Last update - 00:00 05/03/2008
'I was Hitler's doctor'
By Gerald Sorin
"1940" by Jay Neugeboren, Two Dollar Radio, 274 pages, $15
Almost 10 years ago, Jay Neugeboren, already the author of a dozen books, delivered a nuanced and captivating lecture at the State University of New York, New Paltz, at my invitation, on the subject of "Imaging Jewish Fiction." Over cups of strong coffee the following morning, I asked him about the research he had done for his magnificent prize-winning novel "The Stolen Jew" (1981). About this book of more than 300 pages, mostly set in 19th-century Russia (the story within the story) but also in 20th-century Israel and New York, Neugeboren, then a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, admitted he had done almost no research, and that he had never visited any of the places he describes so vividly, other than New York.
I thought he was joking. "The Stolen Jew" is a haunting, poignant and beautifully rendered novel that tells a completely credible historical tale of a Jewish boy in imperial Russia who is kidnapped from a shtetl to fulfill another boy's summons to serve 25 years in the czar's army.
The "liberated" boy and his father escape to America. Nothing but heartache follows for them, and it is transmitted through the generations as guilt, mental illness, lovelessness, suicide and untimely tragic deaths.
But Neugeboren was not joking. "The secret," he said, "is imagination." As in "The Stolen Jew," there is plenty of imagination exercised in "1940," Neugeboren's first novel in more than two decades. This strange story, encompassing several mysteries, melodramatic displacements, graphic violence and theological reflection, has a curious power and pull. The inventive narrative is built around the non-fictive Dr. Eduard Bloch, a Jewish Austrian physician who had been doctor and confidant to Adolf Hitler and his family while the future Fuehrer was growing up, and who ministered to Hitler's mother Klara during her losing battle with breast cancer.
So, in addition to imagination, there is research here, too, not only historical but technical as well. We don't get paragraphs like this all-too-representative sample without careful study: "Elisabeth had removed two of the children's hearts from the jars of formaldehyde she had obtained at Bellevue Hospital, and had begun a dissection of one of them on her father's bread board, cutting away the pericardial sac, then carefully dissecting from the heart an innominate artery. Since there was a right aortic arch... the innominate artery was directed to the left, and Elisabeth knew this meant it could be anastomosed - joined - to the side of the left pulmonary artery. She believed this would be the most efficient choice because although the subclavian artery by its size - the diameter of its internal lumen - may have seemed the ideal artery ... the innominate artery had the advantage of being more nearly the size of the pulmonary artery to which it would be attached."
The fictive American-born Elisabeth (Rofman) is an anatomical illustrator who joins Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1940, and with whom Dr. Bloch, out of Austria with Hitler's help and now in the Bronx, is smitten. She is also the mother of Daniel, a "disturbed" young adolescent who escapes from a mental institution in Maryland (twice); the daughter of a man who also seems to have "escaped" and appears here mostly in Elisabeth's memory, or more precisely, her imagination; and the ex-wife of Alex Landau, an irredeemably unsympathetic but deservedly renowned surgeon. There are throughout, oblique (and occasionally direct) attempts by Neugeboren to connect Nazi racial ideology and Hitler's eugenics to the impending castration of Daniel, whom Dr. Landau and Dr. Bloch believe is "afflicted with a most real condition - one for which we as yet have no names." Today's layman might guess schizophrenia or more likely high-functioning autism. Daniel, it is claimed, hates to be touched. But there are several scenes (two of them sexual) that seem to render autism next to impossible.
Knife-wielding men
Knives, like the one threatening Daniel's future ability to reproduce, and the ones Elisabeth uses for her delicate dissections, figure prominently in "1940." Elisabeth has, for example, a strong childhood memory of the itinerant blade grinder and the neighborhood people waiting in line with satchels full of knives to be sharpened. She also has a more chilling, recurring memory of a dead horse, carcass still steaming, which is being cut up, also in her poor Bronx neighborhood, by hungry, knife-wielding men. And as a youngster, Elisabeth had saved her working-class father's badly infected hand by cutting deeply into it, with his instructions, with a heated kitchen knife.
Even the episode in the Hebrew Bible, wherein Abraham's finely sharpened knife hovers above Isaac's waiting throat, plays a role in the novel. During Shabbat dinner in Alex Landau's opulent home, at which Dr. Bloch and Elisabeth are improbably present (along with Landau's second wife and their two young children), Alex, after the women go off to put the kids to bed, holds forth with what he takes to be an original interpretation of the Akeda story: God is telling us, in the most dramatic way, that we don't possess our children. Nor ought we to.
Alex goes on tiresomely and endlessly, as is his wont, to make the same point about Hagar and Ishmael. It is, Landau stresses, only after Hagar places her son down in the desert, literally "giving up" the 12-year-old (whom she, according to Alex and some traditional interpretations, was apparently lugging around!), that God speaks, promising that Ishmael, like Isaac, will one day be the head of a goy gadol (great nation). Alex's midrashim, it seems, are meant to influence Dr. Bloch's opinion of Elisabeth, whom Dr. Landau believes has been a neurotically overprotective mother. This apparently critical point about Elisabeth, however, is left virtually unexplored by Jay Neugeboren.
Unfortunately, this is true of too many other themes as well, which Neugeboren approaches, but does not examine in any real depth or complexity. For example, Dr. Bloch, whose journal (started after his arrival in the United States) constitutes nearly half the book, wonders if he had been "dishonorable" in accepting favors granted to him by Adolf Hitler that were to his knowledge granted to no other Jew. But this important question does not get much further attention. Similarly Bloch, in his writing, touches on but does not attempt to analyze the concept of "evil." He rightly insists that calling Hitler evil is a way of dismissing him, and a way of saying, had Hitler not existed, all would be well. Here Neugeboren seems to be raising the sophisticated point that in one's search for causal nexus, concentrating on one man, evil or otherwise, is not an exercise in history, but an escape from it. Again, unfortunately, the point slips away into Bloch's banal and naive observation that we must see Hitler clearly so that "those who must engage and confront him - do so with a greater possibility of curbing his ambitions and his power."
This is the same Hitler, whose government, beginning as early as 1933, instituted the virulently anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws, and in November 1938 instigated the brutally destructive and deadly Kristallnacht in Germany and in Austria (which the Reich had annexed in April of that year). By 1940, when Bloch is searching for "understanding," Germany has already occupied half of Poland (inside of which it had loosed its murderous Einsatzgruppen against the Jewish population), and overrun most of France, all of Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark.
Maybe Bloch (and by implication, Neugeboren) thinks that the Fuehrer can be curbed by psychotherapy? This is not meant to be cute. One of Neugeboren's epigrams is a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: "Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us." Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner? I can't believe that as keen a writer as Jay Neugeboren subscribes to this odd notion with regard to Hitler or Nazism. Perhaps it is more directly relevant to Daniel, with his "innate and destructive" impulses, or more certainly to the author's own younger brother, hospitalized some 50 times, and about whom he wrote so honestly and sensitively in "Imaging Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival" (1997). But therein lies one of the problems with "1940," a sometimes very confusing book. Toward the conclusion, there are some surprises (most requiring a suspension of disbelief), but I'll leave those for readers who like that sort of thing. Little or nothing, however, is satisfactorily resolved in the end, or even left in an ambiguous, but illuminating state.
This is disappointing for Jay Neugeboren, who in "Stolen Jew" (which alone would have secured his literary reputation as a master craftsman), "Big Man," "An Orphan's Tale" and "Don't Worry About the Kids" (one of three prize-winning collections of Neugeboren stories) has painted harrowing portraits of mid-to-late 20th-century American social and cultural life, even as he compassionately imbued his characters with sincerity, complexity and authenticity. Let's hope that after "1940," there is a more typical Neugeboren novel in store for which we won't have to wait as long.
Gerald Sorin, Distinguished Professor of Jewish and American Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz, is the author of many books, including "Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent," which won the National Jewish Book Award in History.