Lives rebuilt, history reconstructed

Award-winning journalist Martin Fletcher combines story of his parents’ life in London after Holocaust with a historical thriller.

By LIAT COLLINS
Cover of book The List 521 (photo credit: Courtesy)
Cover of book The List 521
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The List is not a Holocaust story. Its protagonists, Georg and Edith Fleischer, are not even Holocaust survivors in the strictest sense of the term. They are among the lucky ones – Jews who escaped Europe in time. But this, of course, does not mean they are unscarred. The list of the title is the register of names of family members that they cross off, one by one, as their fates come to light. This, too, can be considered “lucky”: Discovering how a parent, sibling, cousin or friend died, however horrific the circumstances, is better than never learning their fate.
Fletcher, best-known as NBC’s Tel Aviv bureau chief of more than three decades, writes in the author’s note that this is not the story of his parents. Nonetheless, he gave the main characters their names, and like the characters in the book, Edith and George Fletcher (once Edith and Georg Fleischer) were refugees from Austria who lived in London.
This might not be the Fletcher family’s story, but it surely resembles it. When I first picked up the novel, I thought of my late Aunt Erna, who fled to England as a teen from Vienna and never discovered the fate of her parents.
My aunt did not talk about her experiences, but as I read The List, I recalled many telling statements: the way she would never come with my uncle to see me off at the train station, admitting once, “I don’t think I could ever say goodbye at a station again”; how she would ask my uncle to recite kaddish for her parents at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (“It’s the closest thing I have to a grave for them”); how, despite being so incredibly English, she particularly valued her Jewish friends; and above all, the tremendous pride she had in possessing a British passport. I now realize this must have signaled both safety and belonging. She told me that the day she’d received her passport had been one of the happiest in her life; when the UK adopted the red-covered European Union passport, instead of the blue British one, she’d felt a real sense of loss, she said.
All these sentiments are present in The List, which deals with a period toward the end of the war and just after, when Britain still ruled Mandatory Palestine. London is neither completely safe nor welcoming to refugee Jews, especially as British soldiers return home, seeking jobs and houses. There is a threat that the refugees – many at one point ironically classified as “enemy aliens” – will be deported to, well, who knows where and what? Certainly the word “home” no longer describes Vienna, Budapest or Berlin for these Jews.
In London, however, Georg cannot find work as a lawyer, or steady work of any kind, for that matter. Edith, pregnant for a second time following a devastating miscarriage, struggles to provide some income mending stockings. Both worry about the future of the child she is carrying – a successor to two families that have been almost wiped out.
Edith also nurses a dream that her father, a physician, will somehow show up before the baby is born. The arrival of her cousin Anna, or the traumatized remains of the once stunning beauty, strengthens the hope that perhaps Papi also survived – that one name on the list, at least, will not need to have a line drawn through it.
The characters in the novel, some portrayed with more depth than others, include the Fleischers’ landlords, caring and thoughtful although worried about their only son, serving in Palestine; Anna, who falls unexpectedly in love with the apparently anti-Semitic Egyptian neighbor, Ismael; and friends like Otto, in a similar situation to their own: “Georg looked around at his friends’ silent faces.... There was not a soul in the room, or among all their friends in London, who had not been robbed of everything essential: family, home, wealth, their very reasons to exist. That was then, but they were discovering that now was even worse. The reports from the camps, the trickle of news, like blood dripping through a rag...”
In this narrative, Fletcher has interspersed a tale of intrigue based on a plot by Lehi to assassinate a British cabinet member in order to hasten the end of the Mandate and enable the Jews to immigrate to their ancient homeland. Georg is caught up in the assassination attempt, creating the most painful dilemmas for the former lawyer and soon-to-be father, desperate for naturalization and stability.
This novel marks a departure for journalist Fletcher, whose previous books include Breaking News and Walking Israel, for which he won a Jewish National Book Award.
The List shows Fletcher’s sensitive eye for detail and deep values as a Jew and a family man. It also demonstrates some of the conflict all native Londoners must feel when dealing with this particular period in Jewish and British history.
However, unlike Walking Israel, a fascinating travelogue, I didn’t always enjoy this book. When you turn history into a novel, the tricky question of credibility always arises.
Nevertheless, even after I’d finished reading The List, the fate of the characters continued to play on my mind. And I realize that these were more than just characters in a book: They were the reflections of real people – extraordinary people – like Fletcher’s parents, my Aunt Erna and countless others. Just because they didn’t tell their own story, does not mean they didn’t have one.