This has been a remarkable spell for the Jewish saga. A few months ago came Sophie Duvernoy’s splendid new translation of Gabriele Tergit’s 1951 novel The Effingers, which followed the fortunes of a clan of wealthy industrialists and bankers in Berlin, and served as a history of a near-century of Jewish life in that city. The Tribe, by veteran English author Michael Arditti, is in some ways a mirror image of it – the episodic story of a gilded family foundering on the rocks of war – and it is similarly illuminating and compelling. Neither book is, technically speaking, a roman-fleuve, occupying instead one epic volume; but in scale and scope, each reads as if it might be.
As we first meet them, Arditti’s Carrache dynasty rank among the Sephardic elite in Salonica, now Thessaloniki, in northern Greece, which under Ottoman rule was Europe’s only Jewish-majority city, and which prospered mightily until the Great Fire of 1917 forced more than half its Jewish population to leave. Both Salonica in particular and Sephardic life in general are under-regarded in the history and literature of Jewish Europe, which has tended to concentrate on Ashkenazi stories. One of the many strengths of Arditti’s book is to show how it is only industrial-scale horror and persecution that in retrospect unite European Jewry, which before – and, often enough, during – the Second World War, was riven along faultlines of nationality, culture, snobbery, religious practice, class and language. A younger member of the family, Gabrielle, who has by then experienced the worst of humanity in Auschwitz and somehow lived through it, listens to a Zionist friend romantically extol “a proud, united people”, and recalls how she “had seen a cluster of rival tribes”.
A novel is not a history textbook, and cannot succeed as one. The Tribe succeeds, and indeed triumphs, because its people feel real. The Carraches, and those around them, are not retrofitted with modern attitudes or foreknowledge. If the narrative once or twice turns on a soap-opera plot twist, well, odder coincidences than these genuinely did emerge from the maelstrom of the war. The family is variously dispersed by events to France, Switzerland, England, Argentina, and on such unpredictable turns of fortune do they live or die. Some find courage, even to the point of heroism, others sink into cowardice – but none of them knows, just as none of us knows, which it will be until tested by crisis.
The nearest thing the book has to a villain is Simon, nicknamed Mercado, and even he, rather than being an opaque Iago, has his motives and grievances convincingly accounted for. Self-serving and Machiavellian, he is the one who preserves the family fortune where otherwise it would literally have gone up in smoke. Wealth protects some of the Carraches but can do nothing for others. Not everything is down to chance – Simon’s machinations prove in some cases a life-saver – but chance always has the final say.
Such ambiguity is as far as Arditti allows symbolism to go. No major character is a cipher, placed merely to convey an idea or a detail – although it is a book full of ideas, and most marvellously rich in detail. Whether it is the lost world of Jewish Salonica, or the terrible Swiss refugee camps that improve upon the German death factories only in inflicting no active murders, or a wealth of other forgotten or little-known circumstances, he puts us right at the heart of it.
Its central premise is never stated, but very important: that Jews – these Jews, any Jews – are just people. Just people, with all of humankind’s qualities and flaws dispersed among them, sometimes within the same individual. When the world demands that we be special – especially good, or especially bad – The Tribe stands up, tacitly but persuasively, for our right to be merely human. And it tells, in every sense, one hell of a story while it is about it.
The Tribe, by Michael Arditti
Salt Publishing
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