A Novel That Performs an Incomplete Resurrection

A century after your death, what traces of your life will remain? Perhaps someone might find discarded clothing or a few boxes’ worth of cherished effects: china, jewelry, a watch, a toy. Your signature on official forms may linger, along with plenty of photos, likely in an outdated file format. What will these scattered items say about you? Even if everything from your time on Earth—every letter, text, tax filing, piece of furniture, and knickknack—were to be preserved, would you be confident that a researcher drawing on your personal archive could accurately describe the kind of person you were, or understand the life you led? Would you want them to speak for you?

Now consider how little of consequence actually survives the churn of human affairs. Mold eats away at diaries and letters. Technological failures and fires swallow family photos. Natural disasters displace neighbors. War annihilates the keepers of memories. The constellation of small things that make up a life is blown apart so easily that historians, biographers, and archivists make accounting for these commonplace losses part of their process.

But there are other ways to reconstitute a person’s life. Fiction, which thrives on the tiny, telling details most easily lost to time, finds opportunity in these open spaces. Whatever can’t be found can be imagined. Here, many writers have flourished, creating works of historical recovery that seek to excavate the dead and the lost. Novels such as Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail and Patrick Modiano’s pair of Dora Bruder books home in on individual lives and intimate experiences effaced by barbarities or tragedies. But the endeavor to resurrect the forgotten can be fraught—especially when the person being brought back was the victim of a shattering atrocity.

In her new novel, The Rest Is Memory, Lily Tuck tries out this mode. About a decade ago, the writer came across three photos in The New York Times of a 14-year-old Polish Catholic girl named Czesława Kwoka. In the pictures, taken during her imprisonment at Auschwitz, Czesława appears starved and bruised, with a shaved head and frightened stare. The images grabbed Tuck, who cut them out of the paper and kept them. She could find only the most basic information about the girl with the glare: Czesława came from a small village in southeastern Poland; arrived at Auschwitz on December 13, 1942, with her mother; was tattooed with an ID number, 26947; and was executed on March 12, 1943. Everything else was lost.

So Tuck aimed to fill in the blanks. In an afterword, she describes Memory as “an attempt to bring to life a young life tragically lost.” She imagines Czesława’s life as a Polish Catholic peasant through a collection of broad attributes easily extrapolated from what’s known about her class, her time, and her home. Tuck writes that Czesława has a father, Pawel, who poaches game animals and yells; a mother who once fell in love with a pilot; a guard dog who makes her anxious; a favorite orange hen named Kinga; and a youthful crush on a boy with a motorcycle. Tuck presents these characteristics in a series of fragmented present-tense passages, some declarative—“Her mother’s name is Katarzyna”—and some descriptive, such as a passage about her favorite food, the creamy karpatka cake.

But Tuck also attempts to illuminate the particular life of the girl and her family with textural, novelistic details. We learn, for instance, that her father’s laugh “makes shivers run up and down her back,” and that he is missing the middle finger of his left hand from “an accident skinning the wild boar,” which left a stump that still bleeds. Czesława likes to taste the snow on her tongue, loves to play jacks, and reads to her grandmother from her favorite book: Kaytek the Wizard, by Janusz Korczak.

Tuck embeds her fictionalized passages within a panoply of explicitly nonfictional paragraphs, full of footnoted information on Nazi agrarian policy, the 1940 Katyń massacre, and the operations of the Auschwitz camps, as well as excerpts from a book about the prisoner and photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took the pictures that so grabbed Tuck. She quotes from perverse evidence, such as ID numbers, camp records, and estimates of the market value of shaved human hair, and she uses these pieces of corroboration to expand outward. Eventually, the novel grows to encompass a network of victims and perpetrators: Polish aristocrats, other prisoners in the women’s barracks, the famed writer Tadeusz Borowski, and the camp commandant Rudolf Höss, along with his wife, Hedwig.

In these factual sections, Tuck’s voice is sober and unadorned, befitting the overwhelming horror of the subject matter. Set beside the naturalistic fictions, they shock, particularly when Tuck leaps associatively between the two modes. A short description of how the ashes and excrement of the Auschwitz prisoners were dumped into the Vistula and Sola Rivers is immediately followed by a discussion between two girls about swimming—a disturbing evocation of the domestic in the demonic. Tuck denies us the comforts of the novel, refusing to quarantine the real at a safe distance from the fictional. She demands that we consider them side by side, two expressions of the same material.

This approach firmly establishes the context for Czesława’s suffering and death. But per Tuck, Memory is meant to bring her back to life, and here the author stumbles. The details she dreams up for Czesława recur throughout the novel, first as descriptions and then as conversation in the camp, twisted brutally by the circumstances: Her youthful love of karpatka curdles into a reflection on starvation. Yet when juxtaposed against the litany of facts and figures, these inventions are exposed as flimsy, easily dwarfed by the documentation. The more solidly Tuck draws the world around her protagonist, the more uncertain the writer’s picture of her becomes. Surely there was much more to her life than her chicken, her mother, her cakes, and her death. Surely she had bugbears, irritations, and emotional leaps both characteristic of and distinct from those of her parents, her neighbors, and her annihilated countrypeople. But, unable or perhaps unwilling to sufficiently imagine these things, Tuck reduces Czesława to an amalgam of facts, details, and anecdotes—a person viewed from the outside in. The author becomes less novelist than prosecutor, establishing the facts of the case but losing the texture of experience, which is to say: what distinguishes life from evidence.

Bringing the dead to life is no easy task, of course. To take up their voice is to run the risk of effacing it altogether—and when other writers make the attempt, it is typically with an acknowledgment of their limitations. In Minor Detail, released in English in 2020, Adania Shibli tells the true story of the 1949 rape and murder of a Bedouin girl by Israeli soldiers. She, like Tuck, fractures her narrative, depicting it first from the perspective of the child’s killers and then from the point of view of a fictional modern-day Palestinian woman, whose investigation of the buried incident results in her own death. This recurrence of atrocity is made inevitable, the novel shows, by the laws and restrictions created by those who had committed the crime in the first place.

Shibli’s narrator feels drawn to her subject by a coincidence: The murder occurred on her birthday, 25 years before she was born. Patrick Modiano feels a similar kinship to the subject of his two books about a young Jewish girl who disappeared in a part of Paris with which he was deeply familiar. At first, the Nobel winner had little more information on Dora Bruder than a missing-person’s report, published on New Year’s Eve 1941: a description of a “young girl … age 15, height 1 m 55,” with a round face, a sports jacket, and “brown gym shoes.” Dora had defied the curfew and run away from her parents, who were asking the public for help. The description grabbed him, and in his 1990 novel, Honeymoon, he imagined a life for her as a fugitive who survives the Holocaust by meeting a man and fleeing to the south.

Yet this imagined survival was not enough for him. Over the next several years, Modiano continued to investigate Dora’s story, discovering her birth certificate, photos of her family, and, eventually, the record of her deportation to Auschwitz on September 18, 1942, six months before Czesława’s murder in the camp. For his follow-up about Dora, named Dora Bruder after her, Modiano has much more data at his disposal than Tuck, allowing him to include other forms of evidence, such as the letter from a deportee found at a bookstall along the Seine.

Still, Dora Bruder is also filled with many qualifications; perhaps might be the author’s favorite word. There is too much he doesn’t know and can’t ever find out—including where Dora went when she ran away. “I shall never know how she spent [those] days,” he concludes, “a poor and precious secret that not even the executioners, the decrees, the occupying authorities, the Dépôt, the barracks, the camps, History, time—everything that defiles and destroys you—have been able to take away from her.” This gap, this absence, is Dora Bruder, and by refusing to fill it, Modiano allows the absence to testify on her behalf: She hid, she lived, and for a time she was a human being who transcended the incomplete image of her conjured by all this evidence. Her escape from the author stands in for a greater spiritual liberation; wisely, he lets her get away.

In Memory, Tuck too seeks knowledge she cannot gain. But rather than acknowledging this unfixable emptiness, she attempts to patch it over with her ultimately insufficient inventions, creating a fiction that, when surrounded by so much indisputable fact, can only collapse inward. Some holes can’t be filled, and no writer, no matter how skilled, can return their subject to anything truly resembling life.