A Sea Change
Michael Arditti Maia Press, 304pp, £8.99
ISBN 1904559212
This year, two remarkable novels have taken the Holocaust as their background. One, Irène Némirovsky's Suite Française, attracted huge attention as a lost masterpiece, discovered in a suitcase 65 years after her murder at Auschwitz. Michael Arditti's novel, published by the tiny Maia Press, is equally in danger of being lost - but the blame here lies with mainstream publishers.
A Sea Change is based on the tragic real-life voyage of the SS St Louis, which left Nazi Germany for Havana in the summer of 1939, carrying almost a thousand Jewish refugees to what they hoped was a new life in the sun. Among them, in Arditti's telling, is 15-year-old Karl Frankel, the priggish, snobbish son of a wealthy department store owner. After living in what he tells us proudly was one of the finest houses in Berlin, hung with old masters and complete with its own synagogue, Karl is not at all pleased by what Hitler has brought about. Clever, handsome and spoilt, he despises his drunken father, who has abandoned his mother, and before long he also despises most of his fellow passengers. Karl is "always embarrassed, never ashamed", and a figure of fun to them (and us): imagine a snooty young Nabokov coming up against Howard Jacobson.
Humiliated and rejected in the past, Karl does not welcome his race or religion. As his mother explains, "he's at a difficult age", by turns argumentative, pompous, sentimental and cynical. He fancies himself in love with his sister's governess, blonde Sophie, but then experiences the real thing with Johanna, the illegitimate daughter of a Jew travelling with her Catholic mother in the hope of meeting her long-lost father. Their increasingly passionate and erotic meetings will affect Karl for the rest of his life, but almost as influential are his encounters with his own lost father, and the sympathetic, God-like Captain. As the ship crosses the ocean, the passengers are buffeted by emotions as well as sea-sickness, and each one of them changes - Karl most of all.
With Johanna's help, he comes to see that both his family's faith and his father are very different from his original, resentful conception of them. On board the SS St Louis, Johanna herself forms "a very different picture: one of kindness, resilience and laughter", having previously associated Jews with negativity and "forever harking back to long-ago persecutions". Karl undertakes his bar mitzvah, the solemn ceremony by which Jewish boys become men, then celebrates it by losing his virginity. The luxurious St Louis, equipped with both swimming pool and cinema, is one of many fictional ships of fools explored by novelists from Barry Unsworth to Beryl Bainbridge, though here it is less a useful microcosm of society than a real-life backdrop for a sentimental education of the saddest kind. Refused entry into US and Canadian ports, the ship was eventually forced to return to Hamburg and the gathering storm of Nazi Germany. Most of the passengers of the SS St Louis - as we know, but the protagonists of this exceptional novel do not - are as doomed as those of the Titanic.
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