The Seventh Well: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Fred Wander (Author), Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 17, 2007

A novel of total absorption, a heroic achievement, and one—despite the modesty of its author—destined for literary transcendence.

He grew up on the street, a high school dropout. In 1938 he left his mother and sister behind in Vienna and fled on foot to France, where later he was put on a train to Auschwitz. Transported from camp to camp, Fred Wander was haunted for twenty-five years by the crystalline, episodic stories that chronicle the plight of his fellow inmates. Only after the tragic death of his little daughter did these voices pour forth. The result was this novel, published in East Germany in 1970. Finally it appears in English in this masterful translation, its haunting cadences evoking Levi and Celan, its backstory as heartrending as Suite Française. Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise. The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante's Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

An Austrian Jew and photojournalist who was interned at 20 different Nazi camps between 1939 and 1945, Wander (1917–2006) first published this loosely structured novel in East Germany in 1970. Spare, haunting anecdotes memorialize Jews who died senseless, undignified deaths in Nazi concentration camps. In the Hirschberg camp, Mendel Teichmann, a 50-year-old atheist, keeps the other prisoners occupied with his wry tales; a Polish boy, Yossl, freezes after guards taunt him and shovel snow over him. While most prisoners gulp down their meager rations, the narrator describes how men like Pechmann... turn a crust of bread into a seven-course meal. On the eve of Buchenwald's liberation, the narrator watches Joschko, 10, patiently push food into his exhausted younger brother. The book is much more than a catalogue of horrors and of courage, as Wanders's narrator struggles to find the language to describe what he has seenn. This is a worthy addition to Shoah literature. (Dec.)
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Review

[Stories] which both profoundly dismay and yet somehow exalt, and in doing so become crucial to our spiritual history. -- C. K. Williams, author of Repair: Poems

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 176 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (December 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393065383
• ISBN-13: 978-0393065381
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 6.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,144,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "You will become transparent, like a well yourself..." *, May 6, 2008

By 

Kerry Walters (Lewisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Seventh Well: A Novel (Hardcover)

Some books are easy to review. Fred Wander's The Seventh Well isn't one of them. This is meant as an accolade, not a criticism.

Wander (born Fritz Rosenblatt; he changed his name in 1950) was a Viennese Jew who was interned by the Nazis in 1939, when he was 22 years old. He managed to escape into Switzerland (the internment camp was in France), but was sent back to spend the next six years in one camp after another. He was eventually transported to Auschwitz and endured the forced march to Buchenwald in the war's final days. His ordeal came to an end in April 1945 when the Allies liberated the camp. The rest of his family wasn't so fortunate.

Wander calls The Seventh Well a novel, but I suspect it's so in the same way that Eli Wiesel's Night is: more autobiographical than contrived. In it, Wander provides us with 12 different stories about life in the camps. The chapters aren't offered in any sort of chronological order. They jump from Auschwitz, to the Buchenwald march, to flashbacks about life in French internment camps, back to the march. This atemporal presentation is entirely appropriate, because Wander isn't telling a history so much as groping for a series of tales that gesture at truths about humanity. It's no accident that the first chapter is entitled "How to Tell a Story," and centers on Mendel Teichmann, the man who taught Wander how to observe a situation and describe it in such a way as to capture its deep significance.

And that's precisely what Wander does in his stories. The reason the book is hard to review is that each of the stories and each of the stories' characters cry out for individual scrutiny. There's Mendel Teichmann himself, the tzaddik, the magician, the magical story-teller; Zubitsch, who quotes Baudelaire's "Litanies of Satan"; Pechmann, who makes music with five drumming fingers; Meir Bernstein, the rich farmer, who in his final moments once again sees his lost family (p. 45); Pepe the Frenchman, the rebel; Tadeusz Moll, the atheist hasid, whose hanging provides Wander with the opportunity to reflect, poignantly, on the preciousness--and fragility--of life (pp. 122-28); and Joschko and Naftali, two children, brothers, who rekindle hope in Wander. Except for the two brothers, all the characters in Wander's stories perish. How does one accurately summarize their miseries, their hopes, their dignities, their martyrdom, in a review?

A second reason why The Seventh Well is difficult to review is that the beauty of the language with which Wander describes the camps' horrors is sometimes almost too much to bear. Here's a description, from one of the Auschwitz to Buchenwald march stories (p. 49): "...evening is drawing in, milky white fogs are dotted about on the slopes and over the forest, a swarm of black crows flies up almost noiselessly, the air is damp. Someone has brought along a piece of canvas, the size of a blanket. Under it lie some twenty men, pressed together like herrings...All around sit the old and feeble who don't go under the canvas because they would die there, and who don't lie down but remain seated because they know that the light goes out when you sleep, that you fly away without a sound, like the crows."

The hallmark of a good story is that it conveys a universal by focusing on the particular that embodies it. In giving us these tales of fellow-inmates who perished, Wander reveals himself as a master storyteller. Mendel Teichmann would've been proud.

______

From Wander's description of the Hasidic legend of the seventh well (p. 52): "The seventh well will wash away what you have collected... Naked you will be left, as from your mother's womb. And the honest water of the seventh well will cleanse you, and you will become transparent, like a well, made ready for future generations, so that they will climb from the darkness..."

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A View From the Barracks, April 19, 2008

By 

Grey Wolffe "Zeb Kantrowitz" (North Waltham, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Seventh Well: A Novel (Hardcover)

How would you react if you were taken away from everyone and everything you knew and placed in a 'level of hell' that you didn't know could exist? How would you live day-to-day in a section of Dante's Inferno? That is what Fred Wander did for six years (1939 through 1945) while being moved from camp to camp (twenty in all) and finally being 'death marched' to Buchenwald where he was liberated by the American forces.

What would be your explanation, not of why so many died, but of how you managed to survive? What would you remember? What would you take from the experience? Wander has given us the stories of individuals (all who later died) an how their lives gave his meaning. Stalin said, "the death of one man is a tragedy, the death of a million is a statistic". The number is too large to get into any kind of perspective. It's only when you look at the actual people, that you can put it into any meaningful place.

One of the most striking symbols of the stories is that only the inmates have names and identities, the guards and workers are referred to only as 'jackboots'. They are uninteresting and interchangeable, they are just murderers and sadists, without any humanity. They are to be endured and fooled, and in some cases made the butt of jokes. But they are at all times, un-human.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars beautiful, lyrical descriptions of wasteland and horror, February 8, 2009

By 

mel9000 - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Seventh Well: A Novel (Paperback)

There is such an incongruity to this book: beautiful, lyrical descriptions of wasteland and horror; characters that come to life for the reader as they head towards death, or are even already dead by the time Fred Wander discovers them (the dead man in the children's barracks); feral children whose instincts are honed to survival but whose minds cannot comprehend hope; sadness and cruelty; scorn and fellowship; the will and unimaginable capacity to survive, juxtaposed with the deaths that come about because of something inside that betrays (Tadeusz Moll; those who answered the final order to death as the Allies advanced toward Buchenwald). This ought to be a book that everyone reads along with Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."