The Memory Chalet [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

This is the kind of book that I delight in discovering -- one that exceeds all my expectations, that makes in a pleasure to slow down and digest the author's skill with words and his deeply personal and ruthlessly honest ruminations on his own past and the events he lived through, as well as the world he inhabits. The fact that when Tony Judt composed this memoir-like collection of essays (or "feuilletons", as he describes them) he was dying of ALS simply adds an element of poignancy. But the deceptively simple essays are a way of exploring important issues: important to him and important to the rest of us as human beings trying to find ways to coexist with each other and confront our own mortality in less dramatic ways than Judt was forced to do by his disease.

Judt delicately backs into his subjects. Rather than writing about class relationships, he chooses to write about the institution of "bedders" (at Cambridge) or "scouts" (at Oxford), and his relationship with them and that of later generations of students with them; the ways in which those students prided themselves on being classless and yet by doing so, ended up violating something intangible that those college servants valued far more than social mobility -- being respected for who and what they were. He writes about his father and the latter's relationship with Citroen cars and it serves to explain his father's personality and his parents' dysfunctional relationship (I empathized, as the cracks in my own parents' marriage surfaced earliest and most often in long car trips) but also ends up as a commentary on the role of the car in our society. "The car, at the height of its hegemony, stood for individualism, liberty, privacy, separation and selfishness in their most socially dysfunctional forms... But it was quite fun at the time." He tackles austerity, gender relations, the delights of train travel -- all in the form of short ruminations that carry far more punch than their length might indicate. Indeed, one of the joys of this anthology is that it forced me to slow down my reading and really think hard about not only the words on the page, but about Judt's experiences, my own reactions to them and the deeper messages. In the same way that Judt's disease forced him to slow down and concentrate on the truly important things he wished to communicate, his readers get to slow down themselves and focus -- without having to confront the sheer hideousness of that disease. That is no small gift.

Several of these essays stood out to me as being important distillations of what might be thought of as modern-day humanist thought. Judt writes of taking pride in experiencing Paris in '68, amidst the wave of revolutionary zeal. But looking back, he realizes what he was overlooking: the events in Poland and Prague, where students his age were trying to fight against true repression. His comment is typically pungent: "In our own eyes at least, we were a revolutionary generation. Pity we missed the revolution." Indeed, throughout this collection, Judt pulls no punches. "You are what your grandparents suffered," he opines, in connection with what he views as "para-academic" study programs. Political correctness is not his forte; thoughtful humanity most certainly is, however. I particularly enjoyed the extremely thoughtful essay "Edge People", in which Judt discusses the issue of identity, and the need to find a way to combine it with a sense of our common humanity. "Fierce unconditional loyalties... have come to terrify me," he writes. "The thin veneer of civilization rests upon what may well be an illusory faith in our common humanity."

These essays are gems, and I can see myself coming back to them time and again to re-read them even more slowly. I'm grateful that this book was a gift in hardcover, and so can be placed on a shelf where, when spotted, it can be pulled down in order to do just that, something that can be too difficult with a Kindle book. Still, I expect to end up buying this for my Kindle as well, because this is the rare kind of book that is so thoughtful and thought-provoking that I want to have a copy with me to dip into whenever I need to remind myself that it's possible to be a "public intellectual" without becoming pompous and self-important. How many public intellectuals have enough sense of humor about themselves to public ponder the reason their mid-life crisis led them to study Czech rather than buy a red Porsche?

One of my favorite books of the year; this would earn six stars if that were possible, and is highly recommended, even to those who have found some of Judt's other works too politically opinionated (eg Ill Fares the Land. With Judt's death in August of this year, we lost that increasingly rara avis -- a clear thinker, with an ability to communicate his ideas in crisp prose, and a heart beneath the intellect.

This is a wonderfully written, beautiful, poignant book, all the more poignant because of the author's recent death in August, 2010 from ALS. Judt's POSTWAR was one of the best books I've ever read about that period. His vast knowledge, his ability to write about complex issues and events in clear concise language, and his rare ability to make the material interesting and entertaining will be sorely missed. Above all, I will miss the common sense, the decency, and humanity that comes through in this, his last book. Rest in peace. Read this book, you'll be glad you did.

In 2008 historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS. Two years later he was dead at age 62. In the interval that marked the course of his dreadful disease, Judt discovered, as he struggled wakeful through the long hours of darkness, that he was "writing whole stories in my head in the course of the night," fashioning them out of fragments of memory he stored in compartments that matched the rooms of a Swiss chalet he had visited as a 10-year-old. The product is this volume of more than two dozen penetrating essays (most of them previously published in the New York Review of Books) --- insightful, reflective, caustic, humorous --- that range over the course of a vital, productive, if too brief, life.

The opening section of THE MEMORY CHALET captures Judt's reminiscences of his life growing up in London after World War II, skillfully evoking that period while at the same time moving effortlessly from personal recollection to commentary on broader social and cultural issues. In "Austerity," he recalls the "characteristic shortages and grayness of postwar Britain" but recognizes that "austerity was not just an economic condition: it aspired to a public ethic," contrasting that with contemporary life in which we have "substituted endless commerce for public purpose, and expect no higher aspirations from our leaders." In a more lighthearted vein is "Food," Judt's paean to the pleasures of Jewish and Indian cuisine, a stark contrast to standard English fare ("Just because you grow up on bad food, it does not follow that you lack nostalgia for it."). "Cars" pays a poignant tribute to his father's obsession with the Citroën: "What other men sought and found in alcohol and mistresses, my father sublimated into his love affair with a car company --- which no doubt accounts for my mother's instinctive hostility to the whole business." Travel --- by bus, train and ferry --- is a recurring theme, not surprising for a man who described his final illness as like living in a prison that grows smaller by six inches every day.

The central group of essays range widely over Judt's education, formal and informal. There's a portrait of "Joe," his German teacher, "a gaunt, misanthropic survivor of some unspecified wartime experience," whose brutal teaching methods "would be impossible today." Yet in the end, Judt, who spent a lifetime teaching, concludes that "being well taught is the only thing worth remembering from school." An unsentimental account of his teenage experiences on a kibbutz explains what turned him against the idea of collectivism and into a "universalist social democrat." Several essays touch on the protest movements of the 1960s. Admonishing the lack of seriousness demonstrated by his baby boomer contemporaries, he writes, "We did not change the world; rather, the world changed obligingly for us."

The final section of THE MEMORY CHALET offers an assortment of perspectives on the subject of identity, focusing on Judt's adopted homeland, the United States. Having driven cross country seven times, by his count, his sense of this country was broad and deep, affectionate and yet without illusions: "It is an old-new land engaged in perennial self-discovery (usually at others' expense): an empire sheathed in preindustrial myths, dangerous and innocent." "Mid-Life Crisis" explains his decision to learn Czech at age 32, a decision that had a profound effect on his life as a "public intellectual" (a term he professes to find "unhelpful"). In "Toni," a piece whose ending is so stunning (and so fitting) it would border on the criminal to reveal it, he explores the question of Jewish identity. Though Judt was a nonobservant Jew whose views on Israel (he was a harsh critic of Zionism and favored a single-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) provoked considerable criticism in his later years, his insights on what it means to be Jewish in the post-Holocaust world are worth quoting at length:

"I choose to invoke a Jewish past that is impervious to orthodoxy: that opens conversations rather than closes them. Judaism for me is a sensibility of collective self-questioning and uncomfortable truth-telling...of awkwardness and dissent for which we were once known. It is not enough to stand at a tangent to other peoples' conventions; we should also be the most unforgiving critics of our own. I feel a debt of responsibility to this past. It is why I am Jewish."

That same sensibility is the hallmark of Tony Judt's incisive mind as it shimmers across the pages of this slim, but deeply impressive, collection. Without the limitations imposed by his terrible affliction, who knows if he would have produced these essays. That he did is an extraordinary tribute to him and a priceless bequest to us.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)