The Sins of Living Ghosts: A Review of Aleksandar Tišma's Kapo (2021, NYRB)
Kapo is an agonizing book to read, an endless terrain of unexcused suffering, neither justified nor unjustified, an unblinking portrayal of evil for which there is no penance, from whose guilt there is no relief, and for whose knowledge the only escape is death. The Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma wrote Kapo as his final novel, and compared to his grim but more spacious earlier novels, it reads as a final statement, a determination to convey the full force of what he perceived in the world.
The aging Lamian is a living ghost residing quietly in Yugoslavia, a spirit who wafts among the living while permanently trapped in a hell constructed of his own memories. It is a hell that he himself constructed in his time at Jasenovac and Auschwitz. Tišma, and thus Lamian, withholds the specifics of Lamian’s worst sins until late in the novel, but the dual world which Lamian inhabits, where the memory of the camps repeatedly supersedes his faint, monochrome present, gives incessant hints as to the depths to which Lamian sank. It is no purgatory, for his sins will never be worked off. He can never atone for an iota of his evil; that avenue is entirely closed.
This stench, this filth, this enveloping debris, he thought, was like the camp, where everything had been polluted, rotten, the food, the clothing, every object. As in the camp, it seemed a miracle to be alive in this pit of decay. But he too, though alive, was decayed: a Mussulman, a walking corpse. He was rot that ate rot only to continue its rotting.
His sins are, in brief, those of collaboration, exploitation, dehumanization, and total and absolute betrayal of self and identity. Lamian was a baptized Jew, uncircumcised so that he might fit into the surrounding society better than his parents did. After being identified as a Jew and imprisoned in Jasenovac and then Auschwitz, Lamian promised riches to an SS officer in exchange for the privileges of being a Kapo, disciplining, beating, and occasionally killing inmates (primarily Jews) on behalf of the Germans. Having been elevated from the wretches, he struck another bargain with a female barracks leader from another camp, by which women would be smuggled into an abandoned toolshed, where he would rape them while “paying” them in food.
All the women were fruit condemned to rot, tossed in a heap amid the stench of the camp; but then he would appear, the Kapo of the workshop, to grab the best, the soundest ones before the mold and stench got to them. And sink his teeth into their still-healthy tissue and draw out its juice before throwing them on the rubbish heap for the process of destruction to be completed, which would happen with him or without him.
None of these women were Jewish, save for one, Helena Lifka, and it is a chance realization about her that sets him off on his pilgrimage at the beginning of the novel. He finds that she may still be alive, and for hazy reasons rises from his torpor to locate her. Perhaps he only wants to ensure that she will not identify him, but as the novel goes on, Lamian comes to be driven by what seems a Hegelian need for recognition, as though the only possible release from his hell is that of being seen by someone who knows what he did—to not be the only one who grasps in all his body and mind what the past holds for him.
They were of separate worlds, they who had once been so much a part of one world that they held on to each other, naked, even though they had been pushed into that embrace by two opposing hungers, the wish to obtain food in exchange for submission and the wish to obtain submission in exchange for food. Because there was too little food for all to live, and this presented each with the task of living nevertheless.
Lamian has no innocence; his survival from the camps, as he repeatedly reminds himself, is itself a sentence to be forced to reexperience his total monstrousness at every moment. While at the start of the novel, he has settled into something resembling a manageable routine, haunted by his dumb-luck survival: being a Kapo was not enough to ensure it, but rather, some sick form of grace gave him a miraculous set of coincidences that let him survive and escape Jasenovac and Auschwitz. He has drifted from place to place, remaining anonymous partly out of fear of being identified, partly out of the permanent alienation he feels from his post-war existence.
Lamian’s identity was confused from the start. His forced conversion as a child caused him to feel permanently fake, but Tišma does not insist that this was the reason behind his choice to become a Kapo.
He looks on the dead Nazis with envy, those with whom he collaborated, as well as the victims. He even envies the SS men, wishing he had been “forced to do evil by his heritage and not by the decision to survive.” Eventually, and inevitably, he turns to the ultimate justification for his evil, anti-semitism: he did it because he was a Jew:
Everything would die; this whole sinful world devoted only to itself, bent on impurity. Everything that was murky and deceitful, that succumbed to the temptations of possession, to luxury, the intellect, art, imagination, meditation, discovery, assimilation—everything, in short, the world’s Jews had used to dazzle and corrupt.
Three hundred pages in the mind of Lamian, barraged by his suffocating, non-linear stream of memories, excuses, recriminations, and laments, is a length that feels unendurable. It is as though Tišma wanted to bring the sheer intolerability of life in the camps to his readers and finally settled on his portrayal of Lamian as the most effective means he could find. His sublimated rage is as great as Jean Amery’s, but Amery never expressed that rage at such great length. Like Aharon Appelfeld’s works, Tišma captures the half-living experience of a survivor and the guilt that accompanies it, but Tišma abandons the hints of dignity Appelfeld affords his characters—he abandons the very idea of dignity. In his excellent afterword, David Rieff finds Tišma far more despairing than Imre Kertesz, but despair does not fully capture Tišma’s attitude. Tišma survived the pogroms carried out in Yugoslavia during World War II, an experience he alludes to at length in The Book of Blam, but unlike all the aforementioned writers, Tišma managed to evade being sent to a camp. Kapo suggests Tišma was himself determined to utilize his own good fortune by staring unblinking into the hell he had fortuitously avoided.
NYRB has republished the two previous novels in Tišma’s “Novi Sad trilogy,” The Book of Blam and The Use of Man, both superb and far more bearable than Kapo. In terms of Tišma’s development as a writer, Kapo represents a structural retreat from The Use of Man’s wider and more traditional scope to the single mind of The Book of Blam. Thematically, though, it is a radical advance, compressing the roles and experiences of the three contrasted characters of The Use of Man into one single personage. Lamian is survivor and victim, oppressor and oppressed, living and dead, everyman and no man. As a summation of humanity he is a damning portrait, but even as he fails to justify himself (how could he?), he does not seem an aberration. He offers up guilt and regret which cannot be accepted, yet in his yearning he is simultaneously pathetic and irredeemable. Lamian is human.
Today we speak for victims of all sorts, demanding reparations and justice for anonymous lives lost long ago. Yet we are naively alienated from the source of evil and harm, and remain steadfastly oblivious to how it may grow in our righteous selves. Having firmly othered evil into a handful of hopelessly abstracted forms (structural racism, colonialism, toxic masculinity, etc.) which conveniently assimilate any and all particulars that are thrust into them (thereby whitewashing such particulars), we lack knowledge of the inner world of those who do evil and how it festers in ordinary souls, even the souls of victims. We may say we are different and better than Lamian, and surely most of us are, but no one can read Kapo without suffering excruciating similarities between Lamian’s recriminations and rationalizations and those so frequently and casually deployed by writers, politicians, and most ordinary humans. Kapo is a palimpsest of horrible knowledge, obtained through unbearable means, and its unique value, even greater than Tišma’s other novels, lies in the rarity and moral necessity of its knowledge, delivered as painfully transparent art.
Reviewed by David Auerbach