In The Apothecary, Martha Blum returns to complete the story of siblings Felix and Süssel, introduced in her debut novel, The Walnut Tree. Blum's publishing history is remarkable. Eighty-six when The Walnut Tree was published, she is now 93. Yet perhaps this is not so remarkable, for it must take the accumulated wisdom of many years to write a book such as The Apothecary, a novel of such richness and compassion, and uncompromising modernity in both style and subject.
The Walnut Tree was Süssel's story; The Apothecary is Felix's. Felix is the self-described "rich, spoilt son of a beautiful mother" and a father who "demanded the science, the modern truth, the 19th-century illusion that absolutely everything is in man's grasp." Handsome and charming, Felix is worshipped by his mother and sister. The lush, bosomy maids who tend to his cultured Jewish home happily comply with his every desire, material or physical.
Felix, though, is no shallow womanizer. His spiritual and emotional home genuinely lies with the women in his life: "Mine was the female world of laughter, banter, clothes and poetry, of my mother." This golden world is swept away, as everything was, with the Nazi onslaught.
And here is where the novel begins, in Czernowitz, 1941, an old and beautiful city known as "Little Vienna" in the Carpathian foothills. The controlling Soviets and advancing Germans are both threats to the Jews. The Soviets have disenfranchised them, but the Germans have murder on their minds.
This may sound like the set-up for a "traditional" Holocaust narrative, with its impending cattle cars and camps, but The Apothecary treads a different path. Only Part One of its three parts is set during the war years, and its characters remain out of Nazi clutches. Parts Two and Three are set in postwar Bucharest in the 1950s and Vienna in the '60s.
One key to The Apothecary lies in its epigraph from Gotthold Lessing's dramatic poem Nathan the Wise (1779): "Let each one strive to emulate this love,/ This love so free from every prejudice." Lessing, a non-Jew, was extolling religious tolerance. Blum expands this concept to encompass an acknowledgment of problematic human behaviour – religious ambiguity, sexuality, even brutality – and to say, for all that, we are human. This might enrich some readers, while disturbing or even angering others.
Take Blum's depiction of relationships. A recurring motif is the undertone of physical attraction between mother and son, brother and sister. Felix's connection with his mother is so profound that their hug is "a unison so intense: of taste, of all things sensuous." Their relationship is not incestuous, but the depth of their emotional and intellectual connection provokes a physical link that will never be realized.
Nevertheless, according to Felix's lover Selma, who had an incestuous relationship with her brother, "True love is love." Or, as another character says, "I'm all for Oedipal complexes. . . . It helps one to see the world through a woman's eyes." Which is, for the most part, how Felix does live.
Even more risky is Blum's compassionate but unsentimental portrayal of Gerhard, husband of Felix's former lover Martina and an Einsatzgruppen member during the war. The Einsatzgruppen were mobile killing units that murdered Jews, communists, Gypsies and other "undesirables." Felix hears Gerhard's story as they sip cognac together, brothers in spirit. Blum challenges the reader to accept Gerhard's full humanity.
The other key lies in language. After the Holocaust, Czernowitz lyric poet Paul Celan – on whom Felix appears partly to be modelled – wrote: "Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language."
This is a book of fragments, of moments, of lives and possessions lost and bound up to live anew through the word. The power to create, or recreate, through language can be summed up in Felix's words: "He loved the word in all its manifestations, as idiom, as revelation, and above all as expression of the inner self."
Blum's narrative structure literally expresses this manifesto. The shifting times, places and multiple points of view – sometimes from paragraph to paragraph – echo the mental process that permits one to speak to a friend while thinking of an errand, a fragment of childhood and death, all at the same time.
The Apothecary can stand on its own. However, its thematic links and characters are considerably enriched when paired with The Walnut Tree. Neither book is an easy read, if by this we mean a book that allows the mind to run on automatic pilot. The Apothecary demands an attentive reader to appreciate Blum's poetic prose and insight into the essence of the inner self.
Dvoira Yanovsky is an English teacher in the Okanagan Valley.
