Auslander review: a tale that supports the theory we don’t belong anywhere

The trigger for writing the book was the unwelcome diagnosis of “a genetic abnormality that produces a rare form of blood cancer”, something to which male Ashkenazi Jews have a higher disposition than most of the population. He writes: “It turned out out that the crackpot theory of the murderous Nazis was correct – I did have special blood… There was no escaping my heritage. It coursed through me.”

And so Moritz, a former journalist, sets about meticulously reconstructing his family’s history, calling on all his considerable journalistic skills to set records straight. This is despite, as he is frequently at pains to tell the reader, having missed the opportunity to ask his parents the salient questions about their lives before they arrived in Wales.

But Moritz bookends his account with a coruscating attack on what he thinks America has become under the heel of Donald Trump and in an unexpected move, records that he has applied for German citizenship, as have both his sons.

“There is the possibility – albeit faint – that eventually there will be three Moritz men, all Jews, living once more in the land of our ancestors.”

Moritz’s father, Ludwig Alfred Moritz, became a distinguished professor of classics at Cardiff University, while his mother Doris, née Rath, became a school teacher. The couple met in England after the end of the war and moved to Cardiff in the early 1950s. Neither of them accepted the term “survivor”, Moritz says, preferring to define themselves as “British citizens who had once been refugees”. In a telling passage, Moritz says that “the more I delved into my parents’ past, the more I had a sense that I was exploring the sources of inherited despair – conveyed unwittingly from one generation to another.”

Though he makes clear that it was his medical diagnosis which led him to write this book, Moritz’s “journey back to the past” began more than 20 years ago, when he found a book by the novelist WG Sebald, Austerlitz. He writes: “Austerlitz read much like an autobiography and, for me, like a once-removed second cousin to the history of my own family.”

Sebald puts his fictional hero in Wales, too, and his adoptive parents, also a vicar and his wife, change his name to Dafydd Ellis, though he later reclaims his identity. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 before he could make changes in further editions of the book, though he acknowledged in correspondence with Susi Bechhofer that essentially, he had drawn heavily on her story for Austerlitz.

So Auslander, Michael Moritz’s all-too real report from the past is partially inspired by a house of cards. Either way it doesn’t matter: Moritz is that rare thing: a reliable journalist and witness. His book is a triumph.

Auslander

Michael Moritz

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