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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