Aftershocks: Seven Stories

by Grete Weil, John S. Barrett (Translator)

Weil’s poetic, surprising book (written in 1992, translated in 2008) conceives of those who escaped the Holocaust with their lives as covert survivors, subject always to the devastating ripples of pain and memory that irradiate the rest of their lives. Whether remaining in Germany or elsewhere in Europe, or building new lives in America, Weil’s characters cannot fit into the real world because of the experiences in the unreal world from which they came. Weil, who lived in Munich and died in 1996 at 93, seems to conceive of herself as a pseudo-survivor, never having seen the inside of a concentration camp, though her husband died there in 1941. Guilt permeates these stories, guilt and a sense of perpetual shock at the ability of a life to go on, perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the final story in the collection, “And I? A Witness to Pain.” Here, Weil writes nakedly about her own survival, wondering, “Maybe I’ve remained alive simply because I didn’t witness enough.”
( Review by Carolyn Slutsky, Jewish Book Council)

Genres: Holocaust, Literature

113 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 1992

About the author

Grete Weil was born in Munich in 1906, the daughter of a Jewish lawyer. When the Nazis came to power, she emigrated to Holland with her husband, the playwright and director Edgar Weil. In 1941, Edgar was arrested; he later died in a concentration camp. Grete went into hiding, and it was then that she began to write, first theater pieces, then fiction. After the war, she returned to Germany, and eventually settled near her native Munich, where she lived from 1947 until her death, at age 93, in 1996. She was the author of five novels, a memoir, and several collections of short fiction. The German original of Aftershocks was first published in Zurich in 1992.

Reviews

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Grete Weil survived the Holocaust by hiding in Amsterdam, though her husband was killed in the Mauthausen concentration camp. That would probably really mess a person up.



(Photo courtesy PBS.org)

Grete's stories here are all about survivors of the war, many of whom have moved to the US, all of whom are struggling to deal with their memories, guilt, and fear. These are short stories, a few stories of which are actually a page and a half long. But all of the stories are complete, and the reader can sense a past in every one of them. I don't know that much about Grete Weil other than she was a survivor and that she was a writer. She knew early on, according to the Intro, that she wanted to be a writer, but it wasn't until after the war that she realized just how important writing was, and how important the Holocaust would be to her writing. What she reminds readers of with this collection is that the war may be over, and the Holocaust may be over, but to many survivors, neither actually ever really ended.

Pretty powerful stuff, highly recommended. If you can find a copy. As usual the really important things are hard to come by.

[Ronald Morton · Rating 5 out of 5]

[…]there’s nothing in our lives nowadays that couldn’t be considered an aftershock.

Wow. What a fucking book.

So, quickly – as, based on how many reviews and rating there are of Weil’s works you’ve likely never heard of her – let me give you the quick (abridged) Wikipedia version of her life:

Grete Weil (18 July 1906-14 May 1999) was a German writer of Jewish origin. […] In 1932, she married Edgar Weil, a playwright at the Munich Kammerspiele. […] In 1935 she followed her husband to Amsterdam, where she operated a photo studio. In June 1941, the year following the occupation of the Netherlands by the Nazis, Edgar was arrested and soon transferred to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was killed, within just a few months of his arrest. Grete went into hiding and survived the Holocaust. She eventually returned to Germany in 1947. […] In 1960, Weil married her longtime friend, the opera director Walter Jockisch, with whom she had been together since her return to Germany. After Jockisch's death, in 1970, Weil increasingly turned to her writing. […] Weil is one of the major proponents of Holocaust literature.

Got it? Good.

Aftershocks: Seven Stories, as its title kind of gives away, is composed of seven short stories. With the exception of one, they are all quite brief (the book itself is only 113 pages long). And yet, through them, Weil manages to explore many of the “aftershocks” felt by the survivors of the holocaust. The book opens, relevantly, with a quote from another Weil book:

They who have gotten away with their lives are doomed

and the stories here manage to cover a variety of survivor responses – with at least two appearing to be almost strictly autobiographical based on certain details utilized in the stories: you have a man who is now living in New York, refusing to speak German, or in any way acknowledge his German heritage. Prior to the war he was a proponent of the arts, and yet now finds himself unable to recognize the beauty of anything created after 1933. You have a couple living in the middle of a desert in California, unwilling to hear any details of what happened to their families, clearly living in denial, slightly insane, ailing, yet insisting how wonderful it is in America. Unsurprisingly there’s a suicide. Surprisingly there is only the one.

There is a great deal of nuance in Weil’s writing – little here is presented as black and white, and Weil doesn’t appear interested in providing easy answers – in the most nuanced, and best, piece of the collection, “ Finish What You Started”, a woman thinks she recognizes her tour guide (at a Mexican ruin) as a former Auschwitz guard. And yet, even in this, Weil manages to deftly subvert the expectations of her readers and cloud the story in overwhelming gray in its final third. I like that she doesn’t try to provide easy answers – there are few in most things, the holocaust especially – but instead is content to let her explorations speak for themselves. They speak loudly.

None of it feels cloying, or sentimental. It all feels open and honest and raw and affecting. Highly recommended.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant short collection of short stories. I've read a lot of Holocaust literature, yet still this hit me in some new spots. Weil's perspective is fresh, different. There's a directness to her style that makes the surreal or dreamlike, when it bursts through and overtakes the narrative, even more overwhelming and strange. I'm sure I'll return to this collection, and I'm happy I ordered, at the same time, her first novel.

[Akshay Seetharam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seven vignettes that seem like they were plucked straight out of reality
"House in the Desert" was my favorite, very cool blend of surrealism with the description of Los Angeles blending into her relatives' home
The short ones were very affecting, as was the one about the girl in the Seine
My one complaint is that the one in Mexico was a little rambly, but W.'s monologue sort of makes up for it

[Godine Publisher & Black Sparrow Press · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In her desire to bear witness to the Holocaust...Weil wisely doesn't attempt to show us what it is like to be a victim or a murderer; [she:] shows us what it is to be a bystander. And, as she delicately suggests, we are all bystanders to something."
– Adam Kirsch, The Boston Phoenix

"Through spare, poignant vignettes, Weil appeals to our historical conscience and our shared sense of the pain of the Holocaust. [She:] enables us to inhabit her characters' world...with the emotional force of a visit to a concentration camp."
– The Review of Contemporary Fiction

[Marian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good, in an uneven way, but intelligent personal stories of Holocaust survivors.