The Past Recaptured

But was it all worth retrieving?
January 08, 2009 - Robert Leiter, Literary Editor

The Mascot, which was recently released in a paperback edition by Plume, is unlike any Holocaust book I've ever run across. The story relayed in its pages is so remarkable, so astonishing in its details, that at first glance you might assume that it's all some evil fairy tale come to life. But the human drama that unfolds in its pages is far too convincing and the portrait of the survivor at its center so piercing that you are not only convinced of its truth, but remain in awe that these events ever transpired in any sort of form whatsoever.

The book begins in a deceptively simple manner. The author, Mark Kurzem, an Australian by birth and a student at Oxford University, was heading to his apartment one May afternoon in 1997. Feeling weighed down by the books that he'd just bought, he simply wanted to get home and immerse himself in his new purchases. But as he let himself in, he found a scrap of paper that had been slipped under his door. It was a stub from a boarding pass for a flight from Melbourne. On the margin was written "Over at Daphnes Dad."

Kurzem immediately recognized his father's handwriting: He wrote all in capitals without punctuation; that was because, the author noted, his father had grown up in Eastern Europe during World War II and had had no formal schooling.

But the author was alarmed at finding the note. He'd just spoken to his parents on the phone a few days earlier; they'd been at home in Melbourne, watching TV. Father and son had spoken about Mark's leaving soon for Tokyo, where he'd spend four months doing research. Then the elder Kurzem grew quiet. Mark promised to call again before his departure. His father gave a nervous little cough, which his son understood to mean that something was bothering him, but neither said a word.

Now his father was in Oxford.

Mark had been trying, without success, to get his parents to come to England, and then perhaps take in a little of Europe -- a place his father hadn't visited since he left in 1949. As Mark said, his mother was always "keen" on the idea, but the elder Kurzem insisted that the past was the past. Australia -- his "lucky country" in the sunshine -- was his home, and he had no desire to go back in time.

'An Aura of Sadness'

Daphne was a next-door neighbor, and Mark went directly there. He found his father nodding off. He and his neighbor tried not to disturb him, but then they heard him stir.

"He had raised his head slightly," Kurzem writes, "and fixed his strong eyes on me with curiosity. I took in his familiar impish features: his arched eyebrows and his high and rosy cheeks gave him a permanently mischievous air. But I was struck by something else -- it was as if I'd captured his image in a photograph and glimpsed an aura of sadness."

Alex Kurzem in his Wehrmacht uniform, 1943.

It was early evening before the pair left Daphne's place, and the entire time Mark had been troubled by his father's impetuousness. As they entered the apartment, Mark reached down to pick up the battered brown case his father always carried, but the older man grabbed it first.

Continues the author: "He had always been protective of his case -- it was an unstated rule that nobody apart from him should ever lay hands upon it. He took it with him everywhere, clasping it so closely under his arm it might have been grafted to his rib cage.

"It was all he'd brought with him from Europe at the end of the Second World War. In it he carried his few meager belongings: mementos from his childhood in Russia and Latvia."

Although the case had been a feature of Mark's childhood, and he and his brothers had known that it contained important photos and documents, no one had ever seen the inside of it. "When he was at home, my father invariably kept the locked case in the bottom of his wardrobe, hidden beneath my Catholic mother's family Bible to give it extra and somewhat superstitious security. He kept the keys to the case in his pocket and out of the reach of me and my brothers ... . Of course, his air of mystery gave the case an almost totemic power over our imaginations that was never more strongly felt than when my father decided to tell us a story from his past, using the case as a prop."

When asked, Mark's father didn't see what was so unusual about him showing up in Oxford. He did confess, however, that Mark's mother knew nothing about this sudden jaunt, thinking he was in Sydney attending to a sick friend. And, for a time, that's all the information Mark received about the visit.

Just Two Words

After a few days together, the elder Kurzem announced that he was leaving, that it was necessary since Mark's mother would be wondering why he hadn't returned from Sydney. The two men then decided to spend their last day together in London, and have a meal at a restaurant that served the kind of Eastern European dishes Mark's father loved. While they were waiting for the food to be served, the elder Kurzem admitted that he'd begun to remember things about his childhood.

Mark was shocked because for so long his father said that he had no memory of his ancestral home or his parents, only his recollection of fleeing into the forest while his mother, his little brother and other townspeople were being slaughtered by the Nazis. He was only 5 years old at the time.

Now he told Mark he remembered two words -- "Panok" and "Koidanov" -- but he didn't know if they were names of people or places. Yet he considered them to be the keys to his past. He hadn't told his wife, not wanting to worry her. He had told his son, he said, because he wanted him to help figure out what they meant.

So begins the journey at the heart of The Mascot. What Mark Kurzem slowly discovers as he delves more deeply into the past is that, after his father's ordeal in the Byelorussian forests, trying not to be eaten by wolves, he was picked up by a band of Latvian SS soldiers. The boy imagined that he would be killed immediately, but for some reason, one of the soldiers took a shine to him, and he was transformed into this military group's mascot. He was given a Nazi uniform that had been tailored especially for him and was made a little "corporal." He even "starred" in a Nazi propaganda film.

This is only the top layer of the story Kurzem tells. Both the past and how it is slowly uncovered are tales of unending drama with truly tragic implications.

Kurzem is not a professional writer per se, so don't expect elegant prose or any real ease in the telling of this complex narrative. It would appear that he plunked a tape recorder in front of his father, then transcribed the man's words verbatim, using large chunks of dialogue to tell the tale, rather than, at times, stepping back and dramatizing it.

Having said that, Kurzem does a number of things remarkably well. The portrait he gives us of his father -- awakened at nights, pacing the floor, literally racked by memories -- is both harrowing and unforgettable. And though not a practiced nonfiction writer, he was smart enough to know that the story had a propulsion all its own, and that he should follow its momentum. Some veterans writers don't know to do that.

In the end, The Mascot is as much a Holocaust story as it is a tale about identity, about learning just who and what you're made of, no matter how rigidly you've tried to reimagine yourself in a sunny new country. And this search for identity does not end in triumph.

When Mark asks his father in the final pages of the book if it would have been better if the past had never been stirred up, the elder Kurzem says: "I honestly don't know, son. Even after 60 years it unsettled me in a way that I could never have imagined. I thought I was in charge of my life but it wasn't so. How I survived even now dictates my life, and all I can do is follow at a safe distance, chained to it. It's as if there are two persons in my body. There is the Alex everybody knows and there's another Alex who was a secret. They'll have to learn to accommodate each other again."

His son adds: "There was no resolution, no absolution, no moving on, no getting over it, no pop-psychology solution. Only an accommodation of the past. My father had somehow known this all along."

Perhaps the saddest thing of all is that Mark's mother (who was not Jewish) was similarly tortured by all this probing into a troubled past and, apparently, died from the stress of the experience, her son thinks, before he could complete the book.

The Mascot, appropriately, is dedicated to her memory.