Review: Quiet Americans

Quiet Americans by Erika Dreifus
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Glass breaks easily. It’s whole one moment, and then it shatters. That’s a small part of what Kristallnacht – the night of broken glass that in many ways marked the beginning of the Holocaust – represented: a breaking that could never be put together again.

Erika Dreifus’s remarkable linked collection of short stories focuses on that facet of what the Holocaust meant. In the wake of so much breakage, so many things torn into pieces, it falls to the second and third generations to make sense of the fragments that remain. None of her characters navigate any part of the 60 years after World War II without bearing its scars, and none can really ignore its shadow.

One of the many subtle insights here is that the legacy of the Holocaust seems to grow over generations. Only one of these stories is set during the War and the immediacy of the staggering disaster has a different feel than the later ones. That story, “For Services Rendered,” may well be the strongest in this uniformly strong collection. It tells the story of a German pediatrician who, because he has cared for Goering’s daughter, is able to escape the world that consumes almost everyone else he knew. After the war, after the Nuremberg trials, he confronts the difficult question: while Goering’s widow was a princess of the Reich and benefited from its evils, she also saved his and his family’s life. She is of evil on a staggering scale, but she is also a person, a woman who showed him a necessary mercy, and he has to decide whether to intervene in her trial.

Most of the remaining stories turn out to be linked, tracing a broken family as it acculturates to American life. There’s a generation of refugees, a generation of their children who have to care for aging parents afraid to go back for visits to a Europe that is eerily familiar, and a generation after them who slide easily into upper-middle-class careers but still find themselves haunted by a past they cannot really know. (The final story, “Mispocha,” does a particularly careful job of that, giving us a middle-aged man who uses the new tool of DNA analysis to uncover a mystery his survivor parents never revealed to him.)

What’s striking in the linkedness – and, unless I am missing a subtle connection, the middle six are connected while the first and last are not – is that the running together of generational perspective is part of the real power here. We see multiple generations experience the challenge of watching parents age and feel children supplant them. Even as the decades pass, though, the Holocaust brings about new challenges, new reminders that they are the heirs of a broken past they cannot hope to repair.

In “Lebensraum,” the second earliest chronological story here, a refugee finds himself working in the middle of Iowa. He’s the only Jew for hundreds of miles, and, in his role as director of a prisoner-of-war camp kitchen, he comes to supervise prisoners who wore Nazi uniforms. It’s a balance for him, remembering his lost family and imagining a future for his new child, but it’s also a promise that American has given him enough “room to live,” enough space to shape a new life separate from but inflected by the old.

In “Homecomings” and “The Quiet American” – two stories that particularly talk to each other – we see women of different generations return to Europe to try to make sense of how their private and global worlds have changed. In the first, the protagonist has the bad timing to arrive in Germany during the 1972 Olympic massacre, a visceral reminder that hatred and fear of Jews persists. In the second, a young woman is troubled to find a tour guide who talks more sadly of the loss of German infrastructure than of the murdered millions. The two stories make a powerful diptych: the same experience mediated by characters from different eras but delivered with Dreifus’s particular skill and supple voice.

That generational conversation may be clearest of all in “Floating” when a woman worries over possible complications in her daughter’s pregnancy. At the same time, she recalls her own, recalls the innocence of “floating” in joy and, perhaps, naivete. The irony seems to be that, in a potentially more dangerous time, she survived without being fully aware of the dangers. Today, her daughter and potential grandchild have more access to life-saving technology but also more awareness of all that could go wrong.

It’s surprising as you read this – and I hope ‘you’ will – how easily and quickly it goes. Each story is powerful on its own terms, and yet they align with one another in powerful ways too. The effect is that this reads in some ways like a novel but with between-story opportunities to take a quick breath.

I happen to be friends with Erika, but the disclaimer seems unimportant because I got to know her as a result of reading her work. She is a serious talent, and this book deserves a wide and appreciative audience.


View all my reviews