Customer Reviews

What Remains

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The rise of Hitler forced German Jewish brothers Karl and Gustave to relocate their family to London. After the war ended, Karl, at the urging of his spouse Julia moves across the ocean to America where they raise their two children, Benjamin and Jacob. Gustave chose to remain in London.

In 1964, Karl and his family fly to London on a family visit. Benjamin and Jacob recall life as children in London during World War II when Hitler and his air force sent bomb after bomb trying to devastate the English. Benjamin and Jacob also have memories of Germany, but they are through the eyes of their parents, grandparents, and Gustave. However, as second generation Americans they are beginning the assimilation process and though their grandmother wants to return to pre-Hitler Hamburg, Benjamin and Jacob know that Thomas Wolfe is right as they can never go home again.

WHAT REMAINS is a powerful look at national identity especially for those individuals displaced and forced to flee deadly events in their native homeland. The tale works as readers understand the different outlooks of the three generations. Nicholas Delbanco writes a tremendously deep, thought-provoking tale that relies on the characters to unfold their feelings and motives for their lifestyles. The use of flashbacks by the cast to reflect how each one sees the monumental events that shaped their destiny strengthens a book that will send the audience seeking the author's previous tales (see OLD SCORES and IN THE NAME OF MERCY).

Harriet Klausner

This book is exquisite. The story of a family of German Jews, from little Benjamin ("Mister Blister!") and his older brother Jacob (named after his mother Julia's first love, in itself a bittersweet subplot) to Julia, Gustave, Karl, and Grandmother Emma. Everyone has a chance to provide their own narration, and give us their own flashback, after adult Ben returns to present-day England to visit the frail Gustave for what may be the last time.

But "As I Lay Dying" this ain't - the characters provide more than filler dialogue for the same action, over and over, ad nauseum. Each chapter, each character's narrative, stands on its own as a separate story.

Emma provides, for me, the sweetest and saddest chapters in the book. As with all elderly in almost every society, Emma becomes prone to being overlooked, the walking, talking afterthought in the family; while once the matriarch of this strong family,she now finds herself little more than one of the curios that litter the cabinets. However, we find that she is still as young as her memories allow her to be, and longs for the chance to revisit her now-deceased husband in her mind, on the day they were engaged. In the background, all the while, Karl and Julia and the kids prepare for a voyage to America (it is 1948). Only Ben seems to have a capacity for empathy, which his mother's narrative further confirms.

Not since Salinger's Glass family have I found myself falling in love with a string of stories about a single family. Delbanco's ear for dialogue is magnificent, and his eye for detail is matched only by his sense of conservation thereof; many authors would spend the 200 pages this book spans alone on what color the birch leaves were, how the soot covered the characters' shoes as they walked about the garden after one of the blitzes, etc. Delbanco's understanding of when to turn it on and when to turn it off is nothing short of masterful.

My only gripe, and I feel sheepish bringing it up, is the fact that, in an effort to make the characters even more authentic, Delbanco feels compelled to fill the pages with German, French, and (on one occasion) Yiddish. No problem there; he explains contextually the meaning of each phrase or word. However, there are (sigh) misspellings throughout the German phrases that were really distracting to me; a pair of words misused the seemingly insignificant umlaut to the point that the meaning was humorously sent askew, and I'm sure it was unintentional.

Don't let this deter you from picking up this most solid book. You will fall in love with this family, and yearn to find more Delbanco.

One of the most beautiful, delicately written books, not only about German Jews but of longing and of life, both its conclusions and inconclusiveness. I'm a literary novelist and I was so inspired by this work that I began to read it again at once.

This is a beautiful and moving memoir of an older generation through the eyes of the younger.

Ezra Pound profounded: "What thou lovest well remains; the rest is dross." What remains is our beloved past. This story follows a Jewish family of immigrants (those who survived Hitler's concentration camps) to England. These cultured Greman natives had been privileged, with large ancestral homes. And yet, their "present" was composed of impoverished relatives, now face a dubious "future" liberated, but not really free.

In the literary club of which I was an energetic member, one of the best wasd a college teacher whose family had to flee Castro's Cuba. She too had a privileged life in that beautiful country and they bled Communism, leaving behind most of their rich possessions and jewelry to find a form of freedom in the United States of America. How she and her family got to Tennessee is a long story. Their home in Cuba was taken over by a foreign embassy and she quipped, "I'm still teaching a foreign language." English was to her foreign.

Karl and Julia decide on America as the 'brave new world' in which to raise their sons, Ben and Jacob. Elsa yearns for her protected past of pre-Nazi Germany. It's about "that memory palace, the past." I too returned to my hometown after forty years farther South (and yet, some folks here ask me if I'd been up North! I explain I was still in Tennessee, only near the Alabama border) to reclaim my good memories of growing up here in the Fifties. They were dashed by unfeeling natives and the Tennessee Theater I'd looked on as a 'temple' now repulses me. Our past shapes us for immortality, but "what remains" when we are gone.

Nicholas Delbanco teaches English Literature at University of Michigan, Christine's Alma Mater. This is his 20th published book, quite a record, and this one lives up to his reputation of relating unforgettable characters. He can even get "quixotically erotic" -- is a teacher of writers, as is Zachary Adrian. His latest is called THE VAGABONDS.