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Preface

Nancy Gerber’s What the Living Remember tells the story of an adolescent boy in a city resembling Berlin facing the “end of the world.” Karl, who turns 14 in the course of this novella, is living in 1930s Germany. He is tested and tormented by bullies at school who are learning to despise him. His mother suffers, sensing the danger growing for Jews, even those like this family who consider themselves more Germans than Jews. His father is a doctor whose Christian patients cut their ties to him due to the race laws enacted after Hitler becomes Chancellor, Führer.

The end of the world as Karl knows it opens on a scene of Karl seeing the red, white and black banners outside the windows of his family’s home, “blood-red with a white-hot center…and a black cross on its side with four angled legs.” Gerber leads readers to inhabit the daily and the dreadful, and how it tears at and begins to scar this family, their friendships, their work and emotional lives. What the Living Remember narrates coming of age at a time of palpable fear, making scapegoats of those deemed different, and therefore, not fit to live among those making the new laws of this country where citizens and neighbors are rendered contaminated strangers.

For Karl the end of the world is also marked by finding and losing his first love on a visit to family in the country. The end of the world is sounded because his father thinks Karl’s drawing and painting is unmanly. The end of the world comes in overhearing his parents argue about his father’s affair with a woman at his office. The end of the world looms when his best friend’s parents are among those who read the signs—and they are increasingly everywhere—and move their family to Amsterdam well before Kristallnacht.

The end of the world becomes yet more real for Karl in the move to New York, to a growing immigrant community of German Jews exiled, banished, fleeing, taking refuge in a new language, new country, with new names and a new self he has yet to become as this novella opens onto his future. Gerber’s telling is moving and masterful, offering insights grasped by this writer in our present who deciphers the sense of a past she has never lived.

FRANCES BARTKOWSKI

Rutgers University-Newark

Author, An Afterlife