Trauma and Migration in Joseph Kertes’ Last Impressions

Part Two of an Essay-Review by Michael Greenstein

Joseph Kertes’ latest novel, Last Impressions, revisits some of the same territory of the Beck family saga found in The Afterlife of Stars. The stellar afterlife of the earlier novel resumes in the lasting impressions of the later novel’s wandering roads. The epigraph from Hamlet applies to both novels: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell / and count myself a king of infinite space, / were it not that I have bad dreams.” Shakespeare’s lenses establish boundaries between the microcosm of a nutshell and the macrocosm of infinite space (Kertes’ migratory poles); and the bad dreams of trauma recur in both novels.

The opening sentence establishes the structure between nutshell of a moribund Zoltan Beck in palliative care and the infinite space over Niagara Falls: “The day Nik Wallenda crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope, Zoltan Beck lay in a private room in palliative care at St. Cecilia’s Hospital.” The wandering road turns to the highwire act, and the crossing of Niagara Falls comments on Jewish migration from the Red Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. Zoltan has three sons – Ben, Sammy, and Frank – and it is Ben who shares the stage with his father. Like life, Zoltan is messy, and his sloppiness provides some of the comic relief in this colourful novel. He hates the colourful Jell-O served by the hospital: “Three tubs of uneaten Jell-O, one red, one yellow and one green, lined up miraculously on the windowsill like a recumbent traffic light.” The traffic light guides various narrative speeds from the horizontal tightrope line to the vertical Niagara Falls and the spray of blackberry jam that Ben gives his father. “Zoltan slurped purply and rapidly on the jam, and while it was not a full-blown Prince concert, Ben had to sit back to avoid the purple mist falling around them.” Stricken with colon cancer, Zoltan fights back with this black bile’s spray of jam and indomitable will.

Like the empire clock in The Afterlife of Stars, the hospital clock in Last Impressions measures immediate time as well as the historical frame of World War II. “Zoltan looked up at the clock hung too high on the opposite wall. It was stopped at 11:07, but he didn’t seem to mind. Ben stared at it too and found it calming. Like a sleeping cat. All that potential bottled up – calming for that reason, he thought.” The bottled-up potential points to the sinister cancer, on the one hand; on the other, it points to the Nazi past featured in the book at Zoltan’s bedside – Hitler’s Mistakes. Just as Kertes animates the clock-cat, so the potted plant on the nightstand “sat pouting” in Dickensian décor. The narrator draws attention to the quality of the surroundings: “How was it possible to stare at these walls or at the clock with its stopped heart … without reaching for significance?” Whereas father and sons barely touch in the Beck family, the reader and narrator together reach for significance in the details.

Ben discerns the history of the refugee’s trajectory in his father’s features: “The flight from the Russians. The triumph over Nazism. The arrival at Pier 21.” The list goes on to include their cat, the reading of Alexander Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, and the “mad magnetism of a streetlight to a moth.” Kertes’s ominous lampposts from the Old World lead to the “keeling over of a top-heavy coat-rack that stood in the vestibule.” These are the nutshells contouring nuggets of information in the precarious balance over the ocean and Niagara Falls.

The narrative backtracks to Zoltan’s colonoscopy eight months earlier when the narrator’s excremental vision yields incremental and incidental humour. Ben drives his father to the hospital, and Zoltan’s Panama hat has the look of Saturn for cosmic significance – “Sunrise on Saturn” for the comic king of infinite space. A statue of St. Cecilia stands inside the main doors of the hospital with an inscription from John Donne at its base. Like Shakespeare’s epigraph, this Metaphysical poem comments on the novel, the nutshell in infinite space:

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

Who did the whole world’s soul contract, and drove

Into the glasses of your eyes

(So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize)

Countries, towns, courts: beg from above

A pattern of your love!

A pattern of rage in trauma, a contraction of cosmic soul to eyes, and a migratory contraction of countries to lenses permeate Kertes’s fiction, which mirrors so much. Donne’s Metaphysical wit meets Zoltan’s sprezzatura of failed colonoscopy and sloppy eating habits, as if his digestive tract were another roadway between Hungary and Canada.

Ben ruminates on the uncanny experience of trauma and migration: “Ben felt that old, familiar feeling again, those early years here as a refugee, the strangeness of it, the strange language, the strange look of the place.” Even with linguistic and cultural mutation, the past always intrudes: “The memory of fleeing the Russians as a three-year-old, of crossing a dark border late one night to freedom, of gripping your grandmother’s hand, stayed with you, even if you couldn’t remember all the specifics.” The dark borders of consciousness accompany the Becks: Ben always has one eye on his coat, on his transient being ready to hit the road, even as his other eye spies the specifics of lost and lasting impressions.

In his historical fiction Kertes turns from the contemporary Canadian scene to the earlier Hungarian past, and the novel’s interwoven structure is a traumatic turning. “On a day not long after the Second World War had erupted, the world of Bela Beck and his younger brother, Zoltan -- or Zoli, as he was then called – turned, and it would not turn back.” As if in response to the narrator, the chapter closes. Zoltan turns – “He then turned and was gone.” But not before he utters the Latin “Hodie mihi, cras tibi” – “Today me, tomorrow you” – a different lesson in history. In turn, the chapters turn on Kertes’s hinge of history. The uncanny beck and call of the repressed is manifest in the novel’s structure of two time frames. Bela is an Olympic swimmer and virtuoso pianist who teaches at the Liszt Academy, but is barred from both activities once the Nazis control Hungary.

Zoli was sixteen in 1939, Bela seventeen. Zoli’s philosophy encapsulates common sense and a fugitive sensibility: “we were all after the same things and running from the same things.” The brothers are sent to a labour camp in Hungary. When the chapters turn to the contemporary scene in Canada, they switch to comedy, as Zoltan fails his driver’s test in his Saturn, his planetary vehicle and mechanical farce. He tells the driving examiner that Ben shouldn’t accompany them because he makes remarks, “He’s a remark maker.” The humour surrounding Zoltan’s failure is anything but saturnine. Driving may be seen as an aspect of migration over paved intentions. “Roads were not made for him, straight lines weren’t, directions weren’t. He needed a vast, paved plain – Europe, say – except that he would get lost as he made his way out and would never be seen again.” His car is a nutshell in the grand scheme of infinite space, and the traumatic émigré driver maps continents in zigzag fashion. A matryoshka doll accompanies the Becks from Hungary as it did in The Afterlife of Stars.

Bela is temporarily saved when the head of the camp invites him home to perform on the piano. The narrator describes the surrounding landscape during the drive to the comfortable house: “The countryside between the camp and Szifli seemed too dumb to him – indifferent, unaware of what was going on to the left of it and to the right of it.” Whereas the Hungarian countryside remains indifferent to human suffering, not so the music that Bela plays for the commanding Vad family, especially when one of their daughters, Zsofia, falls in love with him. Chopin’s etudes mediate between her and Bela: “who was to say what the composer had intended exactly, or whose fingers understood his meaning more assuredly?” The music speaks to the older teacher and younger student, the labour camp inmate and his expectant protegee. Music’s transcendence and multilingual catharsis: “So here it was again, music’s habit of turning aside language, showing itself to be superior to it, speaking out of both sides of its mouth.”

The rhapsodies and elegies of Chopin and Liszt flow in counterpoint to Zoltan’s misplacing of things from his dentures to his misplaced sense of boundaries in the outer world. Adding further to the comedy are a host of Hungarian immigrants in Canada. Ben studies the red maple tree outside his house, which enters into nature’s dialogue with the indifferent Hungarian landscape. “Ben kept staring at the maple tree, imagining its cousins, the walnut tree and the elm. He imagined that they were not impressed by the abracadabra of it all.” Family trees and tree families branch into last impressions, while the unknown etymology of abracadabra suggests the magic of Hebraic origins. Magda, one of the emigrees invited to Zoltan’s party, relates her history to Ben: “So we never looked back … looking back never helped anything.” The traumatic rearview mirror along the migratory roadway needs to be occluded in order to adjust to the New World.

The Becks had been successful in Hungary. In their summer house they had a table with the top painted by Edvard Munch – a crow sitting on a cemetery gate and crowing into the blue darkness over the gravestones. Munch’s crow comments on the novel’s trauma and migration, its silent caw accompanying weary refugees, its flight pattern frozen. The other remarkable heirloom is a grand dollhouse, an exact replica of the house that contains it. Like the matryoshka doll, this miniature participates in the novel’s mise en abyme – a miniature reflecting the larger structure to create a vertiginous significance in migratory meanings, a house within the house of fiction.

During their return to Hungary Ben tells Zoltan about his interpretation of The Catcher in the Rye: “I’m talking about the mysterious ending. The cryptic last pages.” Although this remark may be applied to the sense of ending chapters in Kertes’s fiction, it resonates more with the mystery of memory, the trauma that proceeds toward that ending. “It’s as if memory is the great leveler, the equalizer. It scrubs clean the sin and duplicity, so that once experience is locked safely in the past it cannot progress and therefore corrupt itself more than it already has.” Memory may offer some catharsis in its remembrance of things past, recollections in tranquility, and afterlife of impressions.

As the novel ties ends together during the visit to Hungary, the narrator describes an uncanny painting: “An impressive old portrait of a matriarch hung on the wall behind the elder Zsofia’s head. The woman had the same eyes. It was remarkable how such features resurfaced in succeeding generations, parts of people, bits of them, random bits washing up in their successors. You didn’t have to look far for an afterlife. Here was the afterlife of a multitude of forebears, assembled right in this room.” The afterlife of stars flows into these last impressions of the extended and extensive Beck family on both sides of the Atlantic.

The novel concludes with the scene of Zoltan’s final moments in the hospital with the spotlight on frozen time: “He half opened his eyes and looked ahead, toward the stopped clock on the wall …. He might have been running memories across the wall with his eyes, or drawing cave pictures.” His death is archetypal. The epitaph on Zoltan’s gravestone, “Judge Not,” returns to the ending of Catcher in the Rye, as well as the epigraph to this novel. Bounded in a nutshell and king of infinite space, Zoltan Beck and his recurrent dreams are non-judgmental.

---

About the Author

JOSEPH KERTES was born in Hungary but escaped with his family to Canada after the revolution of 1956. He studied English at York University and the University of Toronto, where he was encouraged in his writing by Irving Layton and Marshall McLuhan. His first novel, Winter Tulips, won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour. His third novel, Gratitude , won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the U.S. National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Kertes founded Humber College’s distinguished creative writing and comedy programs. He is currently Humber’s dean of creative and performing arts.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Canada (March 3 2020)

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0735238219

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0735238213