DOUBLE VISION

Free-floating memories of a Viennese Jewish childhood and flight from the Anschluss, roughly stitched together in a strappingly formal voice and counterpointed by Abish’s later visit to Austria.

Readers are brought directly into the custard of novelist Abish’s (Eclipse Fever, 1993, etc.) fraught youth and pummeled with runaway questions: “What, then, did I find so disquieting? Was it the logic that dictated their shared agenda? The practical motives?” Disquiet for sure, as Abish rolls in ambiguity, indeterminacy, and equivocation like a dog in something long dead. “Was this, I wonder, my very first awareness of self-deception?” he asks when considering his family’s poor excuse for a Christmas tree in his youth. Upon returning to his childhood home years later, he “experienced a satisfaction at feeling so indifferent. It was just another house!” Surely his flight from the Nazis was a scary event, but Abish chronicles it as a series of glancing encounters: the night his family was told to leave their home in one hour’s time; his game of catch with the ghetto’s administrator, “a maniacal individual whose actions frequently bordered on unbridled lunacy.” This approach can be frustratingly elliptical, but there are some remarkably sharp isolated tableaux. Forget the evocations, look at the shadows being thrown: surviving inmates from death camps, “marched by maniacal guards . . . across the devastated landscape of Poland,” or the author’s grim realization that as an Austrian Jew he is the enemy in Israel. Anselm Kiefer provides a loophole into an episode of self-recognition for Abish, as does a tightly knit synagogue community, a mnemonic center of gravity “swaying in prayer, their voices pitched high, filling the air with such acute urgency, such passion that for once I, by heart a skeptic, a doubter, felt my resistance fade.”

Images and emotions indistinct and unresolved, presented as if glimpsed from a seat in a passing train. Even when they burn, Abish provides a protective distance.