Mauricio Rosencof – Shoes for the Overseer

A man drives a train. He is on his way to visit his son, whom he visits every few months. During the journey, bubbles of memories continually arise within him. Soon it seems that the only thing keeping him in the present is his need to pee.

Very rarely does the man think about the immediate future: he has shoes with him that he would like to give to his son, he also has fruit with him, he hopes that the son will receive it too. The son is imprisoned as a “hostage of the state”. This was the name given to the political prisoners in Uruguay who were held in barracks after the military coup in 1973.

The son mentioned is Mauricio Rosencof, former leading member of the MLN-Tupamaros and author of the book. In the 1930s, his father left the Polish shtetl in which his family initially lived and from which they were later deported to be murdered in an extermination camp.

The father’s silence begins with the letters that arrive from his former homeland and which he no longer wants to read at the dinner table, but rather, if at all, discusses them with his wife in a quiet whisper. The silence that will surround him from then on will be so complete that he will hardly be able to share a memory with his son; the physical destruction of the world as he knew it prevents any telling of it. Only much later, in the prison where the son sits, at a bare table, will he be able to talk again about his own childhood and youth and about the people who populated his past, many of whom are no longer there. He has ten minutes to do this every few months. That’s all.

This book is structured in a way that does not work on the German book market: it is a conglomerate of scraps of text, memories, impressions, letter excerpts, partly fictional, partly real. “My Father’s Silence” does not tell a story, but rather a state. There is no peripeteia, there is no resolution, there is the suffering of the people who were murdered and humiliated and those who survived. And it tells us that it is possible to remember them without condemning them or – even worse – turning them into a story.

This type of memory requires the reader to engage with the book; not just on the book, but on the entire narrative style of the fragmentary, thrown-away. Much of the art of the novel was to provide a coherent narrative for why characters are the way they are; Aesthetically, the novel is a securing concept. A more recent example of this type of storytelling is “Siblings in the Backlight” by Sabine Bode, which attempts to describe the “scars of origins” (blurb) of a pair of siblings whose parents were perpetrators. The point of this book is that the purified subsequent generations reconcile themselves with the past because they find each other again.

The point of “My Father’s Silence” is that there is none. The book stops with photos of people who were systematically murdered and also tells, in the briefest terms, how they were killed. It doesn’t want to reconcile, just establish. That’s what happened, there’s no getting around it. Against this background, it is quite interesting that novels in particular sell well in Germany, but short texts and fragments have rarely if ever found an audience: the memory structure of the German cultural landscape is one that seeks relief through psychologization.

The shoes that Mauricio Rosencof’s father brings him to prison fit perfectly: one of his guards. Rosencof’s book tells us that there is no such thing as morality, only attitude.

Mauricio Rosencof: My father’s silence. From d. Span. v. Svenja Becker. Association A, 160 p., hardcover, €18.