E very family possesses a library of stories, and these narratives come in all flavours: happy, tragic, distant, comic, trauma-saturated, transcendent, cathartic, a combination of the above. Some travel ef- fortlessly across generations, accumulating meaning and conjured details with each tell- ing. Others simply aren’t interesting, or not interesting enough to be retold. What’s more, a family story is never mere- ly a rote account of events. Plotlines and points of view are imposed by the storyteller, who may also manipulate, embellish, or omit facts, the way a potter shapes a lump of clay on a wheel, working out the imperfections until the surface is smooth and presentable. In this process of oral authorship, we also misremember or forget basic facts or down- play some subplots that may hold enormous meaning to someone else. But this shaping serves a larger goal. I recently asked one of my sons how he’d categorize this narrative form: is it journalism, fiction, memoir, oral his-
esteemed Holocaust historian Christopher Browning, who, in Ordinary Men: Reserve Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Po- land, reconstructed from post-war testimony not just the actions but also the private thoughts and motivations of the soldiers in a Nazi death squad. All of this laborious work—the excavation of narrative—aims in some sense to provide future generations with an understanding of what happened and how to prevent future wartime atrocities. Needless to say, we’re better at the former than the latter. My father didn’t speak of his experien- ces, but he took specific steps that suggest to me a deep desire to not allow his own history to repeat itself with his children. He tried, for example, to teach my sister and me some basics of boxing. He enrolled me in karate, then an exotic sport, so I had the tools to defend myself. As a teenager, he had gotten into a lot of fights, and those fights, I suspect, had something to do with the toxic anti-Semitism that hung like acrid smog over Budapest in the 1930s. He wanted me to be prepared. When I was about ten, my father told me we were Jewish, and then gave me strict in- structions to not let anyone know. Although both my parents discussed the timing and nature of this revelation, my father did the telling, taking me aside on one of our family’s after-dinner walks. He provided few reference points with which to process this shard of information. The confounding detail was that we did nominally Christian things, like celebrate Christmas and search for the treats left by the Easter Bunny. Neverthe- less, I promised to keep the secret and did so for many years. Secrets, it seems to me, are like dams: they hold back the natural flow of a narra- tive and effectively prevent it from spreading into the world. But secrets also whip up a chaotic and often corrosive energy, a build- ing up of pressure as the taboo of the se- cret, trapped as it is in some dark room in our minds, seeks other outlets. For me, the secret about our Jewishness turbo-charged my curiosity about what it meant. After all, I couldn’t ignore what was left unspoken: Why did I need to keep his secret? The answer must have been one hell of a tale. A t the turn of the twentieth century, Hungary was a nation of increasing- ly stark divisions. Budapest, perhaps even
Like countless others who endured trauma during the Holocaust in particular and war in general, my father did not relate his experi- ences, and I was too young to understand why. There are all the obvious answers—the listener (me) lacked the maturity and the context to deal with the harshness of his experiences. Yet the ubiquity of the heavy silences that define the lives of so many sur- vivors and veterans—as well as perpetrators and bystanders—suggests something else, a kind of psychological or psychic outer limit, beyond which the conventional tools of nar- rative and memory and storytelling vanish into a black hole. Many storytellers have sought to defy the instinct to succumb to wordlessness. These include the archivists who have meticulous- ly recorded, compiled, and made available oral testimonies given by survivors who summoned the emotional wherewithal to share their stories. Authors like Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, and Hannah Arendt all sought,
My father, Janos Lusztig (right), circa 1935.
in their own ways, to impose narrative form onto events that seem literally too horrible for words. Filmmakers in the late 1970s and early 1980s—Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cim- ino, etc.—similarly sought to dispel the pall that hung over post-Vietnam America with movies that turned to the power of meta- phor as a way of talking about that which a scarred society couldn’t adequately put into words. I also think about someone like the
tory...? “Mythology,” he replied, the burnish that distinguishes anecdote from narrative. Family lore also resembles a Russian doll: there are stories inside other stories, as well as the faint voices of earlier, unacknow- ledged narrators who have told the stories that will then be retold, and reshaped, later on. The fact that they’ve been picked up and reshared attests to something about what makes them engrossing, to narrator and lis- tener alike.
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