All The Write Stuff: Uriel Through Eleanor

Unlike any memoir you've ever read. As absurd as it is devastating. A literal tug of war between competing and compelling versions of the truth.

Uriel Through Eleanor

by Brian Prousky

Genre: Historical Fiction

Uriel “Uri” Katz, World War Two veteran, concentration camp liberator, devout atheist, contrarian, cynic and lifelong bachelor, places an ad in a newspaper seeking a “typist” to assist him in writing his memoir and receives only one reply, from a woman, named Eleanor, who negotiates a deal with him that includes room and board.

Within days of her arrival, Eleanor begins inserting herself into Uri’s story. So much so that she eventually becomes one of its main characters. And while Uri is dismayed and, at times, exasperated by this turn of events, he’s also grown accustomed to Eleanor’s company and cooking, and, as such, begrudgingly puts up with the semi-appropriation of his memoir.

Though what remains imperceptible to Uri—until the novel’s final, thrilling pages—is that Eleanor's appearance in his life wasn't coincidental; it was manufactured by her. And that the two have been intricately linked since the day he marched into the concentration camp.

Brian Prousky’s dazzling new book is memoir-writing turned on its head. It’s a story about storytelling itself. About the power of language to shape and misshape history. And about the equal perils of sharing and not sharing deep-held secrets.

INTERVIEW

Can you, for those who don't know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an author?

I felt incidental among, and largely ignored by, kids my age. I certainly wasn’t part of any in-group or popular in any way. I was also physically unwell for long periods of time and spent that time alone in my bedroom. At home, lots of people having lots of fun swirled around me and that only reinforced my feeling of isolation. So my internal life, which I discovered had no limits imposed on it and was controllable in a way my outer life wasn’t and could be rich and imaginative, became a kind of stand-in for what I was missing out on. I also loved music. In fact, my first influences were folk and rock stars, those who seemed to have something important to say about the world or, more precisely, those who interpreted it in a rather cynical, penetrating, fearless way. Bob Dylan, in particular, blew my mind. I didn’t just want to write songs like him, I wanted to be him. Unfortunately, I was a hopeless musician. Every instrument I tried to play sounded like I was torturing it. Or maybe worse, if there is such a thing. So I turned to poetry thinking I could at least emulate the lyrics (thankfully you don’t have to blow into, or strum, a pencil). I ended up writing a lot of poetry when I was young, which I suppose is a fairly typical rite of passage for a future writer. Of course I later threw away all those poems, after rereading them with the withering perspective of hindsight.

At the same time, I was also reading a lot. Poetry and fiction, The poetry, especially freeform, seemed within my reach as a young writer; the relative brevity, the absence of rules, the open-endedness. Novels, on the other hand, seemed as unreachable and complex as distant universes. I couldn’t fathom possessing the patience or discipline to write one. Then I read Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner and discovered writers with the sensibilities of poets. I read sentences that were so wildly unconventional, twisting and turning, veering off in unexpected directions before corralling themselves for a moment and then, with renewed energy, doing their beautiful zigzags all over again. Those sentences left me breathless. I knew right away I wanted to do the same thing. I began reading an entire book every night and at some point during that feverish period in my life, discovered Saul Bellow and suddenly all those previous, magnificent sentences I’d read now seemed like penultimate peaks on a mountain with his occupying the summit. I think I’ve read The Adventures of Augie March five times just to soak in its cadence. I doubted I could ever come close to writing with that type of depth of understanding of the human condition and raw electricity infusing every sentence, but I knew I was going to die trying. Later in life I had the similar experience of discovering something worth aspiring to when I first read Roberto Bolano. He seemed to spill entire libraries into his books. I believe his sentences occupy the same summit as the ones written by Saul Bellow.

What is something unique/quirky about you?

I have an obsessive ability to concentrate on a single thing for an inhumanly long amount of time. I suppose this is a helpful quirk for a writer despite how unhealthy it is in virtually every other aspect of life. There have been days when I’ve sat down to write and, without any sense of the passage of time, eight hours have passed. One would assume this means a steady and plentiful output of words. However, I’ve just as often produced only a few sentences as I have a few (or more) pages. Thankfully, my wife, with her abundant commonsense, will often scream at me from another room to get up, brush off the cobwebs, and go for a walk.

Tell us something really interesting that's happened to you!

I was in Iceland about eight years ago and went to a local swim club at five a.m. and swam laps in a geothermally-heated pool. That isn’t the interesting part. This is: eighty-year-old men and women swam infinitely longer and faster than me and many looked more youthful than me. When I was done, I stood on the deck as they continued to speed past me in both directions and had an epiphany of sorts—that if I ever wanted to achieve true happiness, I should exercise alone (or with an unhealthy, overweight friend).

What are some of your pet peeves?

I collect pet peeves like people collect baseball cards or stamps or coins. So we’d have to schedule a day-long meeting for me to have enough time to articulate them. The newest pet peeve I’ve added to my prodigious collection is how few people there are who convey meaningful information in few words. And how many people there are who convey meaningless information in many words.

Where were you born/grew up at?

I was born, and grew up, in Toronto. Which in the province of Ontario. Which is in Canada. In case anyone outside of my country has a weird unmet need for geographical precision.

I also spent a couple years in New York City. While attending graduate school. It snowed only one day while I was living there. Which meant the climate grossly, perhaps purposefully, underachieved in making me feel at home.

If you knew you'd die tomorrow, how would you spend your last day?

Paralyzed by regret probably. Trying and failing to convey something profound about life to, and adequately express my love for, my wife and children. Though, ideally, with ample debauchery.

Who is your hero and why?

My son and daughter are uncompromisingly, courageously pursuing their dream careers instead of putting them off, like I did with mine, for far too many years. For that, they’re my heroes.

And also Bob Dylan. The reason for which I explain in great detail in my book, Auden Triller (Is A Killer).

What kind of world ruler would you be?

The metric version. Same goes if I was a world meterstick. Just to annoy my American friends.

What are you passionate about these days?

Poetry. I’m well into writing my third (and second publishable) book of poetry. The working title is, Bending In The Direction Of Her Sentences. It’s a series of spare raw poems about a doomed relationship. I read a lot of Elizabeth Browning and Louise Glück beforehand. Which helped me tap into the right mood—inspired and demoralized.

What do you do to unwind and relax?

I’ll for sure let you know when I come up with something effective. Or even promising. Music is, at best, a temporary solace. Truthfully, my first thought was watching the Toronto Maple Leafs play hockey. My second thought was that that’s actually persecution.

How to find time to write as a parent?

When my children were younger, I wrote through the night, between (and sometimes during) meetings at work. Really, whenever I had any precious free time.

Describe yourself in 5 words or less!

Uncomfortable in my skin. Devastatingly funny. And, clearly, someone who requires six, not five, words to describe himself.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

When, in grade five, I wrote a love letter to a female classmate. In retrospect, it was good preparation for the rejection letters I would later receive from publishers.

Do you have a favorite movie?

Ordinary People. Which is anything but ordinary. It’s an extraordinary portrayal of a family shattered by grief. The scene in which they pose for a family picture at a Christmas party might be the best scene in the history of cinema.

Which of your novels can you imagine made into a movie?

The Anna Geller Invention is my love letter to poetry. It’s magically-real and whimsical and would, I believe, lend itself to a killer fantastical satire.

What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?

My son and I travelled back and forth by car through Northern Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota to visit Duluth and Hibbing, where Bob Dylan was born and grew up. To say it was a religious experience would only serve to elevate religion to a perch on which it doesn’t deserve or belong.

Excerpt

We proceeded through the guards’ section of the camp and along a final, curved, narrow road, and emerged onto the wider main road that intersected countless prisoners’ barracks. It was like emerging into a different world. One that bore little resemblance to the world we’d occupied our whole lives. The smell that was hinted at since we’d entered the camp—a blend of vomit, shit, uncollected garbage, something indefinable and similar to our own unwashed bodies but different in its magnitude, like it had reached the point of decomposing or rotting, which, until then, we didn’t know was the coalesced, accreting emission from the living and dead alike—now enveloped us. It was inescapable and eye-stinging. And, still, not the primary assault on our senses. Which was everything we saw. And were unprepared to see. Despite the withered harbingers we’d already seen. And despite the fact that a good part of the population, perhaps an even more nightmarish part, was inside the barracks. Nonetheless, the vast, almost endless visible part, overwhelmed and overmatched us. There were thousands upon thousands—no, tens of thousands upon tens of thousands—of prisoners. An army of them. Like the strewn wounded of the losing side of a protracted battle. Milling or motionless. Filthy, half-clothed, shrunken, distended, stooped. Scarred and mangled by abuse. Frozen in expressions of anguish. Or unresponsiveness. Or vacated hope. Among them were the unburied dead. Arranged in piles. Every few hundred feet. But also unarranged and alone. Left where they collapsed and took their last breaths. The ground was like cake batter and they were as much a part of its consistency as the garbage. The living walked over them without a thought. Left shoeprints on them.

Within minutes of arriving at the main camp, I saw a male prisoner reach into his mouth and pull out a tooth and stare at it in his palm. I saw another male prisoner cough up blood, more onto his hand than a dirty, frayed rag he carried with him. I saw another male prisoner, who was pant-less and seated against the side of a barracks, swiping weakly and unsuccessfully at hundreds of darting flies that had strayed from the dead and had landed on, and drank from, open wounds on his legs. I saw male and female prisoners lean over and vomit. I saw male and female prisoners lying and writhing or twitching on the ground. I saw male and female prisoners with more bald spots than hair on their heads. I saw a female prisoner with a poorly bandaged hand that appeared to be missing all but one finger. I saw a female prisoner remove a thin sweater from a dead body and shake free a rat from one of the sleeves. I saw a female prisoner eating what looked like a cockroach. After which I tried, without success, to focus my gaze overtop all the prisoners.

A number of officers were shouting orders that may as well have been in a foreign language. None of us could hear what amounted to a lesser assault on our senses.

Three trucks, which had trailed behind us since we entered the camp, and which contained a grossly inadequate amount of food, water and medical supplies, passed in front of us, producing the briefest reprieve, and continued on toward a wooden building with a red cross painted on its roof, indicating, in a cruelly incompatible way, that it was the infirmary.

We began to attract prisoners, who approached slowly and cautiously. Perhaps disbelievingly. The first hundred or so stopped at the far edge of the road as if an invisible wall prevented them from coming nearer. Rows began filling in behind them. And soon more rows were filling in and extending back a considerable distance.

As much as the spectacle of their dehumanized existence had stopped us in our tracks, we too were a spectacle stopping them from coming nearer.

Men on either side of me were crossing themselves. Some wore the same expressions of anguish as the prisoners. Some fell to their knees. Some trembled. Some appeared suddenly lost. Though I imagine it was their minds shutting down to protect them from the deluge of impossible-to-process stimuli. Some, like Danny, cried quietly, using their bandanas to wipe their eyes.

I believe the only reason I wasn’t weeping or gripped by shock as well, was that I was arrested by a competing observation, or maybe an illusion, though, regardless, my mind was trying to make sense of why so many prisoners, the most wretched of the living and the whole of the dead, were drained of all but one colour. Their skin, hair, lips, eyes, visible wounds and blood were shades of grey. I wondered if their souls had vacated their bodies long before they died. And if it was an act of mercy. Leaving shed, ashen-turning husks that couldn’t experience further pain.

The officers hadn’t ceased shouting out orders. Though now they were wearing their bandanas, which partially muted their voices, and making their way through the ranks and coming up to us, one at a time, and shaking our arms or shoulders until we pulled ourselves out of our individual fugues and comprehended them.

“Private Katz! Listen to me! Put on your bandana! Now!”

In a couple days we’d learn that the guards, for years, regularly euthanized prisoners who came down with typhus. Sometimes hundreds at a time. And as recently as the previous week. And that the fresh unburied corpses were almost as contagious as the living who were afflicted.

And that the living who were afflicted, for as long as possible, did everything in their power to hide their illness—to pass it off as commonplace deterioration from hunger—given the dire consequences of appearing symptomatic.

And that, as a result, the entire camp was swimming in typhus.

I did what I was told and put on my bandana. Though not without feeling guilty about caring for myself with so much urgency.

“Private Kaplan! Focus on me! Wait! What are you doing?! Private Kaplan!”

I turned my head to see what new trouble Danny had attracted. Except he wasn’t where I expected him to be. He was crossing the road at a quick pace.

The officer spun around and began pursuing him.

“Private Kaplan! Get back here!”

Danny’s hand was raised in the air and his bandana was hanging from it. He reached the wall of prisoners and approached the man I’d observed earlier coughing up blood onto a saturated rag, as well as onto his fingers and palm.

“He needs a medic!”

Two officers were now closing in on him.

Danny removed the rag from the man’s hand and dropped it on the ground and replaced it with the larger, cleaner bandana.

Of all the prisoners requiring immediate medical help, especially those with open wounds for which a bandana would have been a suitable dressing, why he’d chosen that particular prisoner was a mystery.

When I asked him later, he replied, “He just happened to be in my line of sight and I took off toward him.”

“They were all in your line of sight, Danny.”

“I had to do something. I couldn’t stand still and watch.”

“You should have used the bandana to cover your face.”

“He needed it more than me.”

“They all need help. You’re not making sense.”

“Nothing is anymore.”

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About the Author

Brian Prousky spent most of his life as two distinct people. The first held a day job and raised a family and was public and sociable. The second ruminated over sentences and wrote books in secret and dreamed of a living a literary life. They shared little in common, mostly their obsessions: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Mozart, Saul Bellow, Roberto Bolano, tennis and hockey.

Somehow, summoning up a kind of courage or resolve he’d assumed was absent from his DNA, the first Brian Prousky left his day job, revealed his secret and dedicated himself full-time to writing. And the two Brian Prouskys became one. Now the author of five novels, a collection of short stories and two books of poetry, he lives and works in Toronto, where most of his characters, who struggle with secret and often conflicted lives of their own, and who never quite fit in, do as well.

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