Soul of Wood - A Review of Sorts

Soul of Wood by Jakov Lind

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“Soul of Wood” by Jakov Lind - A Review of Sorts

It was more than twenty years ago that I took a class on Holocaust literature. I remember that the class had a thick collected volume of collected essays, stories, and poems. I remember a soft-spoken Jewish man insisting that the Holocaust was beyond comprehension. I remember being in my early 20s and hormonal beyond redemption. I remember horrors that turned my heart cold. I remember prose that was beautiful and tragic. I remember having to read much of the work when I was tired…and I remember Jakov Lind.

As a man with thinning hair in his early 40s, I want to do something dangerous and romantic. I want to read Jakov Lind’s “Soul of Wood” and write about it not academically but romantically. I want to feel that initial thrill of stumbling upon this largely unknown writer’s work.

Much like two of my other literary essays – “Youth and its Discontents” (https://ghostsofnagasaki.wordpress.co... ) and “Lester Goran’s Last Song” (https://ghostsofnagasaki.wordpress.co... ) – this essay is as much about me as it is about the particular books.

Thus, I try to imagine myself as I must have been at 20 or 21 writing an essay on Lind’s story “Resurrection”. I must have been slightly mad, sleep-deprived, a desperate person trying to squeeze a fifteen-page double-spaced paper out of a story that was not that much longer. As always when I wrote literary essays in my early 20s, I was desperately trying to find something clever to say.

“Religious Identity in the Shadow of the Final Solution: An Interpretation of Jakov Lind’s “Resurrection” through Talmudic Hair-Splitting”

That was the title of the paper. A pretentious title for a young man always desperately trying to prove to the world how smart he was.

An aside: in the introduction to “Soul of Wood,” Michael Kruger writes this: “And yet even today we stand bewildered by how rapidly and smoothly this once liberal region of Central Europe could submit to Hilter’s demented bidding, how easily and unblinkingly it rejected modernity–for us the prerequisite for understanding humanity and the world” (p. ix).

I think if we are to truly study the Holocaust (or Chile, Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur…and on and on), then we can no longer use the words “bewildered” and “incomprehensible.” If we want to use these words, let us use them as priests, poets, and moralizers instead of serious students of atrocities. Savagery is our default, and the decline from modernity to savagery, a very steep descent, usually happens so fast that we are better off studying when decline is stunted or arrested altogether. We should be “bewildered” when countries lose wars, incur rapid inflation, or suffer some horrific tragedy (and do not have an occupying army telling them to be pacifist) and yet somehow remain sensible and open minded. (Yes, the Joker in the “Dark Knight” had it right: Madness is like gravity. All we need is a little push.)

I am reading “Soul of Wood.” Here is the description that is written on Goodreads.

Set during World War II, "Soul of Wood" is the story of Wohlbrecht, a peg-legged veteran of World War I, who smuggles Anton Barth, a paralyzed Jewish boy, to a mountain hideout after the boy's parents have been sent to their deaths. Abandoning the helpless boy to the elements, Wohlbrecht returns to Vienna, where, having been committed to an insane asylum, he helps the chief psychiatrist to administer lethal injections to other patients. But Germany is collapsing, and the war will soon be over. The one way, Wohlbrecht realizes, that he can evade retribution is by returning to the woods to redeem "his" hidden Jew. Others, however, have had the same bright idea.

That is a very good description of a very surreal and winding story.

The central relationship of “Soul of Wood” is the relationship between the Jewish cripple Barth and the peg-legged old war veteran Wohlbrecht. But what makes the relationship so fascinating is the ambiguity in their relationship. Why does Wohlbrecht keep the Jewish cripple alive? Because of some personal code? Because of some shred of decency inside of him? A sense of old fashioned honor? Or, because deep down he sees the Jewish cripple as an insurance policy, some proof of his humanity within an inhumane regime? Like much of Lind’s writing, there is this haunting feeling that underneath our civilized veneer lie selfish motivations tied to our desire to breathe.

But the tapestry between these two characters is somehow so much richer than that. The old war veteran and the crippled Jew…there is a kind of father / son dynamic that forms over time. Despite Wohlbrecht’s paranoia, his missteps, the occasional evil thoughts in his head, we get the sense that he is a rare thing in this world: good.

Somehow, the story seems so much less interesting when Barth and Wohlbrecht are separated.

In the end, after the story of “Soul of Wood” goes through its tortuous and surrealist twists and turns, Wohlbrecht is finally reunited with Barth. Barth has become a kind of magic forest creature. As for Wohlbrecht…he is shot unceremoniously, his wooden leg propped up against a tree. And then, we are introduced to the idea of resurrection…a subject we will come back to in a later story.

Something I was smart enough to recognize as a young undergraduate, breathing plays an important role in Jakov Lind’s work. In “Soul of Wood,” Lind writes: “Anton had made an art of breathing. Breathing (not ordinary unconscious inhaling and exhaling) was his happiest occupation. It was his private art, not unlike music (for he used certain rhythms, though there was no melody) and not unlike poetry because it provoked distinct states of feeling” (p. 14-15). Eleven years after I had read these lines, I would need to take care of my mom who was suffering from COPD. Only then did I realize just how important breathing is to people. Now, nine years after my mom has passed, I try to remember how much joy she took in each breath. Lind’s words and Anton’s art take on new meaning for me.

As for the second story, “Journey through the Night,” I encourage you to watch this very good short film based on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDIS6...

It seems that Jakov Lind is not as forgotten as I thought.

What have I learned by taking this long, torturous journey through a book of my youth? Only the delight of the macabre, the bewildering joy of the surreal, and when everything else falls apart, be grateful for my ability to breathe.



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