[BitStillrhile]

This is my first proper post to this website, so forgive me if the correct protocols are not followed. Anywhere, here it is:

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The opening scene of a novel often sets the tone for what will come. The author, if they choose this route, is tasked with compressing their major themes, problems, and interests, into a single page, or a even just one paragraph ? and from that the reader makes the judgment of whether or not to continue reading. Hans Eichner's novel begins with a Jewish joke, then shifts to ruminations about the Jewish propensity (forced or not) for travel, then shifts again to poodle bathing, and then to the Second World War, and then finally ? finally ? to rest among the shoemakers of the large village of Tapolca, which lies north of Lake Balaton in Hungary. Peter Engelmann, the narrator of Hans Eichner's impressive Kahn & Engelmann makes his point early on ? both Jews, and this novel, will travel widely. And tell a lot of jokes along the way.

Kahn & Engelmann is the novel of an old man, and it shows. Eichner was seventy-nine when the novel was first published in Germany in 2000, and his novel has the relaxed, easy tone of a kindly grandfather looking back over his life. The first third of the novel introduces his grandparents Sidonie and J?zsef, immigrants to Vienna from Tapolca. J?zsef, who soon shifts the spelling of his name to Josef, is a skilled, though poor, shoemaker, and his wife makes ends meet where she can, running a vegetable store in Tapolca and helping her daughter's clothing firm as it grows. Peter Engelmann relates the story of his modest middle-class family with tenderness and humor. His voice is authentic and amused, the twinkling recollection of an elderly gentleman remembering back to when the world, it seemed, was so much younger than it is today. Engelmann shifts from his grandparents and, soon, parents and uncles of the far-away past, to his own childhood and early adulthood during the Second World War of the past, and to the present, as an old man in Haifa who looks after the poodles of people whose names he has trouble remembering. These shifts are handled adroitly, even seamlessly, slipping from one time-frame to the next with the ease that comes from a well-worn tale. The relaxed nature of the telling makes it seem as though Engelmann has told this story many times before, the grooves of character and plot firmly set in his mind.

It is difficult to properly pin down the novel. At times it is a family saga reminiscent of Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, complete with the rise and fall of the family company (though in this case, there are several); other times it resembles a bildungsroman, as Peter Engelmann's young self slowly awakens to the rich intellectual heritage of both his Jewish ancestors and the immensity of German literature. There are scenes devoted to young men escaping the clutches of SS troops, but also letters between estranged brothers-in-law who quarrel as the Austrian kroner rises and the business they are discussing steadily disintegrates. Add to this the slow awakening of the elderly Engelmann that his life has been a lie because he never truly faced the horrors experienced by the Jews during the Second World War, and you have an incredibly complex tale, one in which so many balls are being juggled it seems Eichner must drop at least one, though happily this is not the case.

Engelmann as a narrator is not particularly overbearing intellectually, though at no time are we unaware of his formidable intelligence. Several pages might go by during which Kafka or Rilke are analysed, or on a single page can be found the names of Proust, Mann, Dostoevsky and Neitzsche. Engelmann often wonders at how the German nation could fall under the sway of Hitler and his brutality, a thought he admits isn't particularly original, but he is able to shape it in new and interesting ways. Kahn & Engelmann is rich with Jewish and Austro-Hungarian history. Toward the end of the novel Engelmann visits the grave of his poor father, only to find the cemetery neglected and forgotten by his fellow Jews to the extent that swastikas still remain etched into stone because nobody thought to remove them. The swastikas, like Engelmann himself, bear ?witness to the way that world was lost.?

Engelmann writes, ?If I believed in an almighty and benevolent God...I would not be able to make much sense of my family's history; because there would have to be justice in this best of all possible worlds that this God has created, and to take a random example, but one that immediately springs to mind, it would not be easy to understand why my mother, of all people, such a delicate, simple and kind person, suffered such great misfortune ? just as it, per contrarium, makes no sense to me, si c'est ?crit l?-haut, why the Kahns were able to save themselves when the gas chambers in Auschwitz and Belsen, Majdanek and Sobibor were running full tilt, so that we are now able to enjoy our beautiful walks along the Pacific or Mediterranean beaches.... 'We give thanks to Hitler', we joke thoughtlessly.? This is rich, dense writing, filled with literary allusions and heavy with the weight of both familial and European history. Engelmann sees in his family who, though not gassed or murdered during the Second World War, the disintegration of all Jewish families as the diaspora spread across the world and nothing, ever, would be the same. They are a snapshot of the huge collected album of Jewish life before Hitler and the Nazis, and perhaps by preserving them he is able to preserve something of the way things were.

But who are Kahn and Engelmann of the title? Kahn is the name of his maternal family, by far the major focus of the novel. Engelmann comes from his father, Sandor, a tireless, sad, hardworking man who had his heart and finances broken by Jen?, the Kahn family's black sheep. The story of the firm of Kahn and Engelmann gradually takes over the other narrative threads during the last half of the novel, when Jen?, perhaps the only character uncomfortable enough with his Jewishness to wish to be anything but a Jew, destroys the family's cohesion. Eichner handles the increasing focus of the narrative on Sandor Kahn and Jen? Engelmann well, though unfortunately the culmination of their relationship is told through a series of letters rather than through words or deeds. This is perhaps the only miss-step of the novel, though it is small. The collapse of Kahn and Engelmann is neatly juxtaposed with the burgeoning intellectual awakening of the narrator as he discusses art, poetry and philosophy with other displaced Jews in England during the Second World War.

Kahn & Engelmann continues Biblioasis' impressive International Translation Series, an imprint that has already proved its worth, and continues to do so with each new novel. Eichner's novel is a monument of intellectual exploration, a thoroughly satisfying journey through the memory of pre-WWII Jewish life, a bitter examination of the difficulties of family and business, and a fine example of the bildungsroman in miniature. The sheer volume of ideas presented in this novel is staggering, and the meticulousness with which Eichner brings to life the Jewish culture of Engelmann's grandparent's time is simply wonderful.