Luckily, I shared this particular if troubled passion with another family member: my cousin Kirsten. If there was one person to whom I could pass along a book about Josef Mengele’s twin experiments and not get a look of sickened dismay in return, it was Kirsten, the daughter of my mother’s only sister. Though she lived across the country, she and I had more in common than I did with most of my brothers. Over time, the four-year age gap between us collapsed, and she went from being my little cousin to the sister I’d always yearned for.
I considered it my personal mission to rescue Kirsten from the crystal meth–strewn cultural wasteland of her Colorado Springs high school. That summer, I begged my aunt to allow Kirsten to join me on a six-week Eurail tour of Europe. “I think she needs it,” I said obliquely. To our shock, she consented. I brought along the books and the deal was I’d pass each one afterward to Kirsten, who also was the only person on the planet—how I loved her for this!—who read everything I asked her to read. Not only that, she read it immediately and remarkably fast, polishing off in a day what took me a week. That very summer when she got home to Colorado, she started a Book of Books of her own; the growth of her tally was swift. (Years later, when I wrote about Bob in the Times, she e-mailed at once: “So that’s where I got the idea!”)
Kirsten alone understood that I had to make a brief stop at Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s getaway in southern Germany, on my way to meet up with her in Vienna. But Berchtesgaden had been turned into a restaurant and tourist destination, dulling the anticipated impact. Luckily, Kirsten and I had further plans. In Vienna, we met at the airport, and after a week of eating strudel in Viennese cafés, the two of us embarked on a much-anticipated tour of anti-Semitic Europe, heading first to Budapest and then to the Hungarian hinterland; the more wretched the history the more eager we were to check it out. We gave each other nicknames, Krakow Kirsten and Potsdam Pam, and decided to spend the majority of the trip speaking in heavy Borscht Belt accents. We were excited to hit all the major former ghettos of Eastern Europe.
Kirsten had been to Dachau as a young child, when her father was stationed at an air force base in Germany, but her memories of the experience were sketchy. We plotted our trip carefully, taking two days’ worth of trains to get from Eger, the second-largest city in Hungary, to our final destination: Auschwitz. We’d always wanted to go.
En route, we were awakened repeatedly, first by Hungarian border guards, then by Czechs, and finally by Poles, each demanding various documents and, maddeningly, a ticket supplement that we didn’t have and couldn’t possibly obtain at this stage. In an effort to divert attention from the missing ticket, Kirsten and I took to photographing each official who entered our car. The officials, men in their early twenties with pasty Eastern European complexions, wrapped their arms around our shoulders as they blushingly posed for each shot, occasionally kissing our cheeks with shy enthusiasm. We made it to Krakow without paying the supplementary fare.
Upon arrival at O?wi?cim, just outside Krakow, a throng of guides descended on us with signs meant to entice: “Come to Auschwitz! Lunch and Birkenau included. Good morning!” Freaked out to see our gruesome interest thrown back in our faces so crassly, we rushed past them and took a local train, walking through a small town and then a field to get to the former death camp, asking people along the way, “Can you tell us how to get to Auschwitz?” Posing the question aloud to strangers sounded terribly wrong. There was no good way to translate with hand gestures to the uncomprehending locals.
We had planned to spend the entire day at Auschwitz. I’d thought reading books prepared me for anything. But what I had experienced as a kind of literary rubbernecking, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I, read from the safety of the Long Island Rail Road, affected me in a profoundly different way when I actually encountered the cavernous furnaces of Auschwitz. Within moments, Kirsten and I lost our sense of humor and the ironic remove. We stopped making fun of the kitschy guides and the absence of food stalls and the unnerving fact that we had chosen to be there. We found ourselves silenced by the immense oven doors, the glass-walled rooms filled with forever-lost eyeglasses and decaying leather shoes. Without the protection of a book cover, we had no way to distance ourselves from the implications.
“Do you want to leave?” I asked Kirsten when we walked out of a chamber we’d realized was a room-size oven.
“Yes,” she said immediately.
Afterward, subdued and haunted, we headed to Berlin. That summer, a street parade of disaffected youth was all the rage. Massive floats and loud music crashed their way down the main thoroughfare. Instead of celebratory punks and drunken teenagers, we saw neo-Nazis and just plain Nazis. It was as if Auschwitz had spilled out the contents of the books we’d read and forced us to examine how they fit into the real world. We checked in at a few art museums but avoided the one dedicated to the war. Then we took off for Denmark and spent a drunken night at Tivoli on the park’s giant roller coaster, trying to shake it off. It would be ten years before I went back to Germany.
CHAPTER 7
The Grapes of Wrath
Among Readers
It’s the spring of 1992, and I’m sitting at a massive dining room table piled with obscure meats and homemade paté and torn baguettes and overflowing ashtrays and a bunch of French people. The children are sitting with the adults rather than shunted off to a kiddie table, the way it’s done at home. Extremely French authors like Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano are the subjects of animated conversation. Teenagers are allowed to talk, and the adults listen to them. It is a revelation.
So there were people who talked about books and ideas at dinnertime, quoting and debating and rhapsodizing—and it turned out they were in Paris. There were parents who recommended books to their children and discussed them together afterward. Students who read even when their grades didn’t depend on it. Teenagers who could assume their friends also read—for fun, and not just “fun” reading. After a childhood of dinners at which people fought over how much broccoli they had to eat, sat in dogged silence, or monologued through their day’s schedule, I entered this new dining landscape at age twenty. Never mind that they were eating stewed bunny rabbits; I felt at home.
And though my French wasn’t the best, I very much wanted to be a part of it. When the talk at the dinner table turned to Steinbeck, I decided to muster my way into the conversation. This was American literature, after all, and they had a bona fide American on hand. Everyone would be dying to hear what I had to say. Bursting with collegiate ardor, I waited for an appropriate lull before making my contribution.
“Les prunes de la fureur!” I broke out excitedly.
There was silence. A neat oval of blank French facial expressions gaped at me.
“Les quois?” someone finally asked.
“Les prunes de la fureur?” I repeated, a smidge less sure.
“Les quois de la fureur?” Slowly.