Far To Go, by Alison Pick

Review by Allan Gould

There are times when the life of an author is even more interesting than some of his or her creations: the drunken, high-spending revelries of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, perhaps, or the tragic murder of the great Russian short story writer Isaac Babel by Stalin. Alison Pick, a Toronto-based award-winning poet has written a novel, FAR TO GO, published by the small but respected Anansi press, and it stands as a solid new entry into a dangerously over-crowded field: Holocaust fiction. What makes Ms. Pick’s life so intriguing is the fact that she was the daughter of non-religious Jews from Czechoslovakia who came to Canada before the mass murder of European Jewry began, and converted to Christianity. While writing this fine novel, Pick chose to convert (back?) to Judaism during her pregnancy, so that her baby daughter would be born Jewish--the ultimate rejection of Hitler’s goal for her own parents. But even if we did not know of this momentous personal choice by the author, Pick’s novel would stand as an impressive work of historical fiction. While it is uneven, it is ultimately deeply satisfying and moving, especially in its last few sections.

Before you scream, “Oh, heavens! Not another fictional work on the genocide of the Jews! This overwhelming subject should be left alone to die in peace!” let me tell you that Alison Pick has created an often-striking story, highly-original story: an assimilated family of Czech Jews finds itself caught in the tightening noose of Eastern Europe in the late 1930s: bit by bit, the goose-stepping, Europe-conquering Nazis have squeezed the family of Pavel and Annaliese Bauer into a literal corner, as they move from a small Czech town to Prague, and finally struggle to get to Paris, reluctantly sending their beloved young son Pavel on the famous Kindertransport to England, saving his life. Thanks to her Christian background, his Christian nanny Marta also survives, with some shocking results.

What makes FAR TO GO so successful is the complex way in which the story--one which occurred several million times in tens of thousands of versions between 1939 and 1945 across Europe--is told. Ms. Pick, as noted, is a poet, which can at times make the style heavy-going, but at other times, it makes the novel radiate with poignancy and heartbreak. For example, sprinkled through its 300 pages, we come across various letters sent from the doomed parents of Pavel to the family where the lad was sent in the U.K., with the devastating note at the bottom, “(FILE UNDER: Bauer. . . . Died Birkenau [the sister camp of Auschwitz], 1943).” We get fleeting exchanges between friends in about-to-be-Nazi-occupied Prague: “My sister had her girls baptized.” “She has no more principles than you have!” “It’s a good idea. It could save Pepik’s life!” We watch as soft antisemitism allows murderous Jew-hatred to succeed, as we piece together the strands of one family’s horrors, fears and losses, not unlike the way Charles Foster Kane’s youth and rise to success and fame are slowly explained in Orson Welles’ magnificent film, Citizen Kane.

When I lecture on the Shoah, as I often do, I warn my audience to not focus on giant, impossible-to-comprehend numbers, such as Six Million, but rather on single names or losses that we can begin to grapple with, such as that of Anne Frank of Amsterdam. Alison Pick’s novel is far from perfect, as it is sometimes awkward and forced. But it is a welcome addition to the (too large?) field of Holocaust Literature, and I am pleased to hear that it has landed publishers in the U.S. and around the world, and in several translations. God knows that a glorious, two-millennia-old civilization of European Jewry deserves all the kaddishes it can get.