Zygmunt Miłoszewski, A Grain of Truth (London: Bitter Lemon Press, 2012). Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.
This novel begins with the most unrealistic scene I’ve ever read. A researcher – paid to research into family histories – witnesses the aftermath of a murder. A woman’s body is left outside in the early hours, and only a glimpse of a figure in robes and a hat offers any clue. The researcher sees this because he’s been allowed to stay overnight in the archives of a small Polish city, which are housed in a former synagogue. When he goes to return a volume, he hears a thud and sees the body and the ghostly retreating figure.
Hang on! A researcher allowed to stay overnight in an archive? And re-shelve their own books??
I almost stopped reading right there!
I’m glad I kept reading. Despite its occasional clumsiness, particularly around romance, this novel – published over a decade ago – was exactly what I needed to read this year. I read it several months ago now and I have found it difficult to sit down and say what I want to say about it.
The novel’s plot centers around a series of murders that dramatically re-create elements of this very lightly fictionalized city’s long history of anti-Semitism and, ultimately, genocide. Much of this history was familiar to me, not least because I had the incomparable privilege of studying with Omer Bartov, the historian of banal violence in the borderlands of central Europe in the second world war. For readers not versed in history of European Jewry, however, the book offers a valuable window into the centuries of violence and rumor that preceded the Holocaust.
Indeed, in a sense the book is an extended meditation on the unstable relationship between violence and rumor. It excavates old legends of ‘blood libel’, the anti-Semitic accusation that Jewish people kidnapped and murdered Christian children in order to extract their blood, and traces how that accusation ramified and transformed into literal violence against Jewish people. I see anti-Semitism used as part of reductive talking-points a lot these days, often in ways that dismiss its significance. It would be worth anyone’s while to spend a bit more time getting to grips with its complex history.
I’ve agonized over writing this essay in part because I’m not Jewish. Yet this is a book that is ultimately about how non-Jewish Poles deal with their history – or avoid dealing with it. The book’s English title, A Grain of Truth, refers to the idea, voiced in different ways by multiple characters, that—although of course they aren’t anti-Semitic—well, there might be just a grain of truth in those old stories. Miłoszewski’s point is that there isn’t a grain of truth in them. The ‘grain’ that remains is prejudice, like sand in the gears of rational thought. The novel’s terrific dénouement demonstrates that in startling detail.
This is also a book about living in the aftermath of genocide.This city used to be the home of Jews and Christians. Now, the Jews are nearly all gone. Jewishness itself is erased. That historical researcher granted his magical all-night archive pass? A big part of his business, it turns out, is air-brushing out Jewish ancestry and, ideally, replacing it with Polish aristocracy.
I’m still haunted by one side-character, an elderly woman. When some younger people ask about her childhood friend, a Jewish girl who lived nearby, she describes their friendship in rich detail but concludes by saying she’s gone now – she went away – I don’t know what happened. Only after the questioners leave does she allow herself to remember how her friend was taken away and killed by Nazis. Over the course of the novel, this landscape of loss is slowly revealed: the empty place where the Jewish neighborhood was, the empty house where the Jewish family lived, the professions of amnesia where the pain of loss should be.
I grew up in a landscape of post-genocidal amnesia, too. In my New England town, there were monuments to the massacres of English settler colonists carried out sixteenth and seventeenth century. There were no monuments to the Native Americans who lived there—from the Nipmuk and Wampanoag tribes—and who were experiencing wholesale expropriation and extermination. It was common to say—it remains too common to say—that the United States doesn’t have ‘old’ buildings or ruins or historical sites the way that Europe does, erasing the rich historical and archaeological evidence of Native people right out of the landscape.
I’ve shifted gears a bit, from the local to the general by way of my personal experience, because the legacies of mass killing and dispossession are all around us. They are being renewed daily, unbearably. The logic of dispossession is consistent: remove these people from this place, so that these other people can claim it as theirs alone. It always involves unbelievable human suffering and usually mass death. And that promised tidy future, of course, never comes: the ‘unmixing of peoples,’ to use sociologist Rogers Brubaker’s classic phrase, is always a blood-stained folly as well as an atrocity. This is true in Myanmar and Sudan and the Xinjiang Autonomous Region; it’s true in Gaza and the West Bank right now, and in Israel/Palestine more generally since the days of the British Mandate.
I’ve hesitated to write this essay, but not because I don’t know what I think about the present disaster in Gaza. I’m against killing to achieve political aims. I’m against political leaders who accept the death of innocent people as the price of power. I’m against all forms of ethno-nationalism. I’m in favor of democratic pluralism, and I believe that sharing territory is necessary. I don’t have any easy answers.
I’ve hesitated because I have seen my friends, colleagues, students, everyone, try to navigate this crisis with the ghosts of the Holocaust, of the Nakba, of decades of tolerating rising anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and anti-migrant policies, with all those ghosts jostling around. The trouble with ghosts isn’t that they don’t speak, but that so many people speak for them, too, demanding that history is honored in this way and not that way, or that this trauma not be allowed to overshadow that one. I’ve hesitated to add to that chorus.
Today, 1 May, some of my friends and colleagues and students will demonstrate in solidarity with Palestine. At least one will be in a tent on a college campus, and I hope they will be safe and that their clear-eyed call for an end to the killing will be heeded. Some of my friends and colleagues and students will also be holding their breaths, afraid of how those false ‘grains of truth’ might turn into violence against them, as Jews, as migrants, as Arabs, as Muslims. I will not be on a university campus today, so I’m finally publishing this instead.
I borrowed A Grain of Truth from the Manchester Central Library and racked up an impressive late fine while trying to write this essay. You can find out more about the book here.