undertaking. Marwan quickly emerges as the unofficial leader of the small group, and we can almost be sure that with his energy and optimism, he can be very successful in Kuwait – if he gets there at all of course. 

And then there is the good-hearted, naive Assad. After his brother stopped to send money from Kuwait (he got married and supports his own small family now), he had to stop his studies and tries to get now also to Kuwait.

And there is of course the guide, Abul Khiazuran, who promises to smuggle them in the water tank of his truck through the border checkpoints. If only it wouldn’t be so terribly hot in the empty water tank – but it will be ok, if they don’t have to wait very long at the checkpoints. Otherwise…

For the reader it is not a surprise that this journey ends in a disaster. When the driver pulls out the bodies of the three men after the border crossing, he – like the reader – is asking himself a startling question:

“The thought slipped from his mind and ran onto his tongue: “Why didn’t they knock on the sides of the tank?” He turned right round once, but he was afraid he would fall, so he climbed into his seat and leaned his head on the wheel. “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything? Why? – The desert suddenly began to send back the echo: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?”

What struck me also about this story was the deep symbolism of the fact that the bodies are deposed at a garbage dump; this is how much a refugee’s life is worth. And also the fact that the driver lost his manhood literally as a result of his fight with the Israelis, and is now interested in only one thing: money is of course also charged with a symbolic meaning.

One more thing: there are no antisemitic slurs in any of Kanafani’s stories of this collection of stories. Sure, the Jews/Israelis are the enemies of these people; those who are responsible for the loss of their homes, their miserable lives in the refugee camps, and the loss of many lives too. But the enemy is not a demon, just someone who took away the land and existence of people who have lived in Palestine for hundreds of years.

The other stories in this collection are also very good; I was particular impressed by The Land of Sad Oranges, a short story about a family who is forced to flee their home and escape to Lebanon. The few oranges that they can take with them make them cry; a memory of what they lost and will probably never see again.

Ghassan Kanafani (born 1936) was one of the most talented Arabic prose writers. Born in Palestine, he had to leave his home at the age of 12 and shared many experiences of the people in his stories. He became also a political activist and joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine of George Habash. Fortunately, his work is not that of a political propagandist; it shows the suffering of the people of Palestine, and asks for empathy from its readers, not for agreement with a political program.

Kanafani was killed by a car-bomb explosion in 1972 in Beirut, together with his niece. Nowadays the assassination would have been executed by a drone. I suppose some people may call that “progress”.

Kanafani

Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun and Other Palestinian Stories, translated by Hilary Kilpatrick, Lynne Rienner Publishers, Boulder 1998

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014-5. Unauthorized use and/or 
duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

The Last Storytellers

What a wonderful book!

Richard Hamilton, a BBC journalist with a weak spot for Morocco has collected some of the stories that are told until today by the traditional storytellers in Marrakech. The storyteller, once a fixture of each Arabic tea house, is unfortunately a craft that is disappearing quickly thanks to the ever-present TV or other electronic gimmicks in each coffee shop or tea house nowadays. And that is a real cultural loss. At least some more of the stories of this maybe last generation of master storytellers are preserved in this book.

Hamilton visited Morocco many times, and with the assistance of a local guide he was able to track down some of the most extraordinary masters of oral storytelling. Once he made a personal contact with them and convinced them to tell him some of their stories in order to preserve them for posterity, it was not difficult anymore. A stream of wonderfully crafted stories was recorded on tape and translated from the local dialect into English.

37 stories told by Moulay Mohamed El Jabri, Abderrahim El Makkouri, Ahmed Temiicha, Mohamed Bariz, and Mustapha Khal Layoun form the main part of The Last Storytellers, Hamilton added an insightful Introduction that gives not only detailed information regarding the making of this precious book but that gives also a short account on the role of oral storytelling in the traditional Arabic societies. Barnaby Rogerson, who wrote an excellent biography of the Prophet provides an instructive foreword.

So, if you loved the 1001 Nights and you want to know about The Red Lantern and how it changed the life of two very different brothers, or about The Girl from Fez, you will not be disappointed. I am quite sure you will enjoy this book very much and maybe you will say in the end It is good – just like the Prime Minister in the story The King and His Prime Minister. And there will be a much deeper meaning in this sentence as you may think right now.

I read The Last Storytellers in a traditional tea house in Amman which was just the perfect place for it. But no matter where you read it, The Last Storytellers is a truly enchanting and captivating book.

The-Last-Storytellers

Richard Hamilton: The Last Storytellers, I.B. Tauris, London New York 2011

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Utopia, resurrected

Alexandria, the second biggest Egyptian city, has been for most of its history a truly cosmopolitan Mediterranean city. From the time of its foundation by Alexander the Great until the Suez crisis Alexandria housed not only a big Greek community, but also people from all possible different ethnic, national and religious background. When you would walk on the streets of Alexandria one hundred years ago, you would probably hear people on the streets talking to each other in about a dozen different languages.

Alexandria was not paradise, but it was a place where during most of its history, its inhabitants – no matter what their origin was – had learned to get along with each other. (For those who are interested in the history of Alexandria and the other multi-ethnic cities of the Mediterranean Beirut, Smyrna and Saloniki, I would like to recommend a book by the British historian Philip Mansel: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean, London 2010)

It is therefore easy to understand that Alexandria was and still is a place that inspired the imagination of many writers. The Greek poet Constantin Cavafy spent most of his rather uneventful life in this city and created his poetry here. E.M. Forster devoted two of his works to the city (Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon). His friend Lawrence Durrell used Alexandria as a backdrop of his Alexandria Quartet, a series of four novels. Also several Egyptian (Arabic) authors have made Alexandria the location of some of their most important works, e.g. Naguib Mahfouz’ novel Miramar.

And there is of course a rich autobiographic literature and memoirs of people who have lived in Alexandria, such as the beautiful Out of Egypt, by Andre Aciman, or George Moustaki’s Les Filles de la mémoire (Moustaki’s father owned an antiquarian bookstore in Alexandria).

The collection of short stories Farewell to Alexandria, by Harry E. Tzalas fits into this context. Tzalas, born and educated in Alexandria, emigrated to Brazil in 1956 before settling in Greece where he became the founder and president of the Hellenic Institute for Ancient and Medieval Alexandrian Studies in Athens, a position that brought him frequently back to the city of his youth.

The eleven short stories, written between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, explore the Alexandria of the late 1930s, through WWII, the 1952 revolution and the Suez crisis that ended with the almost complete dispersal of the non-Arabic population of Alexandria.

The characters in Tzala’s stories are taken mainly from his childhood and youth. They come from different social milieus and different religions and are described with great warmth, sensitivity and perception.

There is for example Antoun, a poor Lebanese shoemaker, a simple but good man. One day, a relative of Antoun dies in Beirut, and the hero of the story inherits a modest amount of money. Now the quiet life of work and weekend fishing excursions of Antoun comes to a halt for some time. Should he start his own business now that he has the opportunity and the funds to do so? Should he invest the money somewhere else? What to do with this sudden modest wealth? Antoun doesn’t sleep well for a while until he comes to the probably wise decision to spend the money for the fulfillment of a long existing secret wish: he always wanted a watch! Once he makes up his mind, he goes ahead without further hesitation – he buys watches for all family members and a little radio. And leads his life from that moment on just as if nothing has happened. Not a very exciting or wealthy life, but probably a quite happy one. At least he rose to the status of a watch owner, and that’s probably as far as the ambition of Antoun would lead him. The story ends with a short afterword:

The years passed. I left Alexandria. Osta Antoun died. I got the news when I met an old acquaintance who used to go fishing with us on Sundays. “Antoun passed on,” he said. “May God have mercy on his soul. He was a good man. It was his heart, you know. He was buried holding his watch tightly in his hands.”

Many of the characters in Tzalas’ stories are waiting for something to happen, like the Armenian family in The little Armenian girl that is waiting for the ship to bring them home. But frequently, the expected is not happening, or when it comes finally, something important has changed in the meantime. Life is taking its own course and we are usually not the masters of our destinies.

Some of the stories are particularly moving because they show the fate of families that are stranded in a hostile surrounding during WWII. The front line was not very far away from Alexandria, and the authorities (and some neighbors) were not particularly friendly to the number of Italian or German families that resided in Alexandria. That some of them showed open support and sympathy with the enemy didn’t exactly help to make their lives easier. Frau Grete and Sidi Bishr, October 1942 deals with this aspect, but the stories are never dry history lessons. They always put the spot light on some very interesting and credible characters.

Tzalas’ book breathes a certain melancholy. Because it describes a lost Utopia. But it is thanks to stories like the one’s that Tzalas is telling us, that this Utopia is kept alive at least in our memories:

Alexandria is resurrected for all those who called her Utopia, who have loved her and lost her; the Alexandria of children and poets. (from: Alexandria ad Aegyptum)

The book is illustrated by Anna Boghiguian, an Armenian-Egyptian artist. The illustrations are very evocative and add to the charm of this beautiful collection of stories.

Tzalas

Harry E. Tzalas: Farewell to Alexandria, transl. Susan E. Mantouvalou, illustrated by Anna Boghiguian, The American University of Cairo Press, Cairo, 2004

Philip Mansel: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (London, John Murray, 2010) 

E.M. Forster: Alexandria: A History and Guide / Pharos and Pharillon, Andre Deutsch, 2004

Lawrence Durrell: The Alexandria Quartet, Faber and Faber 2012

C P Cavafy: Complete Poems, transl. Daniel Mendelsohn, Harper Press, 2013

Georges Moustaki: Les Filles de la mémoire, Editions Calmann-Levy, 1989

Andre Aciman: Out of Egypt: a memoir, I B Tauris, 2006 

Naguib Mahfouz: Miramar, transl. Fatma Moussa Mahmoud, The American University of Cairo Press, Cairo, 1998

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

 


“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead”

Is it fiction? Is it documentary literature? It’s a little bit of both and the impression of something hybrid is even strengthened by the many black-and-white photos that are inserted into the text without explanation or description. W.G. Sebald’s book “The Emigrants” (“Die Ausgewanderten”) is maybe the masterpiece of this author who came to England in 1966 and who spent the rest of his life as a lecturer and professor teaching at universities in England. His career as a prose writer (in his native German language) started when he was already in his mid-forties.

Sebald1993

The Emigrants” is a collection of four long stories. Dr. Henry Selwyn, born as Hersch Seweryn in a shtetl near Grodno in Lithuania has come to England as a child and has against all odds made a career as a surgeon. The narrator, whose living conditions, opinions and favorite books coincide with W.G. Sebald’s gets to know Dr. Selwyn as a retired doctor leading a secluded life mainly in his garden when he is renting a flat in Dr. Selwyn’s house. A distanced friendship between the author and Dr. S. is developing and finally the doctor is telling the author the story of his life. The marriage of S. with a girl from Switzerland where he studied is not happy, maybe because S. kept his Jewish origin too long hidden from her, maybe because they just lost the love that was between them in the beginning. The happiest period of his life was according to S. his study times in Switzerland, when he used to go hiking with an old Swiss alpinist (who disappeared in the mountains one day). S. seems to be strangely detached from life, melancholic and living for his memories.

After a return from a visit in France, the narrator receives the message of the suicide of S. Years later, during a sojourn in Switzerland, a local newspaper reports that the body of an alpinist was found that was missing since more than 70 years. It turns out to be the missing hiking partner of Dr. S.  

“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”

The story “Unexpected Reunion” (Unverhofftes Wiedersehen) by Johann Peter Hebel comes to mind, an author with whom Sebald was familiar since early childhood because his maternal grandfather introduced him to this Alemannic writer.

Hebel plays also a role in the second story that was inspired by one of Sebald’s school teachers. In the story his name is Paul Bereyter, a “born” teacher who was able to turn every school lesson into something interesting and who was known for his unconventional but very inspiring way to teach. The narrator mentions for example that he introduced Hebel’s “Calendar Stories” to the pupils instead of the textbook lessons that he seemed not to consider as worthwhile for the children.

Bereyter knew already in his youth that he wanted to become a teacher and nothing else and he succeeded to achieve his aim in the 1930s. But as a “quarter-Jew” (one grandfather was Jewish) he lost his position during the Nazi era. After the war (which he survived as a soldier) he was re–installed as a schoolteacher, but something had changed within Paul, as everyone called him.

“The seasons and the years came and went…and always…one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.”

In his later years, Paul is haunted by memories. After his early retirement he is spending more and more time in France (where he lived for a few years as private teacher in the 1930s). There he makes friends with a Mme Landau who shares his interest in literature (Paul is approaching her after he sees her reading a Nabokov biography). From Mme Landau the narrator receives more information about the later years of Paul – also he was an emigrant, haunted by the ghosts of his past and by the fact that nobody in his small home town pretended that something had happened to the “disappeared” Jews even decades after the war was over.

Also the last two stories seem to be based on the lives of real persons. One is the story of a granduncle of Sebald who emigrated to America and who became a butler in a rich Jewish family. With the son of the family he traveled around the world shortly before WWI and they have obviously had a homosexual relationship. After the outbreak of a mental illness and the early death of his friend, the author’s granduncle devotes his life to the family of his friend until in his last years he is retiring to a mental hospital (without actually being ill in the classical sense – Robert Walser comes to mind), even wishing to be completely annihilated by an extreme form of electroshock therapy that was en vogue in the 1950s.

The last story, about the German-British painter Max Ferber (inspired by Frank Auerbach, whom Sebald met when he was a young student in Manchester – in the first German edition the name of the character was Max Aurach), doesn’t end with the death of the protagonist but since Ferber who came to England without his parents (who were killed in the Concentration Camps in the east) gives the narrator a diary of Ferber’s mother which she kept until her marriage, the narrator decides to undertake a study tour to Bad Kissingen, the home town of Ferber’s mother, which is not really a homecoming but a very disturbing experience.

In the meantime, Max Ferber has made a name of himself in the art world, but he almost never leaves his studio in a dilapidated area of Manchester. Only once he goes on a visit to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald. The work of this strange man proves to be the intuition of the extreme power of pain in Ferber’s oeuvre.

Beside the already mentioned literary influences, the reader has also to think of Thomas Bernhard (especially when Sebald is describing his visit in Bad Kissingen in the last story), but also of Georges Perec and of Vladimir Nabokov.

The passionate butterfly collector Nabokov is making an appearance in all four stories (in the last one even twice), and here Sebald is in my opinion doing a little bit too much. This “running gag” is not necessary for the dramaturgy of the stories and a bit of a cheap effect. But this is a minor flaw in this extraordinary collection of stories that has great qualities. Sebald is an excellent prose writer that is clearly inspired by Stifter or Gottfried Keller. The hybrid mixture of documentation, diary, photo novel and story seems to be the appropriate form to speak about the fate of these “emigrants” (Goethe’s “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten” echoes also in the title of the book). And indirectly the book is also a book about the friendship of Sebald with his maternal grandfather because in all four stories a friendship between a young and a much older man plays an important role (Sebald’s relation to his father seems to have been strained in the contrary).

The book received very high praise by literary critics and was also a big success on the German and international (especially English-speaking) bookmarket. Susan Sontag, Antonia Byatt, Michael Ondaatje or Salman Rushdie considered Sebald as one of the most important authors of our times.

Very few critics, like the German novelist Georg Klein have voiced their reservations about Sebald’s books. Klein was speaking about Sebald’s “sweet melancholic masochism towards the past”, which claims a “false intimacy with the dead”. Sebald also seems not to have noticed the changes in Germany following 1968 (he visited the country very rarely after 1966) which made some of his statements regarding his home country a bit out of time and place and for my taste sometimes a bit too self-righteous.

But be this as it may, Sebald was a very important and excellent writer and “The Emigrants” is definitely one of the great books about the historical and personal disasters of the 20th century and therefore I recommend it very strongly.

sebald-emigrants-harvill

W.G. Sebald: The Emigrants, Harvill 1996 (transl. by Michael Hulse); Die Ausgewanderten, Eichborn 1993

A very interesting essay about Sebald’s biographical sources of his work by the American germanist Mark M. Anderson sheds additional light on “The Emigrants” and other works of Sebald: http://www.wgsebald.de/vaeter.html 

Other Reviews: 
Tony’s Reading List 

© Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com, 2014. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expresseded and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Thomas Hübner and mytwostotinki.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.