Book review of FREUD’S SISTER by Goce Smilevski, translated from the Macedonia by Christine E. Krammer. Penguin Books, 2012
Some weeks ago I was talking with a friend who had just read the Joyce Carol Oates review of FREUD’S SISTER in the New York Times. She was shocked and outraged to learn that the factual event embedded in Goce Smilevski’s lyrical novel is Freud’s abandonment of his four sisters in 1938 Vienna. He could have procured a visa for them. Instead, he packed up his nuclear family, his servants and his dog, and fled to London, leaving them to deportation and death in a concentration camp.
“I wonder if they ever forgave him,” I asked.
“I would curse him with my dying breath!” said my friend.
We left it hanging in the air, and yet the conversation returned again and again to the theme of emotional justice.
In his opening artist’s note, Smilevski quotes one of Freud’s letters, referring to the novel’s narrator, Aldofina as “the sweetest and best of my sisters”. Smilevski feel a kinship with her, and states he hopes to “rescue in fiction one of the many lives forgotten by history”.
In doing so he also creates a portrait of Sigmund Freud seen through the eyes of his closest childhood playmate, his confidante, at once placing herself at a distance from him, and longing to return to the closeness of their early childhood, throughout her life.
Aldofina is delightfully unpredictable, in her choices and her colloquy with her bother. She tells him that beauty, not religion, is the greatest comfort in life, yet takes on his atheism as arrogance: “The rest of us will perish, but the great Sigmund Freud will live on, in immortal works”. Indeed, Freud’s high opinion of his immortality is palpable. He tells a male colleague, “Copernicus taught man that we are not the center of the universe, Darwin taught man that he is descended from apes, and I have taught man that he is not who he thinks he is.”
Yet Aldofina claims this narrative as her own, ever moving toward meaning, passion, love and truth. Being so close to Freud, she is loathe to adopt his theories blindly. His internal anti-Semitism is exposed in her critique of Moses and Monotheism, where he asserts Moses was an Egyptian, not a Jew, fashioning his concept of God to appease the pharaoh. One could speculate that his rejection of Orthodox Jewish faith and identification with all things German may have played into Freud’s abandonment of his sisters, on an unconscious, if not conscious level. The novel wisely lets us do our own speculating, by simply allowing Aldofina to tell her story.
One of her greatest gifts to the reader is to pose implicit questions essential to our modern time, to all time: What is “normal”? What is “madness”? How are we to bear the loss and betrayal inherent in our lives? And embedded in the circumstances of the story, and in the heartbeat of Aldofina, so beautifully evoked we can almost hear it, as if listening to an audio book: what do we owe to our family? To our fellow our fellow human beings?
It is incumbent upon the reader to provide answers, or, indeed, ask more questions: where are the boundaries of what we owe to our own self-development, and where we owe attention, love, and support to others?
A related question: what is the place in our world for the mentally ill? In the novel this is graphically etched for us when Aldofina finds respite for her depression at “The Nest”, a home for those identified in Victorian Vienna as “mad”. We enter the corridors of the fascinating souls who live here. Is it horribly bleak? In some ways, of course, but our author also provides a project for the inmates to put on a carnival for the entire community. Costumes are created that evoke the “mad” souls’ greatest fantasies of self-glory, recalling the film of the 1970’s, King of Hearts.
Aldofina’s brothers pay for her long stay at The Nest. We see evidence daily of what happens in our modern world to the mentally ill who do not have family resources.
FREUD’S SISTER gives us a canvas broad and deep. Can we respond in kind, by allowing its beauty to inspire our own inquiry, contemplation…action?