Gretel and the Great War by Adam Ehrlich Sachs

In November 1919 a mute young woman was found wandering the streets of Vienna. She was handed over to the care of a neurologist, who wrote up her case in an issue of Nervenkrankheiten. No lesion, he concluded, could explain her condition, nothing organic, only a childhood deprived of language. Since she could not say who she was or what had happened to her, he welcomed correspondence from anyone with information about her past. He received a single response, from a patient at a Carinthian sanatorium who claimed to be her father. The girl's name, the man wrote, is Margerete--Gretel--and her childhood, whatever its privations, hardly lacked for language! Indeed, until his present confinement put an end to it, he used to tell her a bedtime story each and every night. He wrote now only to resume that cherished ritual. The doctor was asked to read her the enclosed story, titled A: THE ARCHITECT. She would understand it. The next day brought another story, B: THE BALLET MASTER, and the next day another, C: THE CHOIRMASTER, until there were twenty-six of them. Then they stopped, and the man wasn't heard from again.

I got to see Adam Ehrlich Sachs read a section from his new novel, Gretel and the Great War, a few weeks ago. The section he chose to read is among the best of the 26 short pieces, arranged alphabetically: O, the obstetrician. In this section, an obstetrician is brought to the Duchess to take care of her baby, only to find that the baby in question is a porcelain doll. Her other doctors lie to her, but the obstetrician is too upright; he informs her that her child is a doll. Because he proves himself trustworthy, she demands he takes care of her real child--but this, too, turns out to be a doll. The demand is no reward, it's a burden, and his practice suffers from the rumors that surround the doll; as a consequence he embraces his Slavic roots and revolution against the Austrian state.

In this one story, you can see all of principles that govern Gretel and the Great War. The 26 stories, ostensibly written by a father to his mute daughter, have the air of a children's primer, and many of the stories do deal with children and their relationship with adults--the Duchess and her doll, the choirmaster and his choir boys, the toymaker who is beaten to death by the boys on whom he wishes to bestow his toys. They are fable-like in both their innocence and malice. They are anything but simple, and often contain several stories nested inside one another, so that a story that seems to be about, say, a communist revolutionary, actually turns out to be about the armless, legless freakshow performer who secretly turns out to be her father. And yet, as they unspool, they lurch toward the political. "The Duke" and "The Duchess" may sound like fairy tale characters, but there are real Dukes and Duchesses in the world, who are behind real violence and war.

As the stories go on, you're supposed to understand the way in which they are all connected, and how the mute woman Gretel fits into the larger puzzle (as a child, she witnessed the tragic accident of her dancer mother on stage, an accident in which the other characters, the choirmaster, the kindergarten teacher, the lighting technician, are all tightly implicated). I think I really could have used a diagram here. (I got easily confused by what I think are two tragic performances at the City Theater, one which burns it down and one which leads to Gretel's mother's accident, but I can't really tell you how those two moments are connected.) But perhaps it's less important than to get the organization right in your head than to see the themes the connect them: the betrayal of children by adults, the nostalgic desire for simplicity, the way all the various characters seem to end up at the sanatorium of one Dr. Krakauer (are we meant to understand that all these people are, in a sense, just made-up avatars of the father himself?).

The total picture is one of a city, interwar Vienna, descending into hatred and madness. Sachs underlines this in the final sections, "Y for Yid" and "Z for Zionist." No longer are the alphabetical characters identified by their profession, but by terms of race and religion. The "Yid," having taken his daughter--Gretel--to the theater, begins to look around and see that the faces of his neighbors, too, have been replaced by nothing but "German-Austrians," and they in turns look at him and his daughter and see nothing but "noisy Yids." This is the logical endpoint of the madness: the fever of racial hatred that will soon ignite into a war even greater than the one that just ended. The brief "Zionist" section ends on a note of tragic ambivalence, a hope for escape from the madness that, we fear, may only be one of its symptoms.