Chaps 4-7
Outline
• History Reconstructed
• The City and its Landscape
• The Gradual Instant: the Community Built
• The Lovers: Alex and Michaela
Discussion Questions:
1) What kind of histories get reconstructed by
Athos and Jakob respectively?
2) How is the city of Toronto presented? In
what ways is it connected to Jakob’s or its
city dwellers’, trauma?
3) What kind of community is built by Athos
and Jakob?
4) How does Alex and Michaela differ from
each other?
History Reconstructed
History & Memory
• Athos and Jakob in Toronto: “The facts of the war
began to reach us.”  nightmares  face. Fact.
Hands (92-93)
• Athos: works on Bearing False Witness, keeps
letters for Helen, and writes letters to search for
Bella
• Jakob: Tries to bury images with new language,
A’s stories, and facts, but Bella, et al, come back
at night.
[chap 5-7: recurrent memories of Bella, details of
Jewish experience of oppression & of Toronto
• The Past – “nothing erases the immoral act.”
(161)
• Resurrection or life in the underworld
History & Memory
• “History is amoral: events occurred. But
memory is moral; what we consciously
remember is what our conscience
remembers.”
• History and memory share events; that is,
they share time and space. (138) – What
does this mean? Next slide
(139)—
problems in
their marriage
Every moment is two moments.
• Envisioning the details: 138, I think of the scholars of
Lublin,…I think of the Lodz ghetto
• Preoccupation with the past:140, Alex's hairbrush
propped on the sink: Bella's brush. Alex's bobby pins:
Bella's hairclips turning up in strange places,
• Envisioning lives in the underworld: 143, In 1942,
while Jews were crammed into the earth then
covered with a dusting of soil, men crawled into the
startled darkness of Lascaux. Animals woke from
their sleep underground. Twenty-six feet below they
burst to life in lamplight: the swimming deer, floating
horses, rhinos
Every moment is two moments.
• Jews’ experience 147; unfinished lives
• Parables: The story of Zdena and Bettina; the story of
the rabbi
• The un-eradicable: 161 “History is the poisoned well,
seeping into the groundwater. …Destruction doesn't
create a vacuum, it simply transforms presence into
absence. …In the rabbi's universe, in Einstein's
universe, the man will remain forever on the train,
familiar with humiliation but not humiliated, … The
bond of memory and history when they share space
and time. Every moment is two moments.
Jakob’s Growing Awareness
• Jakob realizes that to honor Athos and
Bella he must “resolve a perpetual thirst”
(121 End of The Way Station)
• “To remain with the dead is to abandon
them” (End of Terri Nullius 170)
Toronto: The City and its Landscape
Toronto: A City of Immigrants
nostalgic migrants
“a city of forsaken worlds; language a kind of
farewell.” (89)
Toronto and Athos
• Toronto cross-sectioned by Athos:
• Freedom and escapes to ideal landscape: they dive
into the past; go to “Silas Wright’s old house”
• On Sunday walks through Toronto's ravines, Athos
points out 150 million years of prehistory.
• Experience of the primitive and silence: In the first
thunderstorm of spring, Jakob sees boys blowing on
grass to produce loud squawks.
• Imagining the aborigines  traumatic memory:
Iroquois fortress camp (105) sympathy?  Jakob’s
nightmare: about the Nazis invading his home and
Bella's magnificent hair
Jakob in Toronto: Athos’ influences
• They live away from the Greek community
• Feels grief when seeing the Jewish market (101)
• Hope of Transformation and Re-generation: “Athos's
backward glance gave me a backward hope.
Redemption through cataclysm; what had once been
transformed might be transformed again.” (101)
• Connections with Toronto: Athos explained that the
Laurentian People were contemporaries of the
inhabitants of Biskupin.
• Attached to Athos: works on his book while sleeping on
the floor “I felt Athos's presence so strongly I could smell
his pipe, I could feel his hand on my shoulder.” (119)
• “make love necessary”
Jakob in Toronto: Constructing his Urban
Community
• Every evening Athos plunges into his study, and Jakob
into the night, they are in the same convulsion of time
(110) Jakob fills the industrial forms with his loneliness
(111).
• The beginning of a community: Walking one summer
evening, Jakob hears overhead melodies that his mother
always sang while brushing Bella's hair and he joins in,
only to find “a huge invisible audience”: “A forest of eyes,
of Italian and Portuguese and Greek ears; whole families
sitting silently on lawnchairs and front steps” (109).
• “There was nothing for it but to raise my foreign song
and feel understood” (110)
Jakob: Returns to the Past through Poetry
• As a poet about his language: from puns to poetry 100
• So I lived a breath apart [from Bella & the past], a touchtypist who holds his hands above the keys slightly in the
wrong place, the words coming out meaningless,
• in poems I returned to Biskupin, to the house on
Zakynthos, to the forest, to the river, to the burst door, to
the minutes in the wall. (111)
• English was a sonar, a microscope, through which I
listened and observed, waiting to capture elusive
meanings buried (112)
• As a translator: The poet moves from life to language, the
translator moves from language to life; both, like the
immigrant, try to identify the invisible,”
Affective Landscape
• It's no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the
world… It is no metaphor to witness the astonishing
fidelity of minerals magnetized, even after hundreds of
millions of years, pointing to the magnetic pole, minerals
that have never forgotten magma whose cooling off has
left them forever desirous. We long for place; but place
itself longs. Human memory is encoded in air currents
and river sediment. (53)
Jakob: Explores Toronto with Micheala
• Affect City: 183-84 Jakob – color yellow 184; crosses
the boundary and goes into M’s childhood
• “Across the city, across a hundred milky back yards,
Michaela is sleeping. …The serenity of a winter bedroom;
the street quiet except for a shovel scraping the sidewalk,
a sound that seems to gather silence around it. The first
morning I woke to Michaela - my head on the small of
her back, her heels like two islands under the blanket - I
knew that this was my first experience of the colour
yellow.”
Toronto in Connections with Other Cities
• the Heathside Gardens apartments, which seem
luxurious after Zakynthos.
• Family and Athos: Jakob thinks of Father’s arriving at
Warsaw; Athens, Idhra in Greece
• With history of the Jews, Lublin (138) Lodz ghetto(138),
Biskupin in Poland
• Stories of lovers: Salonika (183 Greece), Kiev (178 in
Russia)
• Ref. http://www.theholocaustexplained.org/ks3/thecamps/what-are-camps/where-were-the-first-camps-setup/#.VSwF5dgcQV0
The Community built by Athos & Jakob
Explorers & Immigrants
•
•
The Taylors – lovers, with stories about Antarctica
Donald Tupper (97) – geologist, living on Scarborough
bluffs and can drive into a ditch
• Constantine (96-) at Poros, was reading Goethe's Faust,
in Greek, between sales
• Joseph, the man who came once to fix [their] stove,
painted portraits in his spare time, (96)
• Maurice Salman 112 -- Yosha and Tomas
Alex vs. Michaela
Alex vs. Micheala
• Alex’s father’s influence
(glories of the war)
• The political liberals in
the 60’s
• (144-) Alex vs. Athos
(explode replace piece by
piece)
• When Alex turns on lights,
Jakob's memories and
stories slip away.(143)
• Alex leaving (148) -• Memories of the parents’
departure (148-49)
• Michaela, family stories &
sympathy –
• her stories of her
ancestors[179; ”Micha
ela offers her
ancestors to me. I'm
shocked at my hunger
for her memories.” ];
• crying for Bella 182;
Jakob, recognized
• Communication of the
Bodies: (181)
Alex vs. Micheala
• Dream: When Bella disappears, the dream turns
nightmarish and Jakob feels wrong about being married
to Alex and living in a foreign land. He feels as though he
has disappeared and Bella is searching for him.