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Cécile Wajsbrot’s novels often evoke the past, in particular, the Occupation and the Holocaust, but their true subject is the here and now. Born in 1954, she turns time and again to the Second World War, which had tragic consequences for her family. Her real goal, however, is not to retell history; what she is interested in is how individuals can remain burdened by historical events even if they did not—as she did not—personally experience them.
The author of the tellingly entitled Mémorial (2005) brings unusual narrative techniques to bear on the dilemma of coming to terms with one’s own life in a present still marked by the Shoah (and Hiroshima, as she has added). This concern with History and personal history is accompanied by an urgent question: How might we remain fully aware of the past yet liberate ourselves from it and move confidently into the future?
Mémorial opens with an unnamed woman narrator waiting on a station platform for a train that has been inexplicably and somehow ominously delayed. The setting is probably Paris’s Gare de l’Est, for a glass roof is mentioned, but it is not named. Nor do we learn where the woman is going. Only later does her destination turn out to be Poland, specifically the town of Kielce, from which her family hailed before the Second World War.
This town is no ordinary stopover. Kielce was the site of the pogrom of May 14, 1946, when 39 Jews (who had resettled in their hometown after the war) were murdered and 82 were wounded because of the false claims of a boy who pretended that he had been kidnapped. The woman is returning in the hopes of spotting traces of her family.
Wajsbrot sets into narrative motion what the philosopher Saint Augustine called “the presence of things past (or things future),” that is, the phenomenology of memory and anticipation as they take place in the mind. As the narrator hears loudspeakers and gazes at the other waiting passengers, she daydreams and hears voices belonging to family members, notably, her father and aunt.
Identified only as “the brother” and “the sister,” these voices from the past function like a chorus in ancient Greek drama. They make general comments and repeatedly ask the woman what she is seeking. (This question is essential for Wajsbrot. In her novels, narrators and characters often depart, sometimes spontaneously, on crucial quests that they can only gradually comprehend.) The story then shifts to a train compartment; the narrator is sitting across from a woman heading for her hometown: Oswiecim, or Auschwitz. She too is on a quest. After a tense and moving conversation that is more silence than spoken words, the next scene finds the narrator walking through Kielce.
Not a realist novel, Mémorial is nonetheless based on historical fact and Wajsbrot’s family background, whose tragic contours are sketched in Beaune-la-Rolande (2004). The subject of this book is her grandfather, who left Poland for France in the 1930s, worked in a leather workshop in Paris and, although a foreigner, volunteered to defend France against the Germans in 1939. Two years later, he was summoned by the police for an identity check in a barracks located near the Porte de Bagnolet. It was a trap. He was sent to the Beaune-la-Rolande camp “to work.” Later, he was herded into a freight train and transported to Auschwitz, where he died within two months.
Wajsbrot tries to reconstruct these events, depicting in the process her grandmother vainly waiting for her husband to emerge from the barracks. She also explains how the woman and her two children (the author’s mother and uncle) miraculously escape the Vel d’Hiv roundup on July 16, 1942, then flee Paris and arrive in the Free Zone. The book concludes with a poignant description of the scratchy, increasingly inaudible tapes that are broadcast during the Beaune-la-Rolande ceremonies that she attends in the 1990s—a telling image of a vanishing collective memory. Beyond remembering and commemorating on individual, familial and community levels, Wajsbrot points to the necessity for all French citizens to come to terms with the negative aspects of national history—a prerequisite to charting a legitimate path to the future.
Wajsbrot translated Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and like the British writer, she provides few details about her characters; they are “viewpoints” or “consciousnesses.” Often the identities of shadowy “voices,” such as in Mémorial, take on distinct features only after the novel has progressed, a narrative technique paralleling Holocaust researchers’ efforts to restore names and faces to the anonymous victims of industrialized mass murder.
In La Tour du lac (2004), Wajsbrot meditates on the paradoxes of autobiography, taking off from Woolf’s speculation, in a 1932 letter to Hugh Walpole, that “only autobiography is literature—novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you and me.” As Wajsbrot’s writing has evolved from her earlier love stories, she has increasingly stripped off the trappings of conventional storytelling in an attempt to get at this individual core. At the same time, she avoids chronicling her own life straightforwardly; in La Tour du lac, she carefully constructs an autobiographical persona who resembles yet is not exactly herself. A woman writer comes across a younger man in the Bois de Boulogne who had worked as a waiter in a café where she used to write. The woman has given up writing novels (she earns her living by translating), whereas the young man is struggling to break away from his parents, who disapprove of his homosexuality. Their encounter is decisive for both of them.
Wajsbrot frequently applies to male-female relationships her vision of how the past keeps the present in bondage—in the body and especially the mind. Caspar Friedrich Strasse (2002) purports to be the commemoration speech of a former East German poet who is inaugurating a new street in the city after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The speech blends insightful remarks about the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich with, surprisingly, a personal love story. One day, as he explains, he was allowed by East Berlin authorities to attend his grandmother’s funeral in West Berlin. A little later, in another cemetery, he encounters a young woman who is cleaning her sister’s grave. After a brief conversation, they corresponded for several years, ever separated by the Wall. The poet (who was married) becomes famous because of verse that he wrote about this woman whom he scarcely knew. Years later, after the fall of the Wall, the two would-be lovers meet again. But will their present be able to free itself from the past, which includes the manner in which the poet exalted his absent muse?
While continuing to pen fictionalized autobiographies, Wajsbrot also explores other genres. Nation par Barbès (2001)—the title refers to a Métro line that runs through the immigrant quarters of northern and eastern Paris—is a love story involving illegal immigrants. Her recent Fugue (2005) is set in Berlin, where she now lives, and is accompanied by Brigitte Bauer’s arresting photographs of inhuman monumental architecture, urban ruins, solitary individuals and anonymous crowds. It is the “autobio-graphical” account of a woman who moves to Berlin on a whim. After renting the first apartment that she comes across, she meets a man in a café. An odd relationship develops (or rather, fails to develop) between them; it is clear that some kind of painful heritage presides over each of their thoughts, gestures, words and especially silences. When the budding love dies abruptly, the woman continues to seek a sort of liberation for herself in the present and in Berlin. Having broken ties with her homeland, will she at last be able to sever herself from the past? One day, in an oppressed mood, she notices a beach pebble that she has brought along on her self-imposed exile. She takes it in her hand and performs an unexpected act that, alas, reestablishes the presence of a redoubtable past. 
The second volume of John Taylor’s Paths to Contemporary French Literature, which includes several articles originally published in France Magazine, has just been released by Transaction Publishers.
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