A young boy, Jakob Beer, emerges from the bog at the Beskupin
archeological site as though he were an artifact reborn. The site,
twenty-five centuries old, has been perfectly preserved in peat. It is
uncovered over several years by archaeologists, and then deliberately
smashed and reburied by the Nazis. He hides in the bog as Nazis smash in
the door, kill his parents, and make off with Jakob's beautiful,
fifteen-year-old sister, who is too big to hide behind the wallpaper.
From his hiding place in the river, Jakob sees the spirits of the dead
ascending. He feels his mother inside him, saying goodbye. Jacob runs
into the dark forest, where he seeks food by night and hides, terrified,
by day, dreaming about Bella. One morning Jakob senses that Bella has
died. One autumn day, Jakob approaches a digging man, Athos, who hides
him under his coat and in his car and spirits him away from his parents'
remains and his best friend Mones to Zakynthos Island, Greece. Bella
remains inside Jakob.
The first chapter establishes that the narrator of Book I as a seven
year old sees his family exterminated, flees into the forest, and after
living an undisclosed length of time in terror, emerges from the earth
like Tollund Man or Grauballe Man. These are ancient naturally-mummified
bodies unearthed in the 1950s in Denmark. Both appear to be victims of
human sacrifice, a theme taken up in the next chapter in relation to the
Holocaust. The narrator is Jakob Beer. His identifying with postwar
archaeological discoveries suggests that the telling is a good deal
after the fact, but he captures the anxiety of a child, lost alone in
the dark for the first time. The exact time of Jakob's writing is late
in Part I revealed to be the summer of 1992, shortly before his death at
age sixty.
The first chapter also establishes that Jakob is for life obsessed
with his sister Bella's fate. She is first depicted as a lover of
novels, including Romain Rolland and Jack London. Jakob hangs from her
shoulders as she reads, demanding that she share with him the mystery of
the black marks on paper. She also traces letters on his back with a
finger to help him learn to spell. These are major services for a future
poet. Jakob refers to Bella as smallest Russian matryoshka doll nestled
inside him, as he himself is nestled inside Athos, the Greek scholar
who rescues him from what is clearly Nazi-occupied Poland, where Jakob's
family falls victim to the Holocaust. Jakob mentions a best friend,
Mones, whose character will be filled in gradually, from Jakob's memory.
The first chapter establishes the importance of language to Jakob.
Entering Greece, he notices that its unknown alphabet and Hebrew are
strangely complementary. This motif will be repeated, and Athos will
often emphasize how the two cultures resonate. Jakob also picks up the
belief that the souls of the dead do not remain inside the earth. No one
is born only once.
Anne Michaels' prose reveals that she is a poet. Scarcely a paragraph
can be found lacking a rich simile or metaphor or evocation of sights,
sounds, and smells. The text is emotive: a young boy scared witless but
somehow knowing how to survive, but told through the eyes of the same
person who has grown into a scholar, knowing about the preservative
nature of peat.
With Athos, high on Zakynthos, in two rooms, Jakob misses the most
important events in his life. Athos's stories evoke images of Jakob's
faceless family and friends. He lives in constant fear of the kicked-in
door, writes letters to the dead, and suffers nightmares. Athos is a
geologist specializing in peat, limestone, and archaeological wood. The
last of a seafaring family, he passes to Jakob his own nautical history
to replace what he has lost, but insists that he retain his Hebrew.
Jakob remembers Bella, who used to be obsessed with Beethoven, and he
has nightmares about incomplete lives. He wonders if his remembering is
painful to the dead. Athos's stories in English and Greek begin to make
sense. Athos opens his rich and diverse library,expanding Jakob's
horizons, interesting him in ancient cultures. Jakob feels Bella
watching him.
Athos lives a two hour walk from town, atop a steep hill. When he
goes there, Jakob stays indoors, beside an old sea chest in which he
hides at the first sign of danger. Jakob learns from Athos how stones
hold human time, and Athos fills him with stories about Antarctica.
Always hungry, Athos and Jakob commiserate with the starving explorers,
who hallucinate about food before starving to death.
On Zakynthos, the Nazis loot the fruit groves and Jakob suffers from
scurvy. Athos forages for food and uses ancient sources to learn how to
cook them. The Italian troops that first occupy Zakynthos do not
persecute the Jews, but when the Germans take over in 1944, the Jews
bury their valuables and disappear into the hills. Jakob sleeps,
listening, prepared to hide in his sea chest. Their friend and
benefactor Old Martin's son Ioannis tells of losing his family on Corfu
when the Gestapo sinks a boat full of Jews. The sinking reminds Jakob of
the sea, where he dreams his family also drowns. Athos draws images
from nature to fight despair. He insists that he cannot save Jakob;
Jakob must save him.
Jakob's situation is luxurious compared to that of Jews across
Europe, about which he then knows nothing. When the Nazis leave
Zakynthos, Jakob emerges to sunlight and slowly regains strength,
wondering whose life he has entered. Athos talks of an invisible world,
citing the serene-looking sacrificial bog bodies. Biskupin had enjoyed a
glorious culture before being inundated and abandoned two thousand
years ago. When archaeological work begins in 1937, Athos takes part.
After he leaves, the Nazis destroy the work and kill his colleagues.
After musing about the effects of rivers, winds, and currents, Athos
remarks that railroads, cutting across land, eventually serve the
Holocaust. Prisoners forced to dig up mass graves handle the gore of
lost lives and are sanctified. The dead influence the world just as
magnetic lines of force form in minerals. Jakob wonders how long the
spirit recalls the body and where in the galaxy the victims screams are,
as they move toward the Psalms.
The second chapter takes its title from a reference to forced labor
in the Golleschau stone quarries, a part of the Auschwitz-Birkenau
system of work camps. The men haul huge blocks of granite back and
forth, mindlessly. One looks to the stars and remembers beauty when all
other hope is lost. This combines with a Zohar, a book of Jewish
mysticism, to define how Jakob views the Holocaust. The Zohar says: "All
visible things will be born again invisible" (p. 48).
Jakob emphasizes that he does not see the horrors that visit European
Jewry during World War II. He endures hardships on Zakynthos and lives
in constant fear of the door being bashed in, as had happened in his
home in Poland, but most of the time he benefits from Athos's breadth
and depth of knowledge of the natural sciences. The chapter ranges over
this learning in great and colorful detail. Jakob happily learns English
and Greek because they free him of painful memories connected with
Hebrew and Yiddish. Athos encourages Jakob to retain his heritage and
enriches it with his own background as the son of generations of
seafaring Greeks and a Western-educated scholar.
The chapter describes how all of Zakynthos's Jews are saved from the
Nazis through the courage of the Christian mayor and archbishop. By
comparison, most of the Jews on nearby Corfu perish by drowning or in
concentration camps. A relative on Zakynthos gives a harrowing, if
somewhat confusing, description. Late in the chapter, Jakob paints in
wrenching, fast-paced sentences and paragraphs what he later learns
about the horror of the Holocaust, mixing specific instances of
brutality with generalized depictions of inhuman conditions. He ties in
the invention of the railroad, which ought to have been a boon to
humankind, but makes possible the systematic slaughter.
Jakob is haunted by not knowing the fate of his beloved sister,
Bella, who had been obsessed with the composer Ludwig van Beethoven's
personal habits and would clown about in disguise, but when she turns to
playing piano turns serious and precise. This establishes a musical
motif that runs through both parts of the novel. Jakob wonders about how
the dead feel about being are reborn invisible. At one point, Jakob
tells Athos about underground synagogues in Poland, a detail that seems
unlikely to be in the mind of a seven-year-old, but in describing how
the Jews of Zakynthos prepare for likely martyrdom, the elders fill the
minds of the young with minute details in order that any survivors might
revive Jewish life and customs. Relatively safe, Jakob is filled with
the lore of science and becomes interested in ancient cultures.
Rather like the aside on Bella and Beethoven, Athos tells Jakob about
Capt. Robert Scott's doomed expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Jakob
is particularly drawn to Dr. Edward Wilson's talent for painting
scientifically-accurate watercolors of the Antarctic skies. Jakob notes
that Wilson is also a poet and Canadian. This points to Jakob's career
path in emigration. Jakob notes that his nightmares also follow him to
Toronto. This becomes significant in later chapters. He always feels
that Bella is watching him.
The chapter ends with Athos talking about "remote causes" and an
invisible world like that of the serene-looking bodies that he has
excavated from bogs. They show signs of being human sacrifices. Athos
tells about ancient Biskupin culture and his work to preserve the ruins.
After the war, he learns that the Nazis had destroyed the excavations
and killed Athos's colleagues shortly after he spirited Jakob to safety.
It is the basis for Athos's belief that Jakob is responsible for saving
him, more so than vice versa. Jakob meditates on how prisoners are
forced to dig up the mass graves of early victims of Nazism as the
perpetrators seek to cover up evidence. He pictures workers forced, like
the stone carriers of Golleschau, to do the unthinkable: handle the
gory remains of the dead. It becomes a sacred vocation, taking on the
lost lives that pass through their fingers. Jakob sees the dead
influencing the world of the living by analogy to magnetic lines of
force form in minerals. The scientific description of magnetism actually
helps make sense of the mysticism. Jakob asks pointedly how long before
murder and death cease to be different categories. The entire chapter
is both harrowing and humane.
Athos takes Jakob, now thirteen, to Athens to search for information
about Bella and Aunt Ida's fate. Greece is in ruins from the war and
communists and British are fighting. They stay with Athos' old colleague
Kostas Mitsialis and his wife Daphne, the adults talking politics and
Kostas describing the various occupations. Jakob pictures events from
his childhood similar to some of the Greek anecdotes about British and
Australian soldiers singing, Germans marching, stealing, and taunting,
and Greeks blackmarketting or collapsing from hunger. Kostas tells Jakob
about the beloved poet Palamas and Sikelianos, who preaches freedom at
Palamas' funeral. Athenians are on the roof, greeting one another the
night before the Germans withdraw. They hear news of one thousand
vanished villages. There are too many dead to bury. The Americans bring
food, which the communists steal as they hunt down and kill anyone
well-off, even relatives and recent allies. The Greeks seem to catch the
virus of violence from the Germans. Jakob learns to live a normal life
from Kostas and Daphne as Athos prepares for their move to Canada.
Daphne's goodbye squeeze reminds him of his mother and Bella.
Before leaving Zakynthos, Athos performs a ceremony of remembering at
the shore, and they eat a memorial meal together. He reminds Jakob that
one's good deeds morally advance the dead and advises him to be buried
in ground that will remember him. Jakob sees plenty of birds, which
Athos says is the sign of prayers comforting the dead. For years after
the war, Jakob can do nothing hurriedly. During the last week in Greece,
Kostas takes Jakob on a tour of Athens and tells him - without details -
that Athos had been married. Helen had died in World War I. Kostas says
that Athos has left Greece many times for various purposes but now
finds it too changed to remain. As Athos is prone to depression, he will
need Jakob's help at times; he is, however, as everlasting as his
beloved limestone. Pointing out graffiti that still points to Greek
courage during the occupation, and describing the culture wars as
vernacular poetry replaces the formal. Jakob grasps the power of poetry.
Athos has had an invitation to teach at the University of Toronto
since 1938, when Griffith Taylor discovers they have much in common. Two
more members of Scott's Antarctic expedition, Frank Debenham and Silas
Wright, help persuade Athos to go to Toronto but are gone before he and
Jakob arrive. Athos crates his books and has Kostas send some to Canada
and some to the family home on Idhra Island, to be safe from earthquakes
on Zakynthos. In 1953, an earthquake does, indeed, destroy Athos's home
there along with most structures; the animals' strange behavior
forewarns islanders, so casualties are few. Luck requires heeding
warnings, says Athos, who hopes to grow to love his new landscape as he
does Zakynthos. Without this, one is an exile. The Mitsialises see them
off, exchanging gifts and well wishes. Kostas gives Jakob an anthology
of Greek poetry that plants seeds for a lifetime. Kostas remembers his
sister and friend Mones.
The third chapter is transitional, as Athos and Jakob prepare to
leave Greece for Canada. It opens with them walking across the
war-scarred Peloponnese (southern Greece), where the Nazis are said to
have destroyed some one thousand villages, leaving too many bodies to
bury. They pass Kalavrita, another instance of mass retribution against
civilians. On the heels of World War II comes civil war to Greece, with
former allies quickly falling out ideologically and murdering one
another.
The description is poetic and so lightly sketched that one can
only take away that it is tragic.
Kostas and Daphne Mitsialis are introduced, largely in order for the
adults to talk current politics and to describe life in Athens before
and after the Germans drive out the British and Australian. The latter
are clearly viewed by the locals as occupiers, but of a far more benign
type. A Greek black-marketeer who substitutes a dead dog for a lamb is
particularly striking. Americans bringing emergency food and the
communists stealing it, and stringing up former friends in arms also
provides striking imagery. Kostas wants young Jakob to understand the
workings of the world while Daphne dotes on him, helping him come out of
his shell. She reminds him of his mother and Bella. Kostas tells Jakob
confidentially that Athos is prone to depression and will need Jakob's
help at times. The menfolk discuss political acronyms and labels too
obscure for most readers to comprehend.
The point is that tragedy
follows tragedy and Athos and Jakob are again to escape it. Note how
Jakob picks up bits of details that remind him of life at home before
war tears it apart.
Athos performs secularized, personalized rituals of leaving Zakynthos
that are modified from the memorial services of the Orthodox church.
The theme of not forgetting the past, the departed, is reinforced.
Victims of the sea are offered fresh water to refresh them. There is a
rather confusing aside on the use of popular, modern Greek rather than
the formal literary language that most readers will want to gloss over.
It picks up the theme of bravery and brings Jakob to realize the power
of poetry, which becomes his professional field.
Chapter three explains how Athos comes to emigrate to Canada and
teach at the University of Toronto. The key names are tied to Scott's
Antarctic expedition, which Athos has already described at length to
young Jakob. It also introduces the island of Idhra, to which the novel
returns in Book II. The rich description of how animal behavior alerts
humans to the coming of a catastrophic earthquake allows Athos to talk
about the need to heed warnings. He flees Poland only because Jakob
flees his house, for instance.
There is a foreboding of life in exile,
close to what is described in the Psalms.
