Books: A journey back to living

Novelist Jonathan Rabb shares his motivation in writing a tale of a Holocaust survivor attempting to rebuild his life in Savannah, Georgia.

By ATARA BECK
Savannah, Georgia (photo credit: Courtesy)
Savannah, Georgia
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Award-winning author Jonathan Rabb’s latest novel, Among the Living, is a compelling read on many levels.
First and foremost, Rabb is a wonderful storyteller with the talent to hold the reader’s interest in more than one plot at a time.
The book, set in 1940s Savannah, Georgia, focuses on Yitzhak Goldah, a 30-year-old Czech-Jewish Holocaust survivor who lost his family and went to live with his American cousins, a childless couple in their 50s who welcomed him with open arms.
The writer manages to portray the Savannah Jewish community of the time, whose members struggled with maintaining their Jewish identity while simultaneously striving for acceptance and security in America – not to mention the hostility that existed between Reform and Conservative Jews. Set only a couple of years after the end of World War II, they were also processing the information about what happened to their brethren in Europe.
Yitzhak – now “Ike,” as his cousins suggested he be called – is a talented journalist, although he initially settles for a position in his cousin’s business.
He meets a beautiful local girl – a young, widowed mother – and they fall in love.
Her father owns a local newspaper, discovers Ike’s brilliance and offers him a position, which leads to a promising career.
Just as the future seems hopeful, a ghost from Ike’s past appears – Malke, his former fiancée who he thought had perished in the camps.
At the same time, drama ensues surrounding his cousin’s business dealings, which also introduces Ike to the plight of the black community and the Jim Crow laws in the American South.
On an emotional level, Ike, an intellectual with a sense of justice, empathizes with their suffering and relates better to them than to his relatives.
Rabb spoke to The Jerusalem Post about his motivation and process in writing.
An edited interview appears below: What inspired you to write about a Holocaust survivor coming to Savannah? I’ve always situated my historical fiction in Europe between the wars, but when we moved to Savannah about eight years ago, I found many of the same qualities here that I had always looked for in, say, Berlin or Barcelona – a decorum with a quiet despair just beneath the surface, a sense of uncertainty. It was wonderful. And even though we were embraced by many of the various communities here, I knew I would always be seen as an outsider of sorts. So, if I were to write about Savannah, I needed a character who was also an outsider.
Years earlier I’d spent a good deal of time with a cousin of mine, Edi Goldah (a few years older than my father), who, at the age of nine, had been sent to a concentration camp along with his mother. His father had been sent to a different camp and, miraculously, all three survived.
While he was leading a very normal life – he was an accountant – it was clear that something remained shattered inside of him. How could it not be? I wanted to create a character who could find hope after that experience, but I knew placing that story in New York would be too obvious.
So I put the idea in the back of my mind.
When we moved to Savannah, it all came together.
You seem to be very familiar with the American Jewish culture/mentality of the 1940s, especially in the South. Where does that come from? Savannah and southern Jewry were very new to me when we moved here eight years ago, so everything I found came through research. Here in Savannah, I was able to sit down at a luncheon one day with five people – one man, four women – with ages that ranged from 90 to 94. I brought along a yellow legal pad with pages of questions, asked the first one and then didn’t speak for the next three hours. I didn’t record anything.
I simply listened, jotted down a name (I stole a character name completely – Mary Royal), a reference to a location, a story that made them all laugh, etc. In a sense, during that afternoon, they were all transported back to 1947 Savannah, so I just went along with them.
Then I went to the books. There are some wonderful archives in Savannah, both of general history and the Jewish community, including an oral history that goes back to the turn of the last century.
I also spent a good deal of time with the work of Primo Levi. For me, his is the clearest voice from those who survived. I tried to capture that same clarity in Ike.
Because this story felt so much more personal to me than my previous books, I dove into the writing much earlier. On occasion, I would need to go back to the books to make sure I was getting something right but, for the most part, I let my characters create the world I needed.
It’s funny, but many people who knew I was writing the book would come up to me saying, “Well, you must include the story of...” and I would listen and nod and then tell them, “You’ll recognize Savannah in the book, but it will be my Savannah, and I hope that’s OK.” That doesn’t mean I altered anything or created fictional locations, but place is always a character in my books. It reflects and interacts with the other characters.
Are you a grandchild of survivors? I’m not. On my mother’s side, the family was already in America in the early 1900s. My father, Theodore Rabb, was born in [then] Czechoslovakia.
His father [Oskar Rabinowicz] played a significant role in the Zionist movement and so they were forced to flee when Hitler invaded. They were lucky enough to make it to England, but my great-grandparents, great-aunt and many other family members did not get out. As I mentioned above, my closest connection to a survivor was my cousin, Edi Goldah. The book is dedicated to him and his parents, who all survived, and I gave Ike their last name as a kind of homage.
Why did you choose to have Ike not share his wartime experiences with his cousins in America? Was this typical of that time? When I write a book, I’m thinking of my character(s) alone, so I’m not sure I can speak to the wider issue of how survivors responded as a whole. As I mentioned, Primo Levi’s work was very important to me. In his Survival in Auschwitz, he does a remarkable thing: he manages not to judge. Not the Nazis, not the kapos, not his fellow prisoners. Perhaps that’s because he was a chemist before the war – I don’t know – but he comes across with an almost unfathomable internal stillness. I knew I wanted that for Ike.
I also had to remember that the book takes place in 1947. The trauma is so raw.
Ike is still processing so much, not only from the camps, but from his sudden move to America. In some sense, he’s still trying to survive as the book opens, so to rummage through his experience in the camps would have seemed artificial to me. He does manage to answer the typical questions, but I’m not sure he has the answers.
Added to that is the way he’s trying to confront the Jim Crow south. Obviously, he can’t know what it is to be a black man living at the time, but he can certainly hear echoes of his own recent past in the way the black community is being treated. In fact, he begins to feel a greater affinity for Calvin and Raymond than he does for his own family. The trauma is ongoing. It just wouldn’t have made sense to me for him to share his past against that backdrop.
On some level, that’s why the flashbacks are equally still. I wanted an almost clinical approach to the moments in Theresienstadt, and then later during the experiments with the water. There could be no indulging of some image people have of that violence and trauma.
Perhaps the clearest sense of that inability to share the experience with anyone comes from Malke, when she says to Ike that it would be so hard for him to understand her experiences – which is true.
Maybe the reason survivors began talking decades later is because it was only then that they had processed the experience enough to confront it. The fact that Levi could do it by 1947 makes his work even more astounding.
How do you think American Jews have significantly changed – or not changed – over the last several decades? That’s a very tough question. I’m not sure there’s a single American Jewish identity that you can point to in order to track those kinds of changes (or consistencies).
The Jews I’ve met here in the south are unlike any I’d ever met before – fully committed, historically more grounded, and – for that reason, perhaps – more culturally tied to the region than other Jews might be. Then again, Jews in California are different from Jews in New York.
We’re still a very small group – less than 3% of the population – yet very visible. And there are certain big issues that continue to define us: our connection and response to the Holocaust, Israel, the sudden upsurge of far-Right politics. All of those both connect and divide us, and will continue to do so as generations pass and others come of age. It might be that we’re in a more fluid phase in terms of identity than we’ve been in the past, but I’m not an expert on Jewish American history, just immersed in that little moment I chose for this novel.