tragedy – medhum.org

The End of Days by Bernard MacLaverty

Tony Miksanek — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 18:30:19 +0000

Autumn in Vienna, 1918. Menace circulated in the air itself, and fear was rampant as a global pandemic and a World War raged. Egon, an artist, and his wife Edi, six months pregnant, had enough money to live on but hardly any opportunities to spend it. Shortages of coal for heat and flour for bread were continuous. Edi has suddenly become very ill – trouble breathing, loss of appetite, exhaustion, fever, and explosive coughing that produces blood. It is the Spanish flu and pneumonia.

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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Did You Ever Have a Family? by Bill Clegg

Howard Trachtman — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 13:47:29 +0000

One of the best features of the apartment building where I live is the three bookcases that are shoved together in the basement on the path to the laundry room. It is a convenient place for residents to deposit books they have read and so prevent them from piling up on their desks, bedside tables, or windowsills. I pass by the bookcases nearly every morning and this novel was my most recent pickup. It is not a new release, and the draw was the bright, orange-colored cover and the relatively large print that seemed inviting to my aging eyes. It was a fortuitous choice

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.

Bill Clegg

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

The Grasshopper by Anton Chekhov

Jack Coulehan — Sun, 11 May 2025 14:40:22 +0000

In this story, Dr. Dymov is an earnest and rather boring young physician, who is preoccupied with his patients and his research. Olga, his wife, craves the excitement and gaiety of the artistic life. She discovers a new lease on romance with Ryabovsky, a colorful landscape artist, who takes her on a Volga River cruise. As they spoon under the stars, Olga and her lover make light of her bumptious stay-at-home husband. After she returns from the cruise, Dymov forgives her infidelity, but in Olga’s mind, his forgiveness proves to be another strike against the poor slob, since she can’t stand his complaisant devotion. She runs back to Ryabovsky for a while, until he makes it clear that he is no longer interested in her.

Then one day Dymov develops diphtheria, evidently contracted by “sucking up mucus through a pipette from a boy with diphtheria. And what for? It was stupid… just from folly.” Dymov soon becomes seriously ill and then dies. Suddenly, Olga is overcome with guilt and grief. Too late, Olga realizes that her husband was a hero.

Chekhov based this story on the real-life love affair between his good friends Isaak Levitan, a well-known (and married) artist, and Lika Mizinova, a young unmarried teacher, who had for many years been infatuated with Chekhov while he toyed with her affection. In this interpretation, Chekhov bases the character of Dymov largely on himself, portrayed as a dedicated and disciplined worker who has no time to spare for frivolous romance. However, in reality, Chekhov had playful relationships with many women, but eschewed commitment until late in life.

Another way of looking at the story is the dramatic tension between practicality (science, public health, and social consciousness), as exemplified by Dymov; and emotion (art, adventure, romance), as exemplified by Ryabovsky. Olga at first chooses the latter, but Dymov’s death turns the tables. After he becomes a martyr to science, she suddenly finds him more interesting and mourns her loss. Was his death the result of a foolish mistake? Did her infidelity play a role, perhaps by distracting him while he was aspirating the pus? Or might Dymov have deliberately performed the foolish procedure, realizing that the infection would cause his death?

The Wife & Other Stories. The Tales of Chekhov. Volume 5, New York, The Ecco Press, 1985.
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.
Shelby Foote (Ed.) Chekhov’s Later Short Stories. 1888-1903, New York, The Modern Library, 1999.
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett.

A previous version of this review was published in the NYU Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (Litmed).

Reviews of Chekhov’s Stories

Time’s Echo by Jeremy Eichler

Howard Trachtman — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 15:54:43 +0000

In this haunting book, Jeremy Eichler combines his unique expertise as a celebrated music critic for the Boston Globe and as a historian of modern Europe to recount the story of four 20^th century composers and how each one responded to the horror and barbarity that they lived through during their long careers. At first glance, there does not appear to be a natural bond connecting Arnold Schonberg, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, and Dimitri Shostakovich, although their lives overlapped, and their paths intersected. Strauss helped Schonberg get started early in his career when he moved to Berlin in 1901. Britten and Shostakovich established a deep and abiding relationship later in life and they enthusiastically championed each other’s work. But the four men had different pedigrees, upbringing, and life experiences. What Eichler sees as the common link is the creative need to express painful memories in music. At a deeper level, that memory always involved the persecution of Jews and the unfathomable evil of the Holocaust.

Strauss and Schonberg were products of high German culture and were inspired by the notion of bildung, that man’s perfection is achievable by embracing the humanistic arts. Of all the elements of culture – visual arts, literature, sculpture, dance – for Germans, music was considered the ultimate and most noble embodiment of the human spirit. How could one maintain this enlightened vision of bildung after witnessing the dark years of the Third Reich? That is the tragedy that confronted these two men. Strauss, a non-Jew, had to reconcile his prestigious position in the German musical establishment and his social status with the need to toady up to the Nazi brass to save the lives of members of his family by marriage who were Jewish. He never renounced Hitler or the Nazi party. Schonberg, who earlier in his life followed Gustav Mahler’s lead and converted out of Judaism to the Lutheran church, was still forced into exile to escape the Nazis, and thrived in a German expatriate community in Los Angeles. The world war reawakened his self-identity as a Jew and forced a reassessment of his relationship to his fellow Jews. Eichler sees Strauss’ Metamorphosen and Schonberg’s Survivor of Warsaw as timeless musical monuments to those who suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis, works that gain their special power by being expressions of each man’s inner turmoil.

For Britten, the War Requiem was a pacifist’s response to the self-destructiveness of war and the grievous loss of a generation of young able-bodied men

Britten and Shostakovich lived in an entirely different world than Strauss and Schonberg. Nonetheless, they too suffered though the ravages of the Second World War. Britten, a gay man and committed pacifist, never served in active military duty. But he witnessed the nightly bombings of England and the German artillery attacks along the coastline near where he lived. Shostakovich was alternatively celebrated and reviled by Stalin. He lived a life of continuous dread, trying to survive as a person and musician when a death sentence could come at a moment’s notice at the whim of the Great Leader. Britten was commissioned to write a musical piece to accompany the dedication of the Coventry Cathedral which had been nearly destroyed by a night-long Wehrmacht bombing raid; Shostakovich was inspired to write his 14^th Symphony after reading Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s 1962 poem “Babi Yar”. For Britten, the War Requiem was a pacifist’s response to the self-destructiveness of war and the grievous loss of a generation of young able-bodied men; Shostakovich’s work was his attempt to come to grips with the moral blindness of the Russian people who denied their complicity with the Nazi murder of 33,000 innocent Jewish men, women, and children at the ravine outside Kyiv in broad daylight, in one ghastly day.

This overview hardly captures the dense description of these four men and the turbulent times they lived through. There are astonishing subplots and characters in each composer’s narrative. Eichler retells how Schonberg originally reached out to Serge Koussevitsky to premiere Survivor of Warsaw. When the conductor demurred, the inaugural concert ended up being performed by a community orchestra and choir in Albuquerque, New Mexico. When Britten toured the Displaced Person camps after World War II and played piano accompaniment with the violinist Yehudi Menuhin at Bergen Belsen, the intensity of his playing profoundly affected a young Venetian woman named Anita Lasker, who survived the Holocaust only because she had been enlisted to play in the inmates’ orchestra, directed by a colleague of Strauss and Schonberg. There is so much in Time’s Echo and the best advice is to allow yourself to be immersed in the book.

Eichler is a precise and enthusiastic writer, and he fully captures the emotional toll of living through the two World Wars, in Germany, England, and Russia. The inhumanity of the trench warfare in World War I, the insane hatred driving the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in Europe, the unprecedented destructiveness of World War II, the senseless starvation and killing of millions of Russians during the forced agricultural collectivizations and the German siege of Leningrad – all of these are depicted by Eichler in stark prose.

There is so much to comment on. Let me focus on one point – Eichler’s assertion that music is the optimal way to memorialize events in the past. To begin, one might question the need to remember altogether. In Zachor (University of Washington Press, 1982), Yosef Dov Yerushalmi documents how important memory is to the Jewish people. History is not a simple record of dates and facts. Instead, history and memory are meant to bring the past to life and reinforce faith and commitment. But David Rieff, in the book In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and its Ironies (Yale University Press, 2016), suggests that overemphasis on memory of past events can ensnare people in a web of accusations and counterclaims and weaken individual agency. And do the musical memorials composed by the four composers point a way forward to overcome the failings of the past or do they create an emotional trap? The swirling currents of hatred circling our world today give pause to any notion that the works of these composers have brought us any closer to a world of tolerance and peaceful coexistence.

All of the senses participate in the formation of memory. Proust famously wrote about how the smell of a madeleine evoked deep-seated memories in one of his characters. Eichler gives pride of place to hearing and music. There is no question that hearing a particular popular song or piece of music often triggers recollection of pivotal moments in a person’s life. Eichler has a wonderful feeling for the musical compositions, which range from seven minutes to over an hour long and play such a central role in Time’s Echo. However, I wonder whether most of us can delve as deeply into the content and feelings articulated in a piece of music. It is not the evanescence of sound per se that makes me uncertain, because all sensory perceptions are transitory and both sights and sounds can be captured and reserved for posterity in photographs and recordings. But it is the complexity of classical music that I find daunting. In Rebecca Goldstein’s book 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction (Pantheon, 2010), there is a scene in which a math prodigy and his genius friends are sitting around and for entertainment, they challenge each other to sing variations of famous classical music pieces like a Bach prelude shifted up by a third, changed from the major key to minor, or starting from the middle and going backwards. Do we need to understand music with such precision to be moved by the complicated creations of Schonberg, Straus, Britten, and Shostakovich? I’ve listened to the four pieces of music discussed in the book, and though I was moved, I know I was not as appreciative as Eichler of their artistry and nuance.

Three of the compositions were accompanied by text to focus and amplify the impact of the music. Some of the choices were straightforward, like the poem by Yevtushenko. But the selection of works by Wilfred Owen to accompany the War Requiem and the words that Schonberg wrote to be read during the performance of Survivor of Warsaw contribute greatly to the emotional power of the two works. So much to ponder, so much to learn.

Echoes lose their intensity as they bounce off surfaces and spread out in space. Eichler’s book does not echo, it resonates and amplifies. It is overflowing with content that touches on so many topics and issues. It activates each one and gets them vibrating, different frequencies, different pitches. In the end, Time’s Echo creates a symphony of ideas that we can all read and listen to, one glorious mixed metaphor

TIME’S ECHO
Jeremy Eichler
Knopf, 2023, 386 pp