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Last update - 21:13 11/06/2008 Fiction War? What war? By Dafna Ruppin Tags: Austrian Jews, Eva Menasse  Eva Menasse's semi-autobiographical novel is all about World War II and the Holocaust, although these events and their horrors are almost never mentioned directly Vienna, by Eva Menasse (translated from German by Anthea Bell) Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 368 pages, £13 (hardcover), £7 (paper) Hebrew translation by Michael Dak, Matar Publishing, 366 pages, NIS 88 In one of the episodes of the British sitcom "Fawlty Towers," some German guests arrive at the hotel run by Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), somewhere in the southwest of England. "Just don't mention the war!" Basil repeatedly cautions the waitress Polly (Connie Booth), trying to maintain civil relations between all involved and not to upset the sensitive guests. In a moment of weakness, however, it is Basil himself who steps over the line while serving dinner ("So that's two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering and four Colditz salads"), creating an even greater uproar when he bursts into a spontaneous impersonation of Hitler. The same principle applies in the case of the Viennese family that is the focus of Eva Menasse's debut novel, "Vienna." The novel's unnamed narrator unfolds the convoluted story of her semi-Jewish family, from the grandparents, through her parents, aunts and uncles, to her own generation and their offspring. Most of them prefer not to talk about the war, avoiding the subject with West European elegance: As one uncle says, war stories are simply not interesting. Yet the war continues to rear its head in the lives of the family's members, Jews and non-Jews alike. Having covered the 2000 London trial of Holocaust-denying historian David Irving for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Menasse apparently prefers to assume that the events themselves are well-known and undisputed, and she chooses not to go into much historical detail. This strategy serves the novel well. The choice of the title "Vienna" is especially brilliant, since it evokes in the reader a range of common associations: culture and the arts, schnitzel and strudel, and, of course, the city of Hitler during his formative years and one of his first targets as conqueror. The fact that the book's original title is also "Vienna," rather than the German "Wien," invites the German-speaking public, too, to adopt an outsider's view of the city and to see it as a product with a certain image. The result is a semi-autobiographical novel that is all about World War II and the Holocaust, even though they and their horrors are almost never mentioned directly. Chronological chaos As befits a family memoir, "Vienna" is composed of anecdotes and stories that are passed on from one generation to the next, making up the family mythology. In the absence of a clear plot trajectory, Menasse relies on her characters' ability to sweep readers along with them through the book. And indeed, the figures in the narrator's family tree are hard to resist. The grandfather, a Jewish wine and liquor merchant, a gambler and womanizer, escapes deportation to the death camps by marrying the grandmother, a Catholic German fond of bridge and fur coats. The narrator's father is sent to London at age 8 with the Kindertransport, returning to Vienna as a professional soccer player who speaks no German. There is an uncle who fights with the British army, despite the difficulty he encounters when he tries to enlist, as the subject of an enemy nation; and that is only the immediate family. There are many other uncles, aunts, cousins and siblings, all depicted with affection and in a humorous style that is not afraid to mock. The leaping between characters and the absence of clear temporal signposts creates a chronological chaos, itself a work of painstaking skill. Anecdotes and stories are interlaced in the narrator's mind in a fluid narrative weave that bridges the generational gaps. In fact, presenting the story in the first person, with the confidence of an all-knowing narrator, practically renders superfluous the mention of dates. The use of "my father," "my grandmother," "my mother," "my uncle," "my brother," "my sister," "my older cousin" and "my younger cousin," rather than names, already contains the time element of family chronology within it; historical reference points, meanwhile, are defined through their relationship to the war: pre-, during or post-. While the narrator's brother is a historian who exposes a Nazi war criminal, the older family members prefer to persist in the belief that there are no Nazis in post-war Vienna. More than that: There never were any. Also, while they choose not to define themselves as either Jews or victims, the members of the younger generation see the Holocaust and the family tale of survival as the experience that grants them entry into Judaism. As the narrator asks at one point, are not the sending-off of the two children, their return home to their foreign, broken parents, the grandfather's yellow patch or the grandmother's journey to Theresienstadt -- are not all these enough to make the small family a Jewish one, a persecuted one? Genetic testing As they discover, however, the Jewish community repeatedly shuts the door in their faces because their mother is not Jewish. The Nuremberg Laws and the laws of Judaism, as the brother explains bitterly, are not the same thing. Through the family's disputes over who is the better Jew, the half-Jew who toils at religious study and takes care to pass the tradition on to his children, or the one born to a Jewish mother but who has never been seen setting foot in a synagogue, Menasse touches on another sensitive point: Who is a Jew? This question has troubled Israeli governments since the establishment of the state, when they were first required to set the criteria for Jewish status as part of the Law of Return. Attempts to give the status of a Jew to anyone who defines himself as Jewish created conflicts with the Orthodox political parties, until in 1970 the law was amended so that only those who were born to a Jewish mother or who had converted to Judaism could be registered as Jews. "The fact that for 6,000 years it was possible to determine with certainty only the mother's identity, is what led, completely understandably, to Jewishness being based on the mother's identity. ?But, since genetic testing came into existence, the time of matrilineal descent has passed,' my older cousin shouted at his brother" [unofficial translation]. If even the Viennese family is torn by the question of who is a Jew, I would not be in too great a hurry to pronounce the death of the establishment in charge of religious conversion. In the meantime, "Vienna" offers readers a new kind of potential Jew. Dafna Ruppin works at the International Institute for Jewish and Israeli Culture, in Tel Aviv, which promotes the study and production of Jewish theater in Israel and internationally. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Marketing ploy Israeli satellite TV has a new star - Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Through her lens Madonna's next project: documentary about the Israeli-Arab conflict.

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