Introduction

"When we're young we tend to think of memory as something belonging to us. There are good memories and bad ones, but aside from forgetting names occasionally, it is hard to imagine what ceasing to rely on your memory means. My mind still functions enough for me to be frightened and feel diminished. Someday, I hope not too soon, I'll cease to be alarmed...."
           --    Renzo, from After Auschwitz: A Love Story

Two of the 20th century's terrible A's collide in this powerful novel -- Alzheimer's Disease and the Auschwitz death camp.  Brenda Webster brings to bear her considerable knowledge of Jewish and Italian history and culture, personal acquaintance with the families of luminaries like Primo Levi, and a lifetime of psychological insight as she observes the intellectual decline of Renzo, a once brilliant writer and filmmaker.

The novel is set entirely in Rome in 2010, and benefits from the author's comfortable familiarity with the city's haunts, both hidden and famous.  Renzo, aware that he is slipping deeper and deeper into the haze of Alzheimer's, keeps a journal in which he grapples with his complicated marriage to Hannah, who survived the death camps as a child and went on to become a chronicler of that experience.  Renzo knows how painful it is for Hannah to lose yet another loved one -- himself -- as he chronicles his own failing grip on reality.

This story of enduring love -- a love that makes the pain bearable -- inspires hope where there appears to be despair, and allows humor to leaven the loaf of existence.  As Renzo's rich memories of the artistic and intellectual currents of the 20th century begin to fade, highly lyrical passages elucidate his sophisticated anguish and his child-like wonder.

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Excerpt

INTRODUCTION:

The excerpt, below, is from the new book, After Auschwitz: A Love Story, by author, playwright and critic, Brenda Webster. The excerpt takes place at the funeral of a friend of Hannah and Renzo's, causing Renzo to think back on the funeral of the famous writer, Primo Levi. A Holocaust survivor who committed suicide, Primo's funeral -- like this book -- raised uncomfortable issues about how best to navigate the end of life.

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The Funeral of Primo Levi

an excerpt from the new novel

AFTER AUSCHWITZ: A Love Story

by Brenda Webster

At the cemetery I think I somehow expected a crowd like the one that followed Primo Levi's coffin. Would a reader nowadays understand the reference? You'd think as an Italian he would at least know the name and be able to say by rote: a great writer Primo Levi, one of the greatest in our time. But what would it mean to him? What remnants of a moral vision are left in our modern consumerist Italy? The economic miracle without a soul.

By now only the grandchildren of survivors are alive and the very old like me. Of course I had read Primo's books about Auschwitz. I'd admired his lucidity, his absence of rage at his persecutors, wondered how he could sustain these things; apparently he couldn't. In the end he succumbed, hurled himself down the stairwell of his mother's house. People said it was a delayed reaction to Auschwitz. That made it murder, not suicide, and allowed him to remain a hero. One can think that one is suffering at facing the future and instead be suffering because of one's past. I think he said that, though he didn't mean it in the Freudian sense. Then too he thought a lot about suicide. He talks in particular about an Austrian philosopher tortured by the Gestapo. This man, Amery, unable to forget what he'd been through, became incapable of finding joy in life, in living itself. That makes me feel that I am on the right track in soaking myself in whatever pleasure I find.

Just now a great flock of starlings went by, turning the sky dark with the beating of wings. Off to a new roosting place, I suppose. Primo found solace reciting Dante's Ulysses canto in which, if I remember correctly, Ulysses wants to sail to the ends of the known earth. Was hubris his sin?

It was enough to see the rabbi recite the kaddish to throw me back to that awful day. Back then, another spring morning, Hannah couldn't stop crying. Primo had called her in despair a few days before his death, and she had responded to him as if he had a headache, lecturing him on setting an example for the rest of them, the survivors.

"You couldn't have known," I told her. It seemed impossible that the man who had looked at the worst human beings can do to each other, that this man had done violence to himself. SAVED BUT DROWNED the newspapers trumpeted. TURIN MOURNS THE MAESTRO. But his funeral itself was like a silent movie. There were no noisy speeches. The widow in black and dark glasses walked behind him. So did she, of course, Gabriella. "Delayed homicide," the rabbi had called it, so that he could be buried with honor. The Jews, like the Christians and Muslims, think of suicide as a sin and bury suicides in a separate unconsecrated part of the cemetery.

Hannah thought it wasn't the camps that had destroyed him; she insisted it was a love problem, an affair with a German woman. This seemed strange but she insisted, though she wouldn't tell me how she knew. And just now there was a biography that hinted at the same thing. His sister hated it, of course, and I put both biographies away somewhere and now I can't find them. I have some bookshelves set under the gable windows. I put them there when I was agile enough to crawl in and retrieve them. Anyway, I thought that Primo was worn down by the difficulties of living virtually imprisoned by his aged blind mother. Living with her was as much a litmus test of character as living in the Lager.

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Copyright ©2014 by Brenda Webster. All rights reserved. After Auschwitz: A Love Story, is published by WingsPress and available wherever fine books are sold or directly from the publisher. All WingsPress titles are distributed through Independent Publishers Group at 1-800-888-4741 and available at IndieBound.org view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1.Theodor Adorno, the German sociologist and theoretician, believed that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” How does Brenda challenge that assertion in her new novel? Do you think she chose the title in ironic deference to Adorno’s sad and defeatist statement?

2. What are some of the ways Brenda makes Rome, where the book is set , into a character in the novel?

3. Why do you think Renzo, a non-Jew, feels he must encourage Hannah to work on her successful novels and fulfill her obligation to write as a witness to history. Why does this matter so much to him?

4. How does Hannah's backstory, from her decision not to bring children into a world with such evils to her appreciation for the love of a deeply flawed man, to informs her life?

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