Trying to go home again

Walter Abish prefaces “Double Vision,” his crystalline yet oblique new memoir, with a citation from Paul Zweig that serves as a kind of challenge to the writer and the reader alike. Language, according to Zweig, is the most versatile form of deception: “I lie and am lied to, but the result of my lie is mental leaps, memory, knowledge. Portions of the world are caught in my psychic net. I become human, and increasingly more human, because the acrobatic gift of my lie turns into a truth of another sort.”

The mental leaps of memory, the acrobatic gift of the lie that leads to the hidden truth: It seems impossible, with so many memoirs under our collective reading-and-writing belt, to set off on a backward-glancing journey without first acknowledging the enormous slipperiness of the path. Beware, or be aware, Abish says through this epigraph: Memory tricks, language deceives, narrative seduces with its yearning for wholeness. The head wants to rest and the heart wants peace, and the pen is ever ready to oblige with both.

Not, fortunately, Abish’s pen. The man whose most notable work of fiction, “How German Is It,” is a postmodern thriller that sought to capture the character of a country the author had never visited, is scarcely going to retrace the dramatic upheavals of his life in such a way as to offer experience predigested. Nor is “Double Vision” a thesis; as the title suggests, it does not even present a single arcing life story; instead it is a patchwork of past and present, or near present, sometimes integrated, as often not. Abish gives us pieces of the writer-to-be alternating with pieces of the writer who is and for the most part leaves us to draw whatever conclusions we will, or won’t. He does not so much introspect as perceive. His story is full of gaps and omissions. He is unafraid of ambiguity, yet willing to judge. What he puts down is almost always of interest.

Abish, like W.G. Sebald, is another of the 20th century’s displaced men for whom place becomes an abiding concern. If “another” seems to imply that the story is familiar, it is only because a Jewish boy born into 1930s Vienna who is able to tell his tale has three plausible fates: He survives the camps, he lives in hiding, or he flees. Abish and his parents fled -- but not before Vienna marked him in its pre- and post-lapsarian states.

This is Abish’s 12th sentence: “Is there no freedom at all from the family?” This is his first: “That’s why things happened the way they did.” Between and for pages afterward there is an uncomfortable, yet touchable and tasteable, Viennese beginning. Abish, an only child, was born into an assimilated bourgeois household ruled by manners, schedules, meals and emotional distance. The rules, he sees now, trained him in “obduracy to wage war on the impediments, such as the blank pages, I was to face years later.”

His parents had an uneasy relationship with their Jewishness. His mother, “like many middle-class Austrian and German Jews, may have felt threatened by a likeness or history that was too proximate for comfort.” His father was marginally closer to his roots; he attended synagogue, he led a Seder, yet the day after Kristallnacht he was back at the office, shipping packages of perfume. When the Nazis came, the Abishes avoided the tightening noose by slipping out from it. “Overnight my familiar world was defamiliarized,” Abish writes. “Could this be the origin of my fascination with the quotidian -- the familiar everyday world?”

Abish attends to the quotidian wherever fate carries him, and it carries him far. Indeed, “Double Vision” can be described as the everyday world -- many everyday worlds -- curated by an expert seer. There is something museological about Abish’s writing: He chooses his moments and elegantly installs them behind vitrines constructed of words. Behind one door: Vienna. Behind the next: Nice, France, where Abish’s father was briefly interned in the camp at Les Milles. After that: Shanghai, where European Jews, cast up in that most displacing of places, created there -- and particularly in the Hongkew district, where in 1943 Jews were confined by invading Japanese -- a mini-Vienna or Berlin, with coffeehouses, schools, lending libraries, bridge clubs, soccer matches, concerts. Peking duck mit schlag: It is like a dream, yet it was an actual time into which, after a spate of terrible bombing, the triumphant Americans came and “with one magic stroke” erased the European past.

From China, Abish went to Israel (where his story is at its most diffuse) and after that, more by implication or aside than explicit revelation of how or when, he ended up in America.

This is the sum total of the writer’s forward-moving journey, but in interleaved chapters there is a sideways-moving one too, as he makes his first return visit to Vienna and his first of several visits to Germany. A double vision for a doubled (young, then older) man.

In Vienna, Abish is ever the curator, seeking the right details and holding them up for our consideration. When he reports that after the war the trickle of returning Viennese Jews was referred to as Gasofen Tachinierer, or gas-oven shirkers, a whole worldview -- shirkers? -- constellates in two words. When he sets out to visit his childhood home, he remains authentic, unsentimental: Despite his admiration for Proust (in his first collection of stories Abish imagined the writer living in Albuquerque), no flood of Proustian memory starts flowing -- it is just a house. Yet in this city of “misleading intimacy” he is enticed by the language; with its “inviting lilt, it is a double language, in which most of which is being said cannot -- must not! -- be taken for granted.” Everything in Vienna, he adds, “retains an odd mix of humor and understatement.... One could almost say I felt at home.”

That “one” and that “almost” are typical of Abish’s tentative, self-aware writing -- he reaches conclusions gently, honestly, with an appropriate chaser of doubt. Germany, on the other hand, brings out the more decisive in him, though even here he is careful to check and recheck his impressions. “Is there anyone outside of Germany who doesn’t hold a decided view of Germanness?” he wonders early on. Certainly not this man, who wrote a novel speculating on just what Germanness might be, a book whose controversial reception took on a life well beyond the one that unfolded in Abish’s imagination.

Of “How German Is It,” he says, “My intention ... was to present an equivocal yet neutral text to which the reader would convey his own emotional Germany.” One insulted German reader called the resulting book “the Jew’s revenge.” This is not at all what Abish meant, though he is not unaware of the complexity of his motivations: “What was it about Germany? Why am I so prepared to identify self-discipline, stoicism, law-abiding people, even a decided lack of humor and a certain insensitivity, as overwhelmingly German? We proceed,” he concedes, “by stereotyping.”

It is often said that stereotypes get to be that way for a reason, but this should not excuse them from critical assessment. Although Abish dutifully reports in “Double Vision” that, in Germany, he comes across a journalist who openly admits her father was a Nazi and absolutely contemptible (“Wasn’t this what I had all along expected to hear?”), the balance of his seeing and his listening gives him a rather different impression.

He collects wartime journals and diaries and is surprised by the scant mention made in them of the fate of Jews. He becomes aware of the idea of the “usable past,” (a darker riff on Henry James’ “visitable past”) being played out in the memorial he stumbles on in the Bendlerstrasse that celebrates Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow officers, who were executed there after their failed attempt to assassinate Hitler. As ever, the quotidian draws his sharpest attention: A bus driver glares furiously at Abish when he positions his ticket incorrectly (“What German lesson was being communicated?”); the driver of a car admonishes him when he jaywalks; in Cologne, he studies the jewelry in the window of an antiques shop and asks himself whether it once belonged to his people.

Everywhere he goes he registers all kinds of screwy ideas about the Jews. A woman he meets at a party believes that Jews invariably smile whenever they touch upon their misfortune. Someone else finds it inconceivable that a German Jewish working class ever existed. A particularly emboldened man says to him, “Must we still feel guilt? Hasn’t the time come when we are able to speak our minds?” To all this Abish has the only viable response: “Though anti-Semitic rhetoric has become stagnant from mindless reuse, to employ it, however playfully, [is] to reinvigorate it.”

Jews, many of whom before the war deluded themselves into believing they were an integral part of German life and culture are now, 60 years after the war’s end, retreating into “diffuse and attenuated memory”; in the country they believed to be theirs, they are curiosities, oddities. Sketches -- cartoons. But in Walter Abish’s double-visioned museum it is the Germans, not the Jews, who come across as truly curious: They may speak their minds, certainly, but Abish will capture them doing so, and with no anger but considerable rectitude he will take them fully to task.