Kahn & Engelmann

Kahn & Engelmann

Hans Eichner

Biblioasis

At the age of seventy-nine, Hans Eichner, a pro­fes­sor of German lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture at the University of Toronto, pub­lished his first novel, Kahn & Engelmann, in German; it was hailed as a mas­ter­piece in Europe. In April 2009, a mas­ter­ful English trans­lation by Jean M. Snook appeared in Canada, pub­lished by Biblioasis, three days after the death of Hans Eichner at the age of eighty-seven. The pub­lish­ers call the novel a “major work of Holocaust lit­er­a­ture,” a fair enough eval­u­a­tion. But read­ers in North America will find it first to be a novel of Europe in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury: the story will be famil­iar in bits and pieces to any­one hav­ing read or heard of Musil, Kafka, Kraus and other lumi­nar­ies of Vienna before the Nazi storm. Eichner’s nar­ra­tive impli­cates con­tem­po­rary read­ers as none of the oth­ers can do today by remain­ing a fam­ily saga, com­pli­cated by fam­ily busi­nesses, messy divorces, rival­ries, dis­putes, sui­cides, suc­cess and fail­ure, all of it com­pelling to any­one with a fam­ily. This saga, how­ever, is dri­ven not by “char­ac­ter” but by his­tory, by the neces­si­ties of the “trav­el­ling life” thrust upon Jews over the cen­turies and of the grow­ing spec­tre of the Nazi hor­ror mate­ri­al­iz­ing finally with the explo­sion into Austria and then all of Europe. Members of the narrator’s fam­ily (like the author’s fam­ily) escape the Holocaust by sev­eral routes, to live as sur­vivors always with an infected after­taste of his­tory in their mouths. Eichner’s nar­ra­tive power is unsur­passed in any lan­guage. His sparse dia­logue car­ries the story with­out effort: we move eas­ily (and uneasily) from present (the last year of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury) to past, wind­ing in and out of the decades. The mun­dane processes of life pro­vide the sinews of epic. Eichner can quote Goethe, rhap­sodize upon Beethoven and tell folksy tales of wan­der­ing rab­bis. He is un­afraid of the ridicu­lous, the low­brow, the sting in the tail. At the end he writes of the rabbi of Radsin: “When the corpses had been taken out, the rabbi still heard a sound in the car. He climbed in and looked: God was cow­er­ing in a cor­ner of the car, cry­ing. The rabbi refused to com­fort him.”