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A contrived identity
By Sylvia Brownrigg |
January 25, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
WHAT makes up a person's cultural identity? Is it intrinsic, a matter of blood and genealogy, or is it in the eye of the beholder, be that beholder a parent or a partner or the state? In the Irish writer Hugo Hamilton's new novel, a man struggles to establish the precise contours of his being. Given that the man is a German who may have been a Jewish refugee as a young child in World War II, the answer to this question carries heavy freight.
"Disguise" opens with a powerful description of a wartime bombing in Berlin in which a young woman's two-year-old son is instantly killed, leaving no trace behind. Grief-stricken, she heads south to her father, who is imperiled in a different way - by his efforts to avoid serving the Nazis. It is her father who finds a lost three-year-old boy whom he urges her to adopt as her own, giving him the same name as her dead son, Gregor.
"In the ungodly scheme of things," the old man reasons, "this was a story of double misfortune turned into multiple good luck." The woman even follows her father's advice not to tell her husband, long absent on the Russian front, about the exchange.
How will this woman - not to mention her unwitting husband - live with such a deception? What feelings will this mother have about her adopted child? Hamilton chooses not to explore these questions directly. Instead, he catapults his narrative forward to a bucolic apple-picking party many years later when Gregor, now in his early 60s, meets up with his estranged wife, Mara, with whom he is once again on friendly terms, and their grown son, Daniel. As the novel alternates between this farmhouse gathering of friends and family and a scattershot recreation of Gregor's adult life, Hamilton slowly seeds the reader's mind with doubt about the original story.
Is it possible that Gregor was simply an over-imaginative teenager, an alienated boy who projected his feelings into the tragic story of a war orphan? Is his belief that he is Jewish anything other than a perverse expression of German war guilt? (As a child, he was not circumcised, but he goes through the operation as an adult.)
"There were certain discoveries he had made which convinced him that he was, in fact, an orphan and that he was Jewish," Hamilton writes. The author's withholding of the nature of those discoveries is one of several frustrations in Gregor's deliberately obscured history.
The credibility of Gregor's accounts of his childhood takes a serious blow when his own son is still very young. Gregor receives a letter he tries to destroy - from his adoptive mother, whom he has claimed was dead. Discovering the letter, his wife takes matters into her own hands, secretly traveling to Nuremberg to meet Gregor's mother, who denies the whole adoption story. Together the two women pore over pictures from Gregor's childhood.
When Mara confronts Gregor, he can only stick stubbornly to the rest of his story: "His entire existence was in Mara's hands, in her imagination, in what she agreed to believe and what she would dismiss. She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces. He placed the facts in front of her, holding on, desperately trying to save himself."
Eventually, Hamilton suggests, the strain of trying to sustain Mara's belief in his Jewish identity causes Gregor to abandon both her and their young son, choosing instead an itinerant musician's life that takes him as far as Canada and Ireland, with occasional returns home - "an entire lifetime of departures and comebacks." Raising Daniel, Mara maintains contact with Gregor's mother, never losing hope that she will one day find conclusive proof of Gregor's true history.
Hamilton's descriptions of Gregor's present-day life are resonant, and his explorations of different aspects of postwar memory and adaptation are provocative. (Gregor's grandfather disappeared at the end of the war in mysterious circumstances.) But what "Disguise" lacks - perhaps reflecting the defects of its central character - is an emotional center.
The author of a much-praised memoir, "The Speckled People," Hamilton seems to find it difficult to penetrate his characters' interior lives in this novel. And in failing to explain fully Gregor's cruel rejection of his adoptive parents (he refuses to see his father, even on his deathbed), Hamilton leaves a hollow at the heart of his story, diminishing the revelations that finally emerge.
It's difficult not to agree with one of Gregor's friends when he scolds Mara for her obsession with discovering her husband's real story: "Mara, look. His identity is not what he was or what the Nazis thought he was. His identity is the people he's been living with, but he's denied them each time."
"Disguise" opens with a powerful description of a wartime bombing in Berlin in which a young woman's two-year-old son is instantly killed, leaving no trace behind. Grief-stricken, she heads south to her father, who is imperiled in a different way - by his efforts to avoid serving the Nazis. It is her father who finds a lost three-year-old boy whom he urges her to adopt as her own, giving him the same name as her dead son, Gregor.
"In the ungodly scheme of things," the old man reasons, "this was a story of double misfortune turned into multiple good luck." The woman even follows her father's advice not to tell her husband, long absent on the Russian front, about the exchange.
How will this woman - not to mention her unwitting husband - live with such a deception? What feelings will this mother have about her adopted child? Hamilton chooses not to explore these questions directly. Instead, he catapults his narrative forward to a bucolic apple-picking party many years later when Gregor, now in his early 60s, meets up with his estranged wife, Mara, with whom he is once again on friendly terms, and their grown son, Daniel. As the novel alternates between this farmhouse gathering of friends and family and a scattershot recreation of Gregor's adult life, Hamilton slowly seeds the reader's mind with doubt about the original story.
Is it possible that Gregor was simply an over-imaginative teenager, an alienated boy who projected his feelings into the tragic story of a war orphan? Is his belief that he is Jewish anything other than a perverse expression of German war guilt? (As a child, he was not circumcised, but he goes through the operation as an adult.)
"There were certain discoveries he had made which convinced him that he was, in fact, an orphan and that he was Jewish," Hamilton writes. The author's withholding of the nature of those discoveries is one of several frustrations in Gregor's deliberately obscured history.
The credibility of Gregor's accounts of his childhood takes a serious blow when his own son is still very young. Gregor receives a letter he tries to destroy - from his adoptive mother, whom he has claimed was dead. Discovering the letter, his wife takes matters into her own hands, secretly traveling to Nuremberg to meet Gregor's mother, who denies the whole adoption story. Together the two women pore over pictures from Gregor's childhood.
When Mara confronts Gregor, he can only stick stubbornly to the rest of his story: "His entire existence was in Mara's hands, in her imagination, in what she agreed to believe and what she would dismiss. She held him like a porcelain figure, at her mercy, waiting to be dropped to the floor in tiny pieces. He placed the facts in front of her, holding on, desperately trying to save himself."
Eventually, Hamilton suggests, the strain of trying to sustain Mara's belief in his Jewish identity causes Gregor to abandon both her and their young son, choosing instead an itinerant musician's life that takes him as far as Canada and Ireland, with occasional returns home - "an entire lifetime of departures and comebacks." Raising Daniel, Mara maintains contact with Gregor's mother, never losing hope that she will one day find conclusive proof of Gregor's true history.
Hamilton's descriptions of Gregor's present-day life are resonant, and his explorations of different aspects of postwar memory and adaptation are provocative. (Gregor's grandfather disappeared at the end of the war in mysterious circumstances.) But what "Disguise" lacks - perhaps reflecting the defects of its central character - is an emotional center.
The author of a much-praised memoir, "The Speckled People," Hamilton seems to find it difficult to penetrate his characters' interior lives in this novel. And in failing to explain fully Gregor's cruel rejection of his adoptive parents (he refuses to see his father, even on his deathbed), Hamilton leaves a hollow at the heart of his story, diminishing the revelations that finally emerge.
It's difficult not to agree with one of Gregor's friends when he scolds Mara for her obsession with discovering her husband's real story: "Mara, look. His identity is not what he was or what the Nazis thought he was. His identity is the people he's been living with, but he's denied them each time."
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