FICTION: The Seventh Well, By Fred Wander, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta, 155pp. £12.99In 1975, an Italian chemist, who was also a published poet and writer, published a remarkable memoir. It was The Periodic Table; the writer was Primo Levi. Almost a decade later it was translated into English and was published in London in the spring of 1985. It is an incredible work, a meditation about being human as much as about keeping alive.
LEVI, WHO always stressed he was a Jewish Italian, was to become one of the great truth tellers, an artist whose work had been inspired by his experiences in Auschwitz. His survival would become a burden: the guilt of having survived made life eventually impossible for him.
In 1971, an Austrian Jew, Fred Wander, published a book dedicated to his young daughter who had died aged 10, which is best compared with The Periodic Table.
The Seventh Well, here translated by poet Michael Hofmann, who has contributed so much in bringing German language literature to a wide international audience, is described as a novel, but it is far more accurately seen as an autobiographical narrative which draws on the devices of storytelling.
It is episodic, anecdotal, even unexpectedly imaginative and, in places, contains prose of spectacular, often Biblical beauty. It is also rather buoyant, although not in the way in which the Hungarian Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész's magnificent Fatelessness is almost perversely, if good-naturedly, detached. In that book, Kertész gives an account of one boy's experience in a concentration camp. As far as the boy is concerned, it is an adventure and he was never a victim.
Just as Kertész draws on his life, so too does Wander, who not only survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, he travelled across wartime Europe as a specific type of prisoner - a Jewish prisoner.
That this book is presented as a novel, albeit one "inspired by many of his experiences", is odd and even odder - if one is trying to present it as fiction - is the inclusion of a chronology and detailed map which outlines the extent of his journeying, initially as an emigrant and then in internment in France, before later, having escaped, spending some time on the run before his recapture which ended in deportation to Auschwitz. He took part in several death marches including one back to Buchenwald from Crawinkel/Ohrdruf in March 1945.
According to Hofmann, in a characteristically informative afterword, Wander was imprisoned in 20 different Nazi camps in France, Germany and Poland. Born in 1917 (or, according to the dust jacket, 1916) in Vienna to a working-class Jewish family, Wander left school at 14 - and proceeded to live the life of a wandering Jew.
Long before his years as a prisoner, Wander discovered hunger as casual labour was all he could depend on as he travelled through Austria, Holland and France. The spirit that runs through this book obviously sustained him throughout his long life; he lived in Germany for many years before returning to Vienna where he died in 2006.
The 12 episodes are not interlinking, yet are obviously united through Wander's prevailing theme, the art of telling a story, which the narrator attempts to learn from Mendel, a gifted storyteller.
"In the beginning was a conversation. Three weeks after the conversation, Mendel died. I didn't know he was going to die, nor of course did Mendel himself. He was already very weak, but still intensely engaged with everything around him. Wherever we were, on the march, or in the timber yard unloading tree trunks, he would deluge us with expressions of bitter contempt, evocations of beauty, dark poetical prophesyings, his word torrent, his pride."
Mendel told great stories and, when asked about the art of telling a story, replied, "So you want to know how to tell a story? Either you have it in you or you don't." What Mendel goes on to explain is how a fiction is shaped, that it all happens through what you hear and, more importantly, what you can imagine. For the narrator, Mendel is "the magician with words."
Above all, though - and there is much to be discovered in these curiously self-contained and atmospheric chapters - is the fact that Wander is not only giving a vivid sense of camp life but he is charting the Jewish experience. Present in these scenes from hell are Jews from all over Europe. In the title sequence, Meir Bernstein, a once-wealthy farmer and father of five, lies "half rigid", he is being watched by two other prisoners who are waiting for him to die so that they may claim his shoes and his jacket.
His body may be lying in an open train wagon, but his mind is elsewhere. "He sees his wife Chanah, and he sees the five children. They are sitting at the festive table, the mother has lit two candles, and covered her head . . . and Meir Bernstein smiles in delight and he thinks, Chanah, he thinks, Chanele, I am back on the Sabbath, I knew I would be back with you by Passover."
It is a re-imagining of another man's mind. The narrator continues: "All eastern Jews like to talk about holidays. But they are not talking now. They are dreaming. No more true stories from a life that will never come back, no more Hasidic sophistries, bonkes and memories; this is a train in which there are nothing but dreams, fever dreams, crazy dreams till a man's dying breath . . . I know the stories of the dead who lie on the outer platform of the wagon."
Memorable characters are encountered along the way; aside from Mendel the storyteller and Bernstein the farmer is Karel, the failed university student and now dedicated camp medical orderly: "His close-set little eyes, which always looked straining, offended, surprised and a little dismayed - they had the coppery luster of death. A smile was welded onto the shrunken face, mocking, a little embarrassed."
Throughout the book, the narrator looks at faces, remembers voices and happenings, describes a shrug of resignation and, often, evokes a memory. It is an unusual book, neither a novel nor a memoir; it is uneven in its conception, perhaps. Yet it is beautiful and strange; rich in those moments, those passing observations of joy as well as horror, that cause the reader to stop and grasp that this is what it was like to wander through hell - and then survive carrying a powerful clutch of stories.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times