Book Review
Author Solly Kaplinski (3rd from right) at his Book Launch in Israel.
Reading Solly Kaplinski’s ‘A WORLD OF PAINS’ on the Holocaust, two images of a personal nature came to mind. The first goes back to 2001, when I stood alongside Solly who was Director of the International Relations English Desk at Yad Vashem at the time and laid a wreath on behalf of the Southern African community at the annual ceremony on Yom HaShoah at Yad Vashem. I recall thinking at the time, how by a twist of geography the Southern African community had escaped the horrors of history. Reading this novella, it’s evident Solly had not “escaped”! He inherited the traumas of his parents.
The second image arose noting in the book’s ‘Acknowledgements’ the name of Cape Town psychiatrist – Tuvia Zabow “for his insights and psychiatric expertise.” I recall while practicing as a defense attorney in Cape Town prior to immigrating to Israel in 1986, having frequently cross-examined Tuvia, who as Cape Town’s chief state psychiatrist, was required to determine whether those accused of the most heinous crimes had the mental capacity to determine right from wrong and therefore able to formulate intent. I recall that in all my many cases over many years, never once did Tuvia find my client unfit to stand trial for reason of inability to formulate mental intent. The moral abyss between responsibility and retribution pervades from the first chapter in the Ponar forest in 1942 to the final chapter in a shiva (house of mourning) home in the USA in 1996, and leaves the reader with two core questions: “Can there ever be forgiveness, and what are the appropriate punishments for unimaginable crimes?”
The son of Holocaust survivors – Solly’s father survived the Shoah as a member of the Bielski partisans – the novella proved a long emotionally painful journey for the author. The reason in revisiting the past, Solly answers in his prologue poem:
I owe it to you Mom and Dad
Even though you rest in the earth
To go home
I owe it to you my Bobba and Zeida
Whom I never knew
Whose warm embrace and loving caress I could only imagine
Who were geshiesen
And geshaysen
Into a mass burial pit in the Ponal forests
To go home
Going “home” for Solly means:
To remember
To bear witness
To be the link
To pay homage
To take care of the past.
At the book launch in Israel, this former headmaster of Herzlia School Cape Town reveals that before he led a delegation in 1986 of South African schoolchildren to Poland on ‘The March of the Living’, “I could not fathom the silence of my parents. I always knew they were different from others.”
In a poem he notes:
The nightmares the screams
painful recurring dreams
the fear of the doorbell
the panic at the shrill telephone ring
“could never quite cover up the games they played to over-protect my brother and me.”
A group of South Africans pray at the site of a death pit in Lithuania where Jews in 1941 were lined up and shot by Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators.
The novella opens with a young mother clutching her baby daughter before an extermination pit in the Ponar Forest outside of Vilnius in 1942. “How can you do this to me, to mein kind, to my baby,” she pleads from the young man who was once her classmate and with whom she had even shared some physical intimacy.”
That man who ended her life and that of her baby in the most horrific way, is by 1996 an esteemed human rights lawyer in the USA who is about to receive the Presidential Award and is a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Peace for his humanitarian work – particularly with children.
Long expunged from his consciousness, his past starts to catch up with him, sparked by a case he takes on where the facts of the killing of a baby are similar to the role he played at Ponar Forest. His client wants to plead guilty – he admits he is a monster and feels he deserves the punishment of the court. Where does this leave his unpunished lawyer receiving accolade after accolade for his humanitarianism?
When finally the curtain of the repressed past is drawn and the ‘macher’ (Yiddish: A person of power and influence) stands naked as a monster to himself, what will Jonathan Varnas do as he steps up to the podium to accent the Nobel Prize for Peace? Can he expect forgiveness from others if he cannot forgive himself?
The shattering ending of the book reflects the author’s “anger” that:
“No one apologised to me for what happened to my Bobba and Zeida.”
“Yes,” says Solly, “while ensuing generations of Germans after the Second World War may have atoned for the sins of their fathers but what of the killers themselves? They literally got away with murder! I often wondered why there were very few of them, if any, who expressed feelings of guilt or sorrow for the crimes they committed.”
Noting how so many of the murderers would emerge “successful politicians, learned judges, accomplished lawyers, outstanding doctors, wealthy industrialists, respected school principals or dignified ministers of the church but never a word of regret or remorse – no acknowledgement!”
‘A World of Pains” is Solly’s way of addressing this injustice and serves as a literary memorial to those who perished in the forests of Vilnuis.
Two of those were Solly’s Bobba and Zeida.
About the author
Solly Kaplinski lives and works in Jerusalem.
A graduate of Herzlia School in Cape Town, Habonim and the Universities of Cape Town and South Africa, Solly commenced his professional career in education as a school guidance counselor and clinical psychologist. He was the Headmaster of Herzlia School as well as Jewish Day Schools in Canada before making Aliyah with his wife in 2000. Formerly the Director of the International Relations English Desk at Yad Vashem, he is currently Executive Director, Overseas Joint Ventures, at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.
Preview YouTube video Book Launch ; Solly Kaplinski : A World Of Pains
