Federman #5

This is the 5th post on Raymond Federman's last novel, SHHH.


A reader backchanneled me because she was concerned about whether the closet incident actually happened since Federman's own daughter seemed to question it, and what sort of aid such questioning might give to Holocaust deniers.

These are good questions. I am not an expert on Federman, I was merely reviewing his book. So if others want to jump in, I would be delighted. That said, from my reading of this book, Federman's fidelity is to a complex notion of 'honesty.' At the end of the afterword Pelton quotes him as saying,

"There is no distinction between memory and imagination, I would not falsify, because I would not lie, because when I walk down the street, my sisters might turn the corner ahead of me and meet me there, and I have to believe that, and how could I tell them when I saw them that I had lied."

By 'lying' I don't believe Federman is referring to getting his facts straight. I believe he is talking about getting his memory straight, all the while knowing that it is riddled with imagination. Did he get put in the closet? Or did he put himself there? Did his mother tell him to "shhh'? We will never know, not because we were not there, but because memory and imagination are profoundly interconnected. To deny this is to be dishonest.

As for Holocaust deniers, in order to keep them from doing any profound harm, we must keep them out of political power. On one level, it is a political struggle of our imaginations, and our stories, against theirs.

But this is not good enough for me. On another level I want to securely say that we Holocaust believers are in the right. And here is where I believe Federman does run into trouble, and he is conscious of it. He writes of himself in the book:  "Federman ... your readers are ... going to wonder what's happening to you." My contention is that it is not simply his telling the story of childhood that pushes him to "the edge of the imposture of realism," but the need to tell his story of the Holocaust.

Perhaps the sheer weight of witness testimony is what we need. With so many stories, partly imaginary as with all stories, of the Holocaust, denying it becomes quite difficult. That said, it may be wishful thinking. How often are people more swayed by facts and evidence rather than ideology?

I end with the rather depressing conclusion that Holocaust deniers are probably more a political, rather than an evidentiary, problem. Because you can get some people to believe anything. Hence, Federman: be honest to your memory and what it constructs for you, not to what it is supposed to construct. Resist easy stories.

In this sense Federman is a hero. He could have written his own great success story: escapes the Holocaust, comes to America, fights in Korea, gets an advanced degree, gets a professorship, becomes an important novelist. It was perfectly available to him. Federman tried to write this novel, then destroyed it, because it was a lie, because it forced his life to a frame, namely, the traditional Western plot-line. He chose to become a lesser-known avant-gardist and remain honest.

This individualistic honesty leads to a complex worldview, which tends to resist the simplifications of Fascism and other authoritarian ideologies.

Raymond Federman, SHHH (starcherone books), part 4

[This is the final in a four-part series of blogs on Raymond Federman's last novel, Shhh, The Story of a Childhood.]

I attended SUNY-Buffalo during some of the years Raymond Federman taught there. I never got to know him well, but I did attend a number of readings and observed him in passing. He can only be described as a raconteur — to my mind, someone for whom the story, not the facts or memory, takes priority. Usually, the raconteur engages in storytelling just for fun. And, while Federman obviously had a lot of fun, he also turned the raconteur's position into an aesthetic.

At one point in the book he even takes on a belligerent tone about just this issue:

"To remember is to play a mental cinema that falsifies the original event. Souvenirs are fiction.

When I write, I don't give a damn about what I owe to memory. Otherwise it would mean that I write to repay what I owe to those who forced me to write. What do I owe them?"

These sentences are uttered by an interlocutor who interrupts Federman's string of vignettes to question what he is writing and how he is doing it. Much of the time, it feels as if it is a version of Federman's voice coming through, even when he seems to divide himself into two voices who go into dialogue. One voice refers to himself in the second person, the other in the first.

Federman's visceral reaction against 'responsible', 'dutiful' writing is, ironically, a call to honesty. He believes that straightforward, realist stories are "responsible" and indefensibly dishonest: "Those who exterminated my family believe themselves to be responsible for cleansing humanity of a verman." An 'honest' story, it would seem, is self-aware of itself as a story, as a construction. It doesn't pretend to represent in any simple and clear way.

I end by returning to my first post, the one where the interlocutor wonders how Federman can be "so serious. Your readers are going to find it boring...What! No more mad laughter, no more sexual effrontery..."

This is a book where Federman risks his raconteur aesthetic in order to tell the heartbreaking story of his early childhood. It is a book where he seems as much interested in history (he even says so at one time) as he is with the story. He seems to risk realism, which he clearly associates with fascism, in order to be true to his vignettes.

But there is a final twist. In his afterword publisher Ted Pelton says that Federman's daughter Simone commented about the closet incident, "if it ever happened." This is astounding: she is questioning the very basis of this entire book. The raconteur could have the last laugh, having created out of thin air the perfect Holocaust, rags to riches story, only to break it up into discontinuous vignettes and the voices of interlocutors.

What did or did not happen becomes indifferent. What we have is the writing. However, this should not be taken as a frivolous postmodernism that claims all human communication/thought/reality is writing. Hardly. Federman came to his aesthetic in part through his painful participation in the Holocaust, whatever his faulty memory might offer us of the particulars of that time.

There is no free play of the signifier when they come for your family. Yes, there might be a lie that keeps the police from searching the closet where Raymond was hiding, but that comes from desperation, not freedom. This book is called "Shhh," not "because of her I can write." Federman emphasizes the closing down of language.

I hope I am not stretching it by saying that this book, in part, shows that the free play of the signifier ends at the point of a bayonet or the barrel of a gun. As Federman worries as early as page 9, perhaps the raconteur cannot tell this story in the face of such devastation, no matter how fast and loose he plays with the facts. Death is absolute. Mass murder is moreso, since it echoes among those yet to be killed. And that echoing is not a sign. It's too deep, too sickening and revolting for such a word. Perhaps the best we can do is use words like "aura," "atmosphere" and so on.

What is Federman's solution in this book? To use ellipses:   ...

Federman's SHHH, 3rd post

Federman's prose is relaxed and conversation; it goes down easily. He manages to describe heartbreaking vignettes in such a way that we readers are not overcome emotionally. In part, he does this by unflinchingly describing his emotions. For instance, when he as a young boy, before he was interested in girls, was shown how to masturbate by a young woman in his apartment building, there is no sense of violation on his part because, apparently, there was none. He was just happy to be masturbating.

Federman describes this way of discussing masturbation, along with other topics, honesty. This may seem like a strange word coming from Federman, from a writer so suspicious of verisimilitude, but I don't think he is contradicting himself. Rather, he is being honest to memory, not so much to historical fact. And the two are different. (However, at other times in the book,  he describes things as historical, such as the cockroaches and mice and lice they share their apartment and hair with as the "historical" facts of life in 1930's proletarian Paris.) What carries us through this fascinating book is this fidelity to memory. The book moves associatively, from one memory to another, jumping around in time, describing events even Federman cannot remember how old he was when they happened. (The fourth part of this series will deal, in part, with the problematic of memory in this book.)

He describes his childhood as chaotic. His father was a tuberculor chronic gambler, his mother a long-suffering house cleaner for rich people, and his Uncle Leon a tailor always trying to get him to come into his shop to do menial chores such as picking up pins from the floor. And then his cousin Salomon, whose hand-me-downs he received, and who treated him with real disrespect. Federman does not describe his sisters, Sarah and Jaqueline, very much at all.

While Leon and his family escaped, Federman's didn't, and whatever their foibles, especially the father's, none of course deserved what they had coming to them from the Nazis. There is almost an innocence in the way that he relates these vignettes.

I have come to wonder how how he has created this relaxed, associative prose at the sentence level. On page 176 he is describing the little birds who came to the apartment window. He thinks they were sparrows.

"I wanted so much to be able to fly like them. Maybe that's why years later in America, I volunteered for the paratroopers during the Korean war. Just to be in the sky. But that's another story.

"I would have liked to have been a bird. Except that in the winter, when it was very cold outside and it snowed, I could imagine how the poor birds were suffering."

This may seem sentimental to some, but to me it's not. The desire to fly comes at a time in the book when Jewish kids were basically forced to remain in their homes by the German occupiers. So there is a double association between the birds and the paratroopers: one is the explicit statement about flying, the second is a military association. When he is actually flying, he is doing the fighting, not being passively holed up in an apartment.

But Federman chooses to cut off this association. The question then becomes why he chooses to bring it up in the first place. Why not cut it out? Apparently, Federman wants to highlight the pruning process that he is applying to his memories. He begins a new story, perhaps even teasing us with it a little, only to shrug and say, "But that's another story." It's a little silly, kind of conversational, and all Federman.

So, the association carefully packed away, Federman returns to thinking about how he would have liked to fly. But he cannot leave it so simple: he also remembers how when he was a boy he imagined the birds suffering. This is a perfectly formed sentence: he delays the man clasue as long as possible, thereby getting all the necessary information in before introducing it. The delay also creates the necessary drama.

This example is one of the smooth, conversational, associative moves that makes this book go down so smoothly. Somehow, Federman makes this representation of a difficult life, that ended in tragedy for most involved, sing in a terrifically accessible manner.

Federman's "Shhh", part 2 — the poem "Before That"

[This is the second of a number of entries that trace my thoughts as I read Raymond Federman's last novel, Shhh, which is about his early life with his family before, at age 13, his mother pushed him into a closet, telling him "shhh," when the Nazis were coming and saved him from the fate of the rest of the family, Aushwitz.]

Throughout his fine prose — and the word is "fine," — Federman intersperses poems. The poems often surprise me at how old-fashioned they seem in their thematics. This is not a put down, it is just an observation. Perhaps the poem that affects me the most is also the most old-fashioned, "Before That." On the surface, it is a simple longing for a long, rooted family occupation, as farmers, builders, or sailors.

The first stanza reads:

Some say, can say: my father was a farmer,
and his father before him, and his father
before that. We are of the earth.

The poem goes on to say that a family of builders is "of the stone" and a family of sailors is "of the water." Then he says that "I have no antecedent" because nobody in his family has been a writer. He claims to write to establish an "antecedent for my children."

The last two stanzas are devastating. Federman wonders if he can say anything of his father given his "erasure from history." In the next stanza, the answer is "yes." He can say his father is "a wanderer" from "nowhere" to nowhere. "He came without earth, stone, water, and he went wordless."

What I find so devastating here is the intense longing for family that comes through. The desire for stone, earth, and water, for the elemental, to touch and become one with the elemental, is almost overwhelming. It is what he sees others have that he cannot because his family was taken from him.

In the prose of the book, where he comments on the poem, Federman suggests that it is about his family's historical tendency toward failure and poverty. And I believe him, but only on one level. The "that" in the title could refer to familial antecedents or to his family being taken away Aushwitz. In the latter case, the earth stone water are the fundamentals of life being stripped from him.