Aleksandra Lipczak talks to Michel Laub – author of Diary of the Fall, among other books – about inheriting trauma, the situation of Jewish people in Brazil, and the mechanisms of violence.
Aleksandra Lipczak: “This week marks ten years since the publication of Diary of the Fall. Throughout all this time I have been reading responses from readers from various places and of various profiles; it’s the best gift a writer can get,” you recently wrote on Twitter. Do you like this novel of yours?
Michel Laub: Of all my books, this one has had the most success in Brazil, both among critics and readers. I get questions about Diary of the Fall during practically every interview and at every reading. Sometimes I would maybe prefer to talk about my more recent novels, but the fact is that readers often feel moved by, or close to, this very book.
And you?
It was certainly a novel that changed the way I write and the way I see literature. Thanks to it I have become much more daring as an author, not only because of the subject matter, but also because of the form. I can feel that in writing it I ‘freed my hand’; that from then on I felt unfettered as a writer. I think that my later novels are much better than those written before Diary of the Fall. Before, I would sometimes feel entrapped or imprisoned by form. I would constrain myself with strict rules regarding the shape of the novel I was writing at that moment. I could not say everything I wanted to, because it did not fit the form. Diary is a much more fragmentary, freestyle book. It taught me that finding a form is more about finding a tool which, rather than being objectively good, is the best way for me to express everything that I want to in the book in question.
Diary of the Fall is, in a nutshell, a novel about inheriting trauma. There is the grandfather who survived Auschwitz, the son, and the grandson who is trying to come to terms with his life. In this sense, it is a very Polish novel, even though it is set thousands of miles away, in Brazil.
I have heard similar opinions in Germany and Israel. Yet in my mind it was never a Polish, German or Israeli story. Quite the contrary: it is a very local book. Also because it is written in Portuguese – a language rarely read worldwide, with all its syntax, vocabulary and imagery, which makes it strangely and deeply Brazilian.
It was not my goal to write a book about the war or the Holocaust. For someone born in Brazil many years after the war – even though I was born to a family of German-Jewish refugees, yet in completely different circumstances – it would have been a real challenge. It made no sense for me to write about things that have been written about before. This is what the narrator of the book says as well: if I am telling the story, it is only because it is linked to a very specific history of my own family.
I kept that in mind at all times while writing: don’t enter the big debates on history and the Holocaust. If the novel were to come into being at all, it needed to take a different path. What makes it radically different is the fact that, while being a novel with the war and the Holocaust in the background, it is also a story very closely linked to the city I come from (i.e. Porto Alegre), with the Jewish school I went to, etc. It is set in a school similar to mine, because I know that there are rather few writers among the school’s graduates. It was, so to speak, a guarantee that I’d be at least a little original. It was important, because I decided to speak on a subject around which hundreds of books are written every year.
“I don’t want to talk about it either,” this is what the narrator says, who keeps repeating that he does not want to talk about Auschwitz.
The American poet Ben Lerner wrote a brilliant essay on poetry entitled “The Hatred of Poetry”. He defines poetry as an art that starts from negation, from resisting poetry. Something similar happens to my narrator who, while trying to convince us that he does not want to talk about Auschwitz, indeed does nothing else. The subject has been exhausted, it has been discussed repetitively, it is full of clichés and conventional, used-up images. He is aware of it, that’s why he says I don’t want to repeat myself. When you’re working on a book, the key problem is to find a way to enter the story, to open it. Should it be done impetuously, subtly or metaphorically? The beginning is the great secret of every story. I usually discover it through experimentation, trying out voices. In the case of Diary, I also experimented with different beginnings, but what worked best was apparent negation. It seems like a lightly written book where the narrative flows smoothly, but finding the right tone cost me a lot of work.
You write about the long shadow of the Holocaust, about victims who become abusers, about clashing with family history. Yet you do all this in such a subtle manner that the question of whether the main protagonist’s ‘fall’ is linked to what his grandfather and father have been through remains largely unanswered. As if you were telling your readers: I don’t know, do you?
Expressing doubt – this is what has always interested me the most as a writer. So far I have written eight novels. Every time I had the same goal: to share questions that bothered me, about the world, my identity, human relations. Writing in a peripheral language, I can set aside dilemmas such as: is the book going to be an international bestseller? Therefore I can focus on what I find really interesting. Otherwise, why would I write in the first place? I could do something else, earn more money. For example, work as a journalist – a job I have a lot of experience in. Writing fiction is an occupation that comes with a big risk, so it should at least be an interesting adventure.
The fact that in my novel there are more questions than answers is closely linked to my condition as a Jew in Brazil. I took my time before I addressed the subject. Diary of the Fall was written when I was almost 40; it is my fifth novel. I didn’t write about my Jewishness before because, among other things, I felt I had nothing interesting to say on the subject. When I was pushing 40 – maybe it is the fault of a midlife crisis – the question became increasingly important. When I sat down to work on Diary of the Fall, I still had no idea what I wanted to say about being a Jew, and what it could mean for a white Brazilian of a certain age, from a particular generation and city. I knew that only the book could do it for me.
This is what I love about literature – it gives you the space to think these things through. In a world full of casual, political, advertising and self-help discourses, literary fiction is a sort of counterpoint. It is not useful, it often causes more discomfort than pleasure, it offers no answers, only leaves you with questions. Its contestatory nature is actually what I like about it the most.
You’re playing a game with your readers – you fill the protagonist’s life with facts from your own biography. For instance, just like you, he studied law and journalism. Many readers must have thought you had written an autobiography.
Every work of fiction is in some sense autobiographical. Writing Diary of the Fall took two to three years. Throughout this time, the book was my life; I devoted to it many hours every day. The protagonist uses my generation’s slang, grows up in the climate I grew up in. I make use of my memories, which are obviously an extremely subjective matter – my vision of the past surely differs from that of my classmates. One has to remember that, being a writer, I invent things from scratch, combine several people to create a character, create episodes that have never happened or happened to a different person in a different time. It is such a total mix that at one point I lost count as to what in the novel is autobiographical and what isn’t. The line between truth and reality became blurred. For instance, on Portuguese Wikipedia you can read that the book is based on my grandfather’s Auschwitz memoirs. It makes no sense to rectify it; it has become a part of this book’s life.
Does this mean that your grandfather didn’t write memoirs?
I have never met him. My father left Germany for Brazil in 1939. Therefore, when describing the grandfather, I had to rely on the memories of my father, who experienced the tragedy of being a war refugee firsthand. He did not experience the war itself, he managed to flee, yet he was marked with loss. He arrived in Brazil, a country on the other side of the world, while the world he used to know came to an end for him. People he knew, landscapes he was used to – these suddenly became the past. This was his experience of the war. When my father talked about Nazism, I could not uncritically believe everything he told me, because it was his own version of a history he never got to know directly. I was drawn to these tales, because literature is also a form of retelling reality.
The protagonist of Diary of the Fall has rather loose ties to Jewish culture. He goes to a Jewish school, sees a rabbi, celebrates his bar mitzvah, but these are just empty forms. What was it like in your case?
This is an autobiographical thread, these were empty forms for me. Reading the Torah was like listening to a service in Latin – I understood a bit, yet it was nothing but decorum, a ritual with no deeper meaning. When I was 13, I was completely convinced that Jewish culture was something absolutely foreign and had nothing to do with my life. This distance was often combined with a sort of contempt or even anger. Yet now, more than 30 years later, I understand that I could afford the distance because I grew up in a time of peace. Moreover, I was deeply immersed in the Jewish community. I went to a Jewish school, my parents were Jews, my schoolmates too. I could come home and say I hate all this – because no-one was pounding at our door, no-one wanted to hurt us, I didn’t have relatives at the time who were taken to away to concentration camps.
Can you tell me more about your family?
My father came from Berlin, where I happen to live temporarily. Like I said, he left for Brazil in 1939, after the war broke out. He went with his mother, who had divorced my grandfather. My grandfather and my father’s brother left for Israel. My father didn’t see his brother again until the 1970s. In Brazil he scraped by, though it was not extreme poverty – he was poor, but still living a relatively decent life. His mother had a relative in Brazil, there was a substantial German minority living there. The relative had a house that was a kind of boarding house where they could stay for a while. Then they started moving often because my grandmother married a travelling salesman. Eventually, they settled in the south of Brazil, in the state of Paraná, where my father did his studies and became an engineer. He had a pretty successful career in Porto Alegre, so my childhood was comfortable. They say we were middle class, but in a poor country like Brazil being middle class simply means you are rich. Yet my father could only afford to travel abroad as late as the 1970s; for a long time travelling was beyond the reach of the lower middle class. Only then, after so many years, was he able to see his brother again.
Was his father dead by then?
My grandfather was extremely traumatized by the war. He did not want to remember the past, so he forgot about it, which included forgetting about my father. Even when he was dying of cancer in an Israeli hospital, he would not see my father. This was one of my father’s greatest traumas: he never saw his father again, he never said goodbye. Just imagine, throughout all these years after the war he never saw his father, even though both of them were alive. It left a mark on me as well, even though I learned about the history very late. Not because somebody was trying to hide it from me, but simply because it was never discussed. It took me some time before I began to understand what it was all about.
My mother also has a long family history. She is the daughter of a German mother and a French father. She was born in Brazil, but her parents also immigrated there before the war. She had a stepbrother whose father-in-law had been in Auschwitz. Throughout my childhood, we often visited him at his place, we celebrated Jewish holidays together. I was aware he’d been through something horrible, but he never talked about it. None of Diary’s protagonists are modelled on him, but the book absorbed the mystery surrounding this man, the whole ‘we don’t talk about it’ that left a mark on my childhood. The novel is also permeated by different attitudes towards the past that I observed in my family: my grandfather, who never talks about it; my father, who talks about it too much; and a teenager, who wants nothing to do with all this. I also had a lot of friends whose grandparents or other relatives had been murdered in Auschwitz. I grew up in the community of German Jews in Porto Alegre, we had our synagogue, we all knew each other a little or were related. Naturally, I soaked up all kinds of stories. This is all part and parcel of the Jewish heritage that we are talking about now and that I examine in Diary of the Fall.
Diary is also – perhaps predominantly – a book about the mechanisms of violence. You place bullying at school and the death camp side by side. What’s more, you reverse the roles of torturer and victim, as the latter role is played by the only Gentile in the Jewish class. The way you take the slogan never again to the test, in a contemporary, everyday context, is very poignant.
This is what fiction is about. If you decide to tell your readers ‘about the war’, you won’t be able to say anything. You need to point your lens to something and enlarge the image, then enlarge some more until you have found a particular, specific story. You need to go for the microscopic scale – under the microscope, you can see everything. It seemed interesting to have two teenagers involved in the story, a Jew and a Gentile, who have no idea about history and politics yet. They only know what their parents told them – that’s why they make for such interesting abusers. There actually appears in the book a comparison between the school’s hell and a concentration camp. Historically and morally these are two different issues, but they have a common essence. Juxtaposing them is a way to direct slogans such as never again and other clichés towards an understanding of evil, how it operates and how it changes history. At the age of eight, Hitler was not a monster; he was a child. And yet somehow already then evil started becoming a part of this man’s sensitivity. The moment is never going to be captured in a history book, because it requires speculation concerning inner life. Even the testimonials of witnesses or childhood friends often lead nowhere. In a novel, however, I can do whatever I want, because only literature gives you the power to enter someone’s mind. Admittedly, I am not writing about Hitler, but about boys from Porto Alegre, yet – like I said before – there is a common essence. Diary of the Fall is a tale of violence that penetrates through years, generations, countries, as well as different levels of importance: from a mass massacre to a small act of aggression at school.
Parts of this interview have been edited and condensed for clarity and brevity.
Michel Laub:
Born in 1973 in Porto Alegre (Brazil), lives in São Paulo. He trained to be a lawyer, but for many years worked as a journalist. Laub is the author of numerous short stories and eight novels, the most famous of which, Diary of the Fall, is the first book by Michel Laub to appear in English – it was translated by Margaret Jull Costa and published by Other Press.
A nominee for, and laureate of, the most prestigious Brazilian literary prizes, Laub was also named by the literary journal Granta as one of the Best of Young Brazilian Novelists in 2012.
Translated from the Polish by Adam Zdrodowski
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