Zauner was 25 when her mother was diagnosed with an aggressive, late-stage, mid-life cancer. Zauner was a rebellious child, resentful of Umma’s version of tough love. Growing up the lone Asian student in her Oregon community, she felt both othered at school and an outsider among her mother’s Seoul relatives when she visited them each summer. Just as she was beginning to appreciate her Korean heritage and understand her mother’s love, she learned about Umma’s diagnosis.   

The first half of the memoir exuberantly brings to life scenes from Zauner’s childhood and her brief post-college years as a musician in New York City. Surprisingly, without hesitation, she paused her makeshift career and flew west to care intensively for her mother. Attempting to heroically save Umma, Zauner zealously learned to prepare the native foods they shared. “I would radiate joy and positivity,” Zauner pledged. “I would learn to cook for her—all the things she loved to eat, and I would single-handedly keep her from withering away” (69). Her optimistic culinary efforts produce a poetry of exacting descriptions of the flavors and textures and preparation of those foods. It’s grimly ironic that the chemotherapy her mother endured wiped out her ability to taste or digest Zauner’s loving offerings of health.  

The second half turns from living with Umma to living without her. Wishing to sustain her bond with her mother as Zauner grieved, she continued preparing her Korean family’s recipes. Walking down H Mart’s redolent aisles released “waves” of sorrow that mark the enduring ebb and flow of her grief. Unsuccessful with conventional therapy, she found cooking the best form of self-care: “Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeong Dong Gyoja . . . The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi” (212-213). An image of abundance in the midst of loss.

Zauner’s detailed descriptions of cooking and consuming invite readers to her table, reminding us—as previous celebrated writers have—of the power of the senses to evoke memory and the power of food to strengthen human bonds. Food also powers Zauner’s self-understanding and the unexpected transformational love for her mother: “The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me . . . If I could not be with my mother, I would be her” (223-224).  

Zauner’s writing is itself active and effervescent. Through her grief, she holds a steady, unflinching gaze on cancer and death. As she writes candidly about her family, Zauner is critically reflective about her own life. Her writerly achievement is the immediacy of her felt experiences, her grief and her joys made palpable. “Let me feel this,” she courageously writes, dismissing her Korean family’s admonitions to withhold tears (202). An unforgettable image of the process of loving transformation that Zauner experienced unfolds in her description of making the Korean staple kimchee. It is a slow, exacting process of fermenting cabbage that at first strikes her as “controlled death” because “[l]eft alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether” (223). 

As if miraculously, a few years after Umma died, Zauner’s itinerant music career took on a new life. The band she has fronted, Japanese Breakfast, recorded the album Psychopop with a song she wrote about her mother, “In Heaven.” Then they toured the U.S. and South Korea. Although her mother was skeptical about a musical career, Zauner imagined that Umma would be “glad that I had finally found a place where I belonged” (233). 

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
Michelle Zauner

Publisher Alfred A Knopf
Place Published New York
Edition 2021
Page Count 239

Web photo by Portuguese Gravit

Based on the novel of the same name by André Aciman, this multilingual film took the world by storm, using three languages (French, Italian, and English) in the first five minutes. The resulting language barriers add to feelings of yearning established by the musical score, whose key elements originate from Sufjan Stevens (Futile Devices; Mystery of Love; Visions of Gideon). Music, language, and literature carry the work’s primary themes, namely those of precocity and sexuality. Elio embodies all three—his main hobbies include transcribing music, playing the piano, and reading. These themes are further captured by the symbol of the apricot, its relationship to precocity and sexuality explicitly discussed in the film. Furthermore, the denouement of the film, arrives through a figuratively rich and overtly sensual scene involving Elio and the summer stand-in of the apricot, the peach, (1:34:30-1:40:24), beautifully capturing the relationship between Elio’s intellectual maturity and emotional naïveté.

Controversy surrounds Call Me by Your Name, primarily regarding consent and age statutes. Although Elio is over the 1983 age of consent in Italy and most United States jurisdictions, his relationship with Oliver evokes discomfort. This speaks to the historical Western perception of gay relationships as predatory. Nonetheless, their relationship warrants some skepticism, particularly regarding age-based power dynamics. The Perlmans support and watch over their son as the relationship progresses, frequently checking in and pointing him to literary passages as points of reference. In this way, the film navigates a complicated and loaded social topic, particularly in the queer community.

Further depth is added by considering the historical context of the early 1980s. By 1983, the AIDS epidemic had globally taken hold, the virus only identified in France the May prior to the events of the film. “Gay cancer” was a widely used term for a rare and defining symptom of AIDS, singling out the Western community hardest hit at that time. The merciless, viral specter of death overshadowed the gay liberation movement of the previous decade. HIV is never mentioned in the film, but its presence must be known by Oliver, adding to his own hesitations and fears about his and Elio’s sexualities. 1983 was also rife with relevant political fallout: Gerry Studds––the first openly gay member of Congress––became embroiled in a scandal involving a relationship with a 17-year-old, and Bettino Craxi was elected as Italian Prime Minister, eventually leading to the collapse of the modern Italian political machine. Craxi plays a central role in the peripheral events of the film, his influence appearing on television and in conversations with dinner guests.

Call Me by Your Name is an evocative masterpiece, one of the few movies that I can watch repeatedly (cf. Heated Rivalry). Despite my inherent preference for novels, this film, far and away, manifests a beauty missing from its literary inspiration. The actors perform splendidly, the music deepens the emotional journey, and the cinematography transports the audience perfectly to the setting. Every time I watch it, I discover greater depth and fall in love with it more, even if I can never look at a peach the same way.

Call Me by Your Name 
Director: Luca Guadagnino 
Screenplay: James Ivory 
Awards: Best Adapted Screenplay (Critics’ Choice Awards); Best Male Lead [Chalamet] & Best Cinematography (Independent Spirit Awards); Outstanding Film-Wide Release (GLAAD Media Awards); Best Editing (Nastro d’Argento Awards & Golden Ciak Awards); Breakout Actor [Chalamet] (Gotham Independent Film Awards & Hollywood Film Awards)
Year 2017 
Studio Sony Pictures Classics 
Running Time (in minutes) 132 
Based on Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman 

Web image from Sony Pictures.

It seems simple. Ask a few questions, record the answers, job done, move on. But as all doctors know, getting a good history is a defining skill, something that blends medical acumen and astute intuition. When history taking is done properly, it distinguishes adequate physicians from those who are truly exemplary in their ability to diagnose and treat disease. What makes getting an accurate history so challenging? 

This slim but beautiful book by Jane Ziegelman may help answer this question. At first glance, it seems like an unlikely point of departure for a discussion of medical humanities. This elegiac work of history describes the yizkor (memory) books, which were written by survivors of the Holocaust. Their goal was to compile a lasting remembrance of the shtetls (towns/villages) of Eastern Europe, a record of the places where they lived and people among whom they lived for decades before the start of World War II, and that had been totally annihilated by the murderous onslaught of the Nazis. Most of the communities were small, populated by poor artisans and farm laborers who struggled day-to-day to feed and clothe their families. Food was never plentiful and the weekday diet was dominated by potatoes in any shape and animal fat in any form. Rain and snow routinely turned the streets into an unpassable sea of mud. The village square was cluttered with animals, big and little. Only young boys received a regular education and even that was often given by underpaid and underappreciated old men who were just as likely to beat their students as to serve as role models of the good life. Jewish rituals and the holiday calendar served as a sturdy anchor for shtetl life and provided spiritual relief to the townspeople from the quotidian drudgery. In a word, life was hard – a continuous battle to survive the hostile forces of nature and the random antisemitic attacks of their neighbors. 

Yet, the inhabitants of the shtetls that dotted the Eastern European landscape never despaired of life. It is true that escape to America, the goldineh medina (country of gold), the promised land, was a dream for many. At the start of the 20^th century, thousands of shtetl Jews abandoned their hometowns and left their families behind to cross the Atlantic Ocean in hopes of achieving a more prosperous life. But most stayed put and were reconciled to their lives. The steadfastness of shtetl life has been recorded in Jewish history and literature. In the face of hardship on so many levels, these men and women maintained their families, jobs, and, most importantly, their human agency. 

History is the record of many kinds of stories – of people, places, political movements, ideas, war and peace, companies, the natural world, and the creative arts. The trajectories and the lessons to be drawn from historical narratives are as varied as the subjects. The endings can be upbeat and inspiring, or they may culminate in demise and depression.  

Ziegelman’s compilation of shtetl memory books are historical documents of loss. For the writers of these books, the Holocaust had utterly destroyed their world. Everything they knew and held dear was wiped out in a frenzy of hatred and violence. The yizkor books were an effort to bring those vanished worlds back to literary life, to recreate them in full. But pain for the victims who died, regret over decisions made, and nostalgia for a better time inevitably color these tragic tales of loss. Can the testimony of the surviving witnesses be trusted? Are the linguistic pictures they draw true to what life was really like in Luboml, Radin, Lodz, or Kobrin? Was the community ever as unified as described by the yizkor book authors? Were the squabbles quite so divisive? Did everyone really look so angelic as Sabbath arrived at twilight on Friday? Did people really sink up to their knees in the mid-December mud? We are inclined to believe the authors because we empathize with their suffering and loss. But if we are to learn from the past and prevent the destruction of future worlds, we need to be sure we have things right as we look in the rear-view mirror. 

It is reading about this literature of loss that brings us back to the doctor or nurse who is encountering her patient for the first time. These patients – men, women, adolescents, and children — have to recount their stories and explain what it is that brought them to the office or clinic. They are also telling stories of loss – loss of vitality and energy, the ability to think clearly, to climb a flight of stairs without needing to stop to catch their breath, to love passionately, to party with friends and family. For patients, their histories are tales of the world that they have lived in and grown accustomed to but which suddenly seems on the verge of breakup. As we listen, we have to decide. Are they accurate? Are they exaggerating their problems to gain our attention or downplaying them to avoid our interventions? Is their memory dependable about timing, severity, and responses to treatment? How confident are we that we have elicited an accurate story? 

The notion of illness as narrative is widely appreciated in the world of medicine. We are attuned to view our patients as participants in a larger more comprehensive social context in which their illness is but one feature in a multitextured milieu. The initial patient history is our first entry into that world. We should be fully aware that the stories that patients tell us at that initial visit are, like the yizkor books, tales of loss. Hopefully, the medical story will unfold over time. There is no telling at the start how the saga will play out and end. But it always starts as a tale of loss. Just as we aim to combine heartfelt sympathy and clear minded appreciation of the facts as we read the Holocaust survivors’ yizkor stories, we should make sure that, while we are emotionally engaged with their pain and suffering, we are attentive to the facts and nuances as patients first describe their loss of health that prompted them to seek our help in the first place. Getting their history right at the start is the first step to getting patients better.  

Once there was a town: The memory books of a lost Jewish world 
Jane Ziegelman 
St. Martin’s Press, New York, 2026, pp.227 

Web image by Medhum.org

“Once There Was a Town: The Memory Books of a Lost Jewish World” Book Launch

The collection opens with a poem, “Dedication” (p.1), dedicating the poems that follow to those “dear friends” who share, and so understand, the sufferings of ongoing illness. The implication is that healthy people cannot, yet, truly enter that world and, in fact, “fear” those who must live there. Yet Silver’s poems are a way into that universe. Tender and fierce, the poems in this collection seem to arise fully formed from the deepest part of Silver’s existence. The poems in section I present us with the harsh realities of illness and the anticipation of loss. In the acknowledgements, (p.72), the author notes that the poems in this section are “in honor of my sisters with inflammatory and advanced breast cancer.” In “Advent, First Frost,” she likens that “feathered prophecy” to “a bowl of frozen tears” (p.6) and in “Stage IV,” she writes that she is “taboo, now,” that she and others use words that once embarrassed them, “courage, prayer, miracle.” Even so, she is aware that “Our passports have been stamped– / our wrists and collar bones have been marked” (p.7). In a lovely prose poem on page 11, she writes in memory of her friend, Susan: “Ulysses will sail the storms till he dies. And so, my dear ones, will we” (p.11), combining, as she often does, the reality of approaching death with hope, dignity, and strength. In “Leaving the Hospital” (p.23) and “On a Line from Virginia Woolf’s Diary,” Silver celebrates the return, even if temporary, to life: “And the day takes my body back simply, / the way a mother dresses her child” (p.14). For me, the most moving poem in this section is the title poem, “I Watched You Disappear” (p. 22-23). It is a litany of regret, loss, anger, and pain, related not in poetic images but in plain and deeply human language: “I hate spring, its prettiness. / Your heart kept beating. Why didn’t it just stop?” 

Section II consists of seven, short one-stanza poems based on images from Grimms’ fairy tales. It seems that the first two lines of each poem serve as metaphorical statements about the realities of advanced breast cancer. “Owl Maiden” begins “No transformation’s instant. / Her hair fell out first, replaced by quills” (p.29). “Strawberries in Snow” begins “Belief comes easily to the ill. / Miracles fall from their lips like gems” (p.31). And “The Flowered Skull” offers these opening lines: “The magician finds them, young or old, / mothers, maidens–to him–no matter–” (p.34). The final poem in this section is a tale told to her son, Noah. In “The Hazel Tree,” Silver is the mother who “died and grew into a tree,” “each nut a word she’d grown to tell her son / now that her speaking human voice was gone” (p.35).  

In Section III, she turns, as she did in her first collection, to poems about her family. She visits again the (actual) doors of her life (“Doors” p.39), expresses regret at being impatient with her son, “Ubi Caritas Deus Ibi Est” (p.41), and in other poems examines moments of her family life, especially those shared with her son, father, sister, and husband. This section’s poems rarely mention illness, yet as they share family stories, they hint at the inevitability of loss. The final poem in this section, “Sea Glass,” ends with lines that could be applied as well to the way poems might be born from the wages of a life: “Something salvaged, sunlit, / gem-like. Something saved / from the grinding into grit” (p.55).  

Section IV, like section II, contains only seven poems, three of them commentaries on paintings and, through those commentaries, observations on illness and suffering as well. “Late Renoir” speaks of how the artist painted to “smudge away doubt” and to submerge “the mutilations of war, his dead wife, / the black he banished from his palette” (p.59). The long poem “Valentine Gode-Darel (1873-1915)” is a reflection on the five paintings by Ferdinand Hodler that captured his lover’s sickness, decline, and death (p.60). “Portraits in the Country,” (page 63), offers a glimpse into the poet’s resignation and acceptance of death, a mindset supported by her faith in both the human and the holy: “But I will not rush to put down my sash. / Instead, I will turn the leaf of my book. See with what gentle gravity God / lets it hover, in balance, then fall to its side.” The book’s last poem, “The Firebird,” suggests that words, especially poems, might hold truths that sound louder than the approach of death: “The bell ringing in your throat will drown / out the train’s slow grieving” (p.67). 

These poems are beautifully crafted, often primal, and they touch the deepest reaches of personal illness and the shadow of mortality. Readers who have breast cancer or who have family or friends living with breast cancer, might find these poems difficult to read–others under the same circumstances might find them difficult and yet, at the same time, essential. For me, dealing with the reality of an aggressive breast cancer afflicting someone I love, these poems provide a window into an experience I can only observe from a distance, even if that distance is only an embrace away. These poems provide a portal into the emotions, fears, regrets, and pleas that might be hiding behind a patient’s or a loved one’s exterior of cheerful optimism and determination. We can’t walk the path that a woman with advanced breast cancer is traveling. But these poems help us be companions on the way. 

Miscellaneous 
“Strawberries in Snow” was first published in the Bellevue Literary Review (V12N1).  

Publisher Louisiana State University Press 
Place Published Baton Rouge 
Edition 2014 
Page Count 73 

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database .  
Web image created by Medhum.org

Attending plays is not always just a passive experience. Through various means playwrights, producers, composers, choreographers, set designers, and others have available to them, they can make plays immersive and interactive for audiences. A good example, among many, is Florian Zeller’s play, The Father. 

The Father is the story of an older man with Alzheimer’s disease (André) and his progression through first living on his own, then living with his daughter (Anne), and finally living in a nursing home. Or, is it? It’s hard to tell, and that is the intention of the playwright, Florian Zeller, who in a 2021 interview with Forbes Magazine,* said his aim was, 

to tell the story from the inside and put the audience in a unique position as though they were going through a labyrinth—questioning everything they’re seeing. It also was a way for me to play with the idea of disorientation because I not only wanted The Father to be a story but also an experience. The experience being what it’s like to lose everything, including your own bearings as a viewer and to be uncertain of what is and isn’t real. It was a way for the audience to experience a slice of dementia.

The director, Doug Hughes, creates the audience experience through an interplay among set designs, lighting effects, repeated scene sequences, and time loops as circumstances for various behaviors like memory loss, paranoia, anger, and lasciviousness. All the scenes take place in one room that serves at different times as André’s flat, Anne’s flat, and André’s nursing home room. The furnishings of the room change based on the supposed setting, but the walls are exactly the same for all of them. In different scenes, André is not always sure where he is, and neither is the audience.  

Early in the play, André hears Anne tell him she’s relocating from Paris to London with her lover, but she is present to him in most of the scenes thereafter and until the end of the play when he’s told by a nurse that Anne had moved to London some time ago. Had she really left Paris and was never actually there in all those other scenes? He wonders and so does the audience. In other scenes, the way characters from the past and present enter and exit distorts time for André, and so while audience members know the linear trajectory of the disease course, they can’t be sure of where they are in that course during a given scene. With the last scene taking place in André’s nursing home room with the same walls seen in his flat and Anne’s flat, the audience can’t be faulted for wondering whether all that came before was just one of André’s hallucinations. 

The Disorienting Is Clarifying

If the play had been staged as the customary audience view of outside looking in, the audience would have merely witnessed the familiar manifestations of Alzheimer’s disease and a familiar progression of events. This view would have afforded a new appreciation for the trauma it causes to those who are not closely acquainted with the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, while those who are familiar with them could possibly achieve a measure of catharsis. Zeller endeavors to do much more by offering a view of Alzheimer’s from the inside looking out and a means to grasp the actual experience of it. He is successful when audience members find themselves working as hard as André is to discern fact from fiction, past from present, and here from there.   

This can be no easy feat for the stage, and no wonder then that the Broadway production team enlisted an “illusion consultant” (Jim Steinmeyer) and a medical advisor (Dr. Randi Diamond). The intimate experiences the actor playing André (Frank Langella) and the director (Doug Hughes) have had with Alzheimer’s disease through family members no doubt contributed to the production’s authenticity as well.  

Zeller doesn’t leave the audience members defenseless in their efforts to orient themselves. He associates André’s grasp of his own situation with the whereabouts of his watch: “I need to know exactly where I am during the day. I’ve always had this watch, you know. If I were to lose it, I’d never recover.” As André’s dementia progresses and his powers of perception weaken, we see fewer objects in Anne’s flat. In the end, Zeller is hoping that confusing and disorienting the audience members will clarify the dementia experience for them.

Notes:
*Dawson A. Florian Zeller takes viewers into the labyrinth of dementia with The Father. Forbes. March 30, 2021.
This essay is based on a live performance of The Father presented by the Manhattan Theater Club at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in New York City that ran between April and June of 2016. 
Translated from French by Christopher Hampton.
Brain photo:  Processing language, left brain hemisphere (sagittal view). Stephanie Forkel, NatBrainLab. Source: Wellcome Collection
License: Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Watch photo from Wikicommons images and licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

In “Mandatory Evacuation Zone,” Felice Aull has gathered 63 beautifully crafted poems in which she examines the intricacies of language and loss, of grief and healing.  Each of the book’s five sections considers these themes in slightly different ways, always in language that is understated, vivid, and exact.  In Section I, we read poems that focus on the author’s complicated family history and her early loss of homeland.  In “Tracings” (page 15), an unknown relative (thanks to online genealogy searches) reaches the narrator and wants to meet her.  She, however, only wishes to learn “. . . how my parents / and my infant self / made our tortuous way out . . . . ” Brought in infancy from Germany to America, the author suffers the loss of both native homeland and native language (“Notes from an Alpine Vacation” page 16).  She searches photos of her mother and ponders museum note cards illustrated by Holocaust survivors (“Museum Notecards” page 18), imagining what she can’t quite know and yet can’t quite forget.  

Section II finds the narrator as a young woman in American, awakening to sexuality (“Gay Blades,” “Camp Counselors Make Out,”  “On the Staircase” pages 29-31), becoming a wife and mother, and then a grandmother.  A grandchild’s birth is both joyful and yet another “slipping toward / the edge of separation” (“Daughter in her Eighth Month” page 37). 

In Section III, the author turns her gaze to observations of the world around her, around us, aware of how many come to loss and death.  “Be prepare to mourn,” she tells us in “Disaster in October” (page 49), and in the moving poem, “I Saw the Smoke,” re-visions September 11th in words stripped of sentimentality and therefore made more powerful. 

Sections IV and V confront bodily loss through aging and illness, noting how, in so many ways, we try both to capture and to let go: “You snap photo upon photo / hoping to grasp and preserve / what cannot be grasped” (Capturing Alaska” page 66).  We learn of the most personal losses in poems of biopsies, surgeries, and chemotherapy.  When facing the unknown, every event might seem to hold a prediction.  In “Stunning Blows,” a doorman stuns a mouse, claims that it’s dead.  But the narrator, aware of the wages of time, writes, “But I still see it, like death, / moving toward me” (page 81).  At the book’s end, we return to language, how it too can leave us (“Forget That” page 90).  Yet in the collection’s final, gentle poems, the poet is “able, finally / to walk past the park’s redbud tree / without weeping” (“Immunity” page 96).

Although there are many poems that confront loss both recalled and experienced. grief for self and others, illness and the unknown in this collection, there are also poems of great acceptance and ultimate joy: “These gifts and losses, every year, mine” (“The Key to Gramercy Park” page 98).  The poems in “Mandatory Evacuation Zone,” show us how poetry can help us to “declutter” (see “Divesture” page 99) and release, and at the same time, hold on to and embrace.

Kelsay Books, California 2017: 100 pages

Felice’s website: https://www.feliceaull.com/

Web image created by Medhum.org
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database

Egon devotedly cares for his sick wife despite her warning, “You will get it from me” (p111). Soon she is unresponsive. As Egon listens for a heartbeat with his ear against Edi’s motionless chest, he can only auscultate the distant, faint beat of his unborn child’s heart that is quickly silent. He tragically describes Edi’s corpse: “Her body being both cradle and coffin, within a minute” (p128). Egon feels compelled to make multiple sketches of his dead wife. 

Before long, Egon experiences harsh bouts of coughing, fever, and chills. He becomes remorseful about the drawings he made of Edi and burns them in the kitchen stove. Egon gazes at the fire, knowing he too will die shortly but aware that he will be survived by all his other artwork. 

This short story imagines the final days of Austrian painter Egon Schiele and his pregnant wife Edith. He died at age 28, just three days after she passed away, both victims of the 1918 influenza pandemic. 

A stunning and sorrowful re-creation of what the end of life might have felt like for a young husband and his expectant wife during the 1918 pandemic. The tale highlights the risk of love, the inescapable weight of dread, and the connection between creativity and illness. 

Primary Source 
Blank Pages and Other Stories (pp105-138) 

Publisher 
W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2022: 34 pages 
A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image by Medhum.org

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When he arrives, he finds that the hospital is an expropriated village church overrun by rats and ravaged by typhus, and he is the only physician. The hospital is run by a nun, Sister Margarete, assisted only by orderlies, and the patient load runs the gamut from fractures and gunshot wounds to gangrenous legs and massive head trauma. The front is only a few kilometers away, and the wounded arrive continuously; the quiet and formal Sister Margarete confidently and unobtrusively guides him through rounds, surgeries, and battlefield medicine. Lucius is initially wary of her, perhaps a bit awed by her, and ultimately falls in love with her.  

The transforming event is the arrival of the “winter soldier,” Jozsef Horvath, brought in from the snow mute and shell-shocked, but with no visible wounds. For Lucius, who is fascinated by diseases of the brain and mind, this patient presents a tremendous challenge. Lucius is sure that Horvath has “war neurosis,” what the British physicians of the time were calling shell shock and what we today would call PTSD, and he is determined to understand and heal him. Lucius and Margarete make slow progress with their patient, but his attempts to care for the patient have unintended effects, and Lucius must then deal with the consequences of his actions.

The war, and the hospital routine, go on. One day, while Lucius and Margarete are relaxing in the woods, Margarete runs off; Lucius returns to the village, but Margarete is not there. While Lucius and the staff search for her, Lucius gets lost; he stumbles onto a battlefield and is dragooned into service with a regiment of the Austrian infantry. He ultimately escapes and tries to make his way back to the field hospital, and to Margarete, but Lemnowice has fallen to the Russians. The hospital has been evacuated—and Margarete has disappeared.  Lucius’ search for her will take him across the war-torn remnant of the Empire.

The Winter Soldier is a war story, a doctor story, and a romance, and it also poses a wrenching question of medical ethics. This is a lot to ask of any novel, but Mason pulls it off with aplomb. The writing is lyrical; the author’s descriptions of the variation of the seasons in the Carpathian forests are poetic and beautifully detailed, and his characterizations are finely drawn. We can not only clearly see, but also feel that we know, these people, not only the major figures of the doctor and the nurse, but also the orderlies, the Austrian soldiers, Lucius’ somewhat bemused Professor Zimmer, and Lucius’ parents (who are marvels of characterization: the retired military officer father who lives on past glory and cannot see his son for who he is, and the controlling, clever, acid-tongued society grande dame mother who can only see her son for who she thinks he should be). Lucius and Margarete feel real, and their interaction feels real…and complicated. The historical setting comes alive with detail, and the reader truly feels that they are in that place at that time, whether at a formal dinner in a Viennese mansion or treating war casualties in a Galician backwater. And the medical details are correct, not just the medical terms but even the way in which they are used in dialogue, which is not surprising, as Mason is a physician; it isn’t always easy to get this right, but Mason does.  

But the true heart of the medical story here is the ethical quandary in which Lucius finds himself—the complex nature of the doctor-patient relationship, the motivations which drive it, and the decisions we make. Although this takes up a relatively short page count, its repercussions continue throughout the novel.

The novel has a particular, though minor, resonance for the time of COVID-19 (though it was released two years before the pandemic occurred). The action of the novel is set in motion when, due to a war-induced doctor shortage, medical schools decided to allow upper-level students like Lucius to graduate early and become doctors, and then immediately posted them, often with little practical experience, to field hospitals near the front lines.  Several American medical schools took a superficially similar action in Spring 2020 when doctors were desperately needed to help staff hospital units during the coronavirus pandemic, although this only applied to fourth-years who were but a few months short of graduation and would have already had the clinical experience which Lucius lacked. So while the situations aren’t entirely analogous, the concept of students opting into a trial by fire is.

The Winter Soldier can be appreciated for its historical perspective, its story of human relationships, the ethical dilemma it poses, and the beauty of its prose. Or enjoyed for what it is—a great read.

The Winter Soldier
Daniel Mason
New York, Little Brown & Co., 2018; 318 pp.

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database.
Web image created by Medhum.org

The story begins abruptly. A woman named June is driving westward alone in her car, destination unknown. She is trying desperately to escape the small town near Litchfield, Connecticut where she grew up, after the funerals for four people who have died in a lethal housefire — her ex-husband Adam, her boyfriend Luke, her daughter Lolly, and her daughter’s fiancé Will. The tragedy is compounded by the timing of the fire, the night before the scheduled wedding of June’s daughter.  

In a format that is increasingly common in current literature, the story unfolds from the unique perspective of people connected in various ways to those who perished and those who survived the disaster. The gallery of characters includes June, Lolly, Luke’s mother Lydia, the lesbian couple who own the seaside hotel where June hides out, the Native American woman who cleans the rooms in the hotel, Will’s parents, and a fidgety, socially awkward adolescent who has an unhealthy fixation on Lydia. Each chapter is told from the vantage point of one person, in their voice, in their thoughts. The narrative is in the first person except for the chapters that recount June and Lydia’s experience. There is minimal dialogue, mostly stream of consciousness story telling. Insight emerges from the action. The chapters weave together seamlessly, and you feel yourself drawn more and more into this microcosm of people struggling to make sense of a senseless tragedy. It would be a category error to call the novel a page turner. But there is a profound mystery at the core of the story, an appreciation of the ineffable wonder at how our lives play out and the complexity of our interactions with one another. 

This haunting book incorporates many classic themes that characterize literature that can engage us – the pain of the sudden loss of loved ones, loneliness, regret for mistakes made and actions not taken. It  echoes Tolstoy’s notion that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Were it even simply a tale of coping with heartbreak and learning from life’s catastrophes, this would be a notable book. But there is an unexpected element that emerges from the prose that raises this novel to another level and makes it truly worth reading. 

Amid the grief and wreckage of personal stories, June and Lydia’s stories gradually move to the narrative center. Each one is wracked with guilt and remorse for ill-thought-out actions that caused a loved one profound emotional pain and hurt. Faced with death of the loved one, they feel powerless to get past  their feelings of worthlessness and shame. But as the story gradually unfolds and moves inexorably to its conclusion, each woman becomes more acutely aware of what she has done and is willing to accept responsibility. This self-knowledge culminates in a moment of genuine forgiveness and a sense of rebirth, 

In the Jewish tradition, forgiveness for sins must be preceded by a verbal recognition of wrongdoing, regret for what has been done, and a public resolve to avoid doing the same thing again if the opportunity to sin presents itself in the future. But there is a wrinkle depending on the nature of the sin. If it is directed to God, confession and repentance are enough to wipe the slate clean. But for sins committed against people, confession and repentance alone are insufficient. True forgiveness and closure are not achieved until forgiveness is granted by the person who was injured. Did You Ever Have a Family? describes and captures this interpersonal healing process in lyrical prose. Moreover, the sense of rebirth that animates the climax of the novel recapitulates the Jewish notion that a person who achieves genuine repentance after committing a sin is a new person, completely different than the person who committed the crime.  

There have been recent books like A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet that create a storyline that incorporates biblical elements. Did you ever have a family?’ is different. The architecture of the novel and its human voices are unequivocally modern. But the deeper structure has a profoundly religious sensibility; it grapples with spiritual themes and ideas normally taken up in non-secular settings. The book is infused with a heartfelt intensity that is unusual in contemporary fiction. I’m sure the author would be gratified to know that his book has beautifully articulated the regenerative power of forgiveness in a manner that transcends the bounds of plain fiction.  

Did You Ever Have a Family? 
Bill Clegg 
Reviewed by Howard Trachtman 
Simon & Schuster, Inc 
Published 2015 
Paperback version, Scout Press, 2016, pp291 
Web Photo by Norbert Buduczki