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In provocative experimental, linguistically playful fiction, a Vienna-born American traced the complex interplay of fashionable Germany and its Nazi past.
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By Alan Cowell
Walter Abish, a much-admired, if not widely read, experimental fiction American whose young people drew a parable of hasty escapes from hostile forces from Nazi-era Austria and revolutionary China, died Saturday in Manhattan. He was 90 years old.
Amos Gelb, his nephew, showed the death Tuesday at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, but specified a cause.
“Although he published little and delayed,” John Updike wrote in a review of M’s memoirs. Abish, “Double Vision: A Self-Portrait,” in The New Yorker in 2004, “projects a unique presence in letters. “
Mr. Abish was in his early forties when his first novel, “Alphabetical Africa” (1974), was published with a provocative and iconoclastic tone. Its first and last chapters use only words beginning with the letter A, and the intermediate passages carry out other linguistic contortions.
A passage under trend “A” is like this:
“Long ago, an archaeologist, Albert, also known as Arthur, skillfully witnessed a case of archaic African armchairs in Antibes, attracting attention as an archaeologist and atheist. Ahhh, atheism. . . anyway, Albert advocated for African ants. Ant? Everyone is stunned. Ant?Absurd. “
Reviewing “Alphabetical Africa” in The New York Times Book Review, poet and translator Richard Howard wrote that the e-book “is more than just a waterfall, even if it is a waterfall, and Walter Abish is a fearless stuntman, willing to reveal his prowess. handheld. -pocus in each and every turn.
Overall, Mr. Abish has 3 novels, 3 collections of short stories, a volume of poems and memoirs.
His most acclaimed novel was “How German Is It” (1979), which explored the complex interplay between fashionable Germany, with its strong post-war economy and orderly society, and its roots in the Nazi era. The e-book won a PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1981, one of the many accolades that marked M. ‘s life. Abish as a researcher at several American universities and colleges. He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.
“How German Is It” is set in a newly created fictional community, Brumholdstein, which turns out to have been built on the site of a German concentration camp. The story centers on two brothers, Ulrich Hargenau, separated from his wife, Paula. , a radical leftist and terrorist, and Helmuth Hargenau, an architect. The brothers’ father was shot in 1944 for plotting against Hitler. (The so-called Hargenau turns out to be a play on the word “haargenau,” which generally means precision. )
At the beginning of the book, Ulrich “looks at his face in the mirror with gravity and sees the afterlife of Germany pass before his eyes,” writes M. Abish. get rid of his long and dark legacy.
In the final scene, Ulrich visits a hypnotist, who convinces him to raise his right arm in a “stiff salute. “
The novel concludes: “Is it conceivable that someone in Germany would raise his right hand, for whatever reason, and not flood into the reminiscence of a dream to end all dreams?
The novel portrays Germany with “something irreparably suspicious,” Updike wrote, adding that “it is given coherence and strength through genuine animosity and a genuine question: how is it possible that the Germans have committed such unspeakable acts?To what extent does the German-only Holocaust? »
Writing about the novel in The Times Book Review in 1981, essayist Betty Falkenberg wrote of M. Abish: “All of his writings are an attack on the reassuring familiarity of things. Now, it turns out that Mr. Abish is saying that it is the risk lurking beneath the surface that attracts new Germans as a way of living, if only secretly, the unassimilated terror of their past.
In “Double Vision,” Mr. Abish recounts his first visit to Germany to announce the German edition of the novel. He describes how he drives through the western city of Wuppertal and how he photographs “German houses ordered directly from “How German Is It” – what could be better?”
It wasn’t until he arrived in Cologne that he discovered that his camera did not include film. “Somehow,” he writes, “it is fitting that I achieved my first impressions of Germany with an empty chamber. “
In the memoirs, Mr. Abish mentions his black triangular eye patch, which is gently seen in photographs on the covers of his e-books, which led to the title of the e-book.
“Obviously,” he writes, “the fact that I have dual vision was one more incentive to decide on the title. “(Double vision of the medical condition is treated with a patch on the eye. )
“My paintings invite interpretation,” Abish told Tablet magazine in 2004. “To provide explanations is to inhibit reader interaction. Often, it’s toArray
Walter Abish was born on December 24, 1931, the only child of a disgustingly wealthy circle of Jewish relatives in Vienna. His father, Adolph, a perfumer whose mother, Friedl (Rubin) Abish, disdained the products in favor of the French perfumes of the Guerlain luxury logo, wrote Mr. Abish in his memoirs.
In the book, Mr. Abish portrays his parents as disconnected from others, making him uncomfortable. While his father celebrated Jewish traditions, he writes, his mother saw them as an impediment to his assimilation into Austrian Gentile society.
Young Walter was on holiday with his mother in the Alps when Germany annexed Austria in 1938, and they soon returned to Vienna. He remembers being pulled from a Viennese playground by Nazi brown shirts while shouting “Juden raus!”: Jews outside. His circle of relatives ordered to leave their comfortable apartment and temporarily began to make plans to escape.
In December, they fled to Nice, France, and then boarded a ship for Shanghai. There, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese forces sent up to 18,000 Jewish immigrants to a so-called Hongkew, which Mr. Abish described as a ghetto.
He recalled that at the end of World War II, Allied fighter jets attacked Shanghai’s docks, warehouses and airfields and also civilian targets, adding an open-air market in Hongkew, where another 250 people and 30 Jews were killed. A few weeks later, after the Japanese overrun, the U. S. Seventh Fleet was able to overcome the U. S. Navy. The U. S. sailed to Shanghai to begin what turned out to be a free, though relatively brief, interregnum before revolutionary communist forces took control.
In the late 1940s, when the inevitability of Mao Zedong’s victory over the ruling Kuomintang became apparent, hostility toward foreigners increased. And in December 1948, Abish’s circle of relatives set sail for the newly created State of Israel, circling Africa and arriving in Israel. across the Mediterranean Sea to a dangerous passage through the Suez Canal.
He returns to this in his memoirs, a narrative traced in two tracks intertwined with chapters entitled “The Future Writer” and “The Writer. “
“It’s an e-book about how to make a writer,” he said in his interview with Tablet.
Abish described his years in Israel as his literary evolution, recalling his time as a reluctant young recruit in an army tank unit and then as a librarian at the American Library, run by the defunct U. S. News Agency. USA
“Is it inevitable that the long-term, variable, fickle, even disloyal editor when it comes to getting a concept for a story, will use his former friends and lovers as a possible curtain for a long-term text,” he wrote in a passage about a woman he called Allison. And, later, in a passage about a woman named Bilha, she asks, “Does the editor love the long-term conceptual text?
In 1957, the circle of relatives retreated and he arrived in New York; he became a U. S. citizen in 1960. Over the next decade, he published a collection of poetry, “Duel Site” (1970), as well as “Alphabetical Africa”. He also published 3 collections of short stories: “Minds Meet” (1975), “In the Perfect Future” (1977) and “99: The New Meaning” (1990).
A definitive novel, “Eclipse Fever”, set basically in Mexico City, published in 1993. The book, centered on a Mexican literary critic who suspects his translator wife is having an affair with an American novelist, opens a window into the global social and cultured world of a privileged intelligentsia in Mexico City. The complaint is lukewarm at best.
“Mr. Abish’s protagonist is, even to a literary critic, boring,” wrote critic James Atlas in The Times Book Review.
Mr. Abish, who lived in Manhattan, married Cecile Gelb, an American photographer and sculptor, in Tel Aviv in 1953. She survives him. They had no children.
Among his accolades, Mr. Abish is a member of the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has held educational positions at Columbia, Brown, and Yale; the University at Buffalo and Empire State College, any of the components of the State University of New York; Cooper Union, in Manhattan; and Wheaton College, Illinois.
Some of the most poignant moments in M. ‘s memoirs. Abish would possibly be a six-month stay spent in Germany still divided in 1987, visiting the Dachau death camp near Munich and conveying instant impressions. When he visited Berlin, two years before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he wrote: “I traveled blindly to the walled city, unprepared to dismantle the wall I had erected on myself.
In “How German Is He?”, Abish also explores in fiction the tensions that history imposes on Germans in fashion, leading some to deny Holocaust archives as they are preserved in movies, paper, and elsewhere.
“What do we think?” question. ” Viewers, young and old, face the grim challenge of whether or not to settle for the old filmed images of skeleton-like men and women in their uniforms striped with prisoners, staring at the blank camera. Did this happen, or were those photographs conscientiously manipulated, ingeniously invented just for the purpose of denigrating everything German?
Maia Coleman contributed to the report.
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