Psalm 44

One of the ways to diagnose the greatness of a literary work is to identify the moments or details that stop you in your tracks and demand to be thought through, forcing you to adjust your readerly expectations. Those are the moments that might make the work difficult, necessarily countering the page-turning consumerist instincts. Great works effectively train you how to read them, generating a thought process that might well extend beyond reading the book. Psalm 44, slight though it may be, is rife with such mind-stopping instances. Take Maks, the übersurvivor, the genocide superhero, “a devilishly clever fellow,” the belief in whom seems to have been induced by the utter hopelessness of the camp. Or the directness of naming the Mengele-like camp “scientist” Dr. Nietzsche, bringing up in one brazen move a whole set of ethical questions about “science” and its role in the extermination of European Jewry, as well as about the complicity of philosophy in the Nazis’ apocalyptic reconstitution of history. Or the wet concreteness of diapers for Jan, a child born in the camp, whose mother, Marija, is drying them against her body. Or Marija’s obsessive thinking about the sheet she takes from Polya, the dying woman, as she is trying to decide at what point Polya will no longer need it. Or Marija’s memories of the Novi Sad massacre, which Kiš conveys in a few terrifying details, so that the terror is as fully experienced as it can be in a work of literature.

All those moments are contained by a structure that deliberately slows down time. The main temporal framework of the novel is delimited by the few hours before Marija and her fellow inmate attempt a courageous escape from the camp, as the cannons of the Allied forces are thundering in the distance; within those few hours much is recollected, no tranquility whatsoever available. Kiš writes in long, convoluted crypto-Proustian sentences, which allow him to follow closely Marija’s thoughts, thus making each terrible and hopeful moment count.

Kiš’s ethical ambition is even more impressive than his aesthetical/technical repertoire or the brilliance of his details. As someone who has taught creative writing classes and has often dealt with works teeming with ailing grandparents, suburban boredom, and college-love breakups, I long for a student who would write with Kišian intellectual and moral confidence, or, at least, urgency. I long for a young American writer who would, like Kiš, in his or her first book, present the case that literature is capable of processing the most difficult human experiences, be they personal or historical — it is one of the few tools (and, for some of us, the only one) we have to get a handle on life and history. Writing fiction can be taught and practiced, but what cannot be taught and practiced is ethical courage. “If you cannot say the truth,” Kiš advised the Young Writer, “say nothing.”

At a very young age, Kiš understood the nature of willful forgetfulness and the role it plays in the history as narrated by the powers that be. He saw literature as capable of forestalling oblivion, of telling the history experienced by individual human beings. Everyone who has ever suffered had a name, a set of parents, a life comprised of a multitude of irreplaceable details; the death of each one of us is an irreparable loss to all of humanity. That seems like an easy kind of knowledge to acquire, but many — writers, artists, politicians, killers, historians — have failed to fully comprehend the infinite weight of a single human life and the enormous price we pay in oblivion for each one extinguished. “Because that’s what death is, To forget everything,” Marija, Kiš’s hero, realizes in Psalm 44. The only way to remember what must be remembered is to tell the stories of lives that have been erased by the megalo-maniacal callousness of history. Such stories might be difficult to construct and read, but they are ethically and aesthetically necessary. Without them we will be forgotten. Without them we are nothing on our way to nothing.

Aleksandar Hemon, 2012

PSALM 44

“And the angel of the LORD said unto her, Behold, thou art with child, and shalt bear a son, and shalt call his name Ishmael; because the LORD hath heard thy affliction.”

— THE FIRST BOOK OF MOSES

“Thou makest us a byword among the heathen. .”

— PSALM 44

Chapter 1