The Emigrants

Sebald's book consists of four long narrative lives of Europeans, living in exile to some degree, before or after the Second World War. It seems the most straightforward thing imaginable, but it isn't.Each section is like a lingering film camera shot of an innocent family photo. The lens slowly pulls back to reveal slight discoloration of the edges, then the charred page of a photo album, then only at the very end of the view the ruins of the house that held it, the rubble of the city around it.Sebald blends fiction, memory and history. He weaves pictures and words. He researched his novels by visiting war archives and sifting through piles of postcards, maps, photos and magazine pictures. Some of them end up in his books, but infused with his artist's imagination.This is what Truman Capote might have written, if he had been a brilliant and sublime novelist instead of a journalistic raconteur.I'm tempted to omit the fact that this is a book "about" the Holocaust, for fear that people who were assigned to read Eli Weisel in high school will politely click the page on me and think, "OK, well, I know what that's like."The Holocaust in this book is a negative space, a hole into which things go and never come out. If it is mentioned by name at all, it is only once or twice. It's like the silent, immense black hole that astronomers find in the middle of the Milky Way. The bright stars we watch at night pinwheel around it.The novel shows how people warp under the weight of their inherited identity, which is something modern Americans and Germans share.Critics compared Sebald to Ingmar Bergman, Kafka and Proust. But "The Emigrants' " true antecedents are in works just beginning to emerge from the bargain bin of history _ works long obscure, but now with suddenly snowballing reputations, such as Stendhal's unfinished autobiographical "Life of Henri Brulard" or Ezra Pound's "Cantos," which pull history like taffy through poetry.The evocation of memory throughout the book recalls Stendhal's image, in trying to recall his own childhood, of ancient frescos in ruins. Here's an arm, precisely and vividly painted on plaster. And next to it is bare brick. Whatever it once attached to is gone beyond recall.For Stendhal, a 19th century French writer, Napoleon and his career were a brilliant meteor that blazed, never forgotten, never fully understood. The Holocaust fills this space in Sebald. Pure light and pure darnkess blind alike. They make you lose sight of things.

"The Emigrants" is a fictional account of four men, and, more importantly, their journey through space and time and the effects of memory on their lives. Although I read this book in German in 1992, as "Die Ausgewanderten," I only recently read Michael Hulse's brilliant and luminous translation into English. In my opinion, the English work retains the originality, the tragedy, the delicacy and the ephemeral qualities of the original...qualities so perfect for the subject matter.Although the four subjects of "The Emigrants" are not known to one another, they are related in that each explores the significance of living his life in a land that is not his own. Their stories dramatize, through the memories of each of the four emigrants, the relationship between historical accuracy and memory, a relationship that cannot be denied.The first section belongs to the retired Dr. Henry Selwyn. Ourwardly, Dr. Selwyn is an elderly Englishman and devoted gardener, but, as with all of Sebald's books, things are not what they might, at first, seem to be. Dr. Selwyn, our narrator learns, is not really English, by birth or by ethnicity. He is, instead, a man who has become quite homesick, and home turns out to be, not surprisingly, a small village in Lithuania that Selwyn has not seen since the date of his departure in 1899.The second section belongs to Paul Bereyter, a man whose suicide comes to interest the narrator since Paul Bereyter had been the narrator's favorite school teacher in his childhood Germany. The narrator finds, that although he thought he knew Bereyter, he really knew very little about him. And, more interestingly, he finds that Bereyter, for so many years, really didn't know himself. When Bereyter finally finds out who he really is, the truth of the revelation is something he cannot face.Perhaps the most playful section belongs to Ambros Adelwarth, the long-dead great-uncle of the narrator. Adelwarth is the only one of the four emigrants who fled to the United States, becoming a butler for an ultra-wealthy Jewish family on Long Island. When Ambros becomes the valet and lover of polo-playing Cosmo Solomon, however, he returns to Europe where the narrator traces him from Deauville to Constantinople to Jerusalem. In a lovely dream sequence, the narrator himself, returns to Deauville and the dinner party of the Prince de Guermantes. There, among the assembled aristocrats, are Ambros and Cosmo, sharing a romantic lobster dinner.The fourth narrative, however, may be the very best. It belongs to one Max Ferber, a Manchester artist, who, in 1939, at the age of 15, was sent by his parents from his native Germany to live in England. Memory plays an important part in Ferber's life as well, and he spends much time studying a book on Tiepolo and the Wurzburg frescoes so that he may more fully recall the summer of 1936, unpleasant as his memories of that summer are.At the heart of this book, of course, lies the Holocaust, something Sebald's ch

WG Sebald continues to show us that his gifts as a writer are not only unique but are consistently fine. Having read all of his translated books I find that I never offered my thoughts about "The Emigrants" on this platform. Perhaps that is because after reading this powerful little tome I was speechless, or in awe, or felt inadequate to the task of commenting on a masterpiece. Having just read "Austerlitz" I returned to the Emigrants to see if all the promise of what his latest book brings was present in his first translated volume. Without hesitation ........... it is. The Emigrants weaves the lives of four people who wander the terrain of postwar world in search of discovering their true past in that nightmare of history they have survived. Sebald is eloquent in his use of language, spare in his style of writing, and wholly individual in his method of presenting not ony the word but related photographs to mimic the melange of fragments that piece together to form our histories.He is simply one of the literary treasures of our day.