We hear a lot about “bubbles” and how important it is not to live in them–so it is important to read books like these. This heritage is the secret that whispers on every page of The Endless Steppe–faded from history, but kept whole and handed on in the sheltering love of Esther’s family. Not only forty-six million lives, but the vibrant life and livelihood which they had inherited, and might have left to their descendants, were blotted out: a heritage of work and joy, of struggle and creativity, of learning, hopes, and happiness….’* “By far the largest number of those killed, whether in battle or behind the lines, were unknown by name or face except to those few who knew or loved them yet in many cases … even those who might in later years have remembered a victim were themselves wiped out. Martin Gilbert wrote of this second world war that part of the scale of its tragedy was loss of memory: If she could begin hard memories like one would begin a fairy tale, she must know secrets worth overhearing. Hautzig’s opening sentence with its gentle cadence pulled me in. Douglas had turned on those people in rage.) (And moderns applauded, much like people in a theater cheering footage of a German pilot being shot down. He deliberately took to flat, jarring cadences. Lyricism is an expressive vehicle of a past or present that has a future and Douglas foresaw none.

The World War II poet Keith Douglas abandoned lyricism along with hope: “I see no reason to be either musical or sonorous about things at present,” he wrote to a fellow poet. Her cadences are soothing, even when her recollections are barbed. The lilt of Esther Hautzig’s memory of exile in Siberia–seared by privation, filth, and loss–keeps an almost magical, storybook intonation. “The morning it happened - the end of my lovely world - I did not water the lilac bush outside my father’s study.”

The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig