The Living and the Lost by Ellen Feldman; St. Martin’s Griffin (c) 2021; ISBN 9781250-780829; 336 pages, $17.99.
By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO — This is a novel about a survivor’s guilt. Millie Mosbach, a German-American Jew returns to Berlin immediately after World War II to participate in the denazification program administered by the U.S. Army. She and her brother had left Germany while still teenagers; American benefactors had arranged for her to attend Bryn Mawr College on a scholarship. Foregoing higher education, David was quick to enlist in the Army; he wanted to fight Germans.
The Mosbach siblings had left behind their parents and a younger sister, Sarah, and while they didn’t know what had become of them; they suspected the worst. The fact that her family had been at the mercy of the Nazis left Millie with a burning hatred, not only for the Nazis but for all the people of Germany, who she figured either participated in or stood by the mass slaughter of her people.
But not all of her loathing is for the Germans; much of it is for herself. How could she and David have gone ahead to the United States without their parents or sister? Why should she and David be alive and they….?
As the novel progresses, we flip between the years just prior to the war, when Millie and David emigrated from Germany, and the years just after when both — because of German being their native tongue — are serving in the Occupation Forces of the U.S. Army.
Millie’s job is to interview Germans seeking civilian jobs in postwar Germany. She must make sure that the U.S. doesn’t unknowingly restore to power any former Nazis. She is a good interrogator; she can spot a lie, or an evasion, very quickly. The problem is that she assumes everyone that comes before her probably had been guilty of something. Blaming the Germans for whatever had happened to her family, she was unable to muster the requisite objectivity needed to separate the incorrigible from the redeemable.
She is not alone in her unit; almost all her co-workers also are former German Jews who made it to the safety of America before the onset of World War II. Almost all of them have stories of family loss; regrets; and nightmares.
Millie’s civilian rank is equivalent to that of a captain, and with fellow officers she establishes relationships, professional, social, and romantic. She has nothing but contempt for the German frauleins who work as secretaries in the office, and considers any American male who consorts with a German woman to be a despicable traitor.
Much of her animus toward the Germans displaces her hatred of herself for surviving.
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Donald H. Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com