Cigar Weekly

MEMOIR

A Family History of Smoking

By Andrew Riemer

MUP, 224pp, $32.95

Destined to Live: One Woman's War, Life, Loves Remembered

By Sabina Wolanski with Diana Bagnall

HarperCollins, 320pp, $32.99

SABINA Wolanski was born in 1927 in Boryslaw, ``a hard-living oilfields town in Eastern Poland'' in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains. At the time, the town was made up of a mix of Poles, Jews and Ukrainians, a population that history was raring to reveal as an ethnic time bomb. Today the little grey mouse of a town is part of western Ukraine, having changed hands several times since the 18th century: from Poland to Austria to Galicia (Austro-Hungarian province) back to Poland and then finally it was swallowed by the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

As part of contemporary Ukraine, Boryslaw is a small dot in ``a dirt-poor corner of Europe'', unremarkable in every sense, observes Wolanski in her moving memoir, Destined to Live, co-written with journalist Diana Bagnall. I suspect it was equally as unremarkable when Sabina was born there to Sala and Fischel Haberman eight decades ago.

As to the Haberman's ethnicity, no surprises there. Sala and Fischel were Jewish, yet this fact did not seem central to either parent's sense of self or to the way they brought up Sabina and her older brother Josek. Fischel Haberman was a director of a bank and a wholesale merchant, prosperous enough and respected enough in Boryslaw, while his wife worked alongside him. Despite not being religious, they closed the family business on Saturdays for reasons of prudence and propriety. In a small town, they knew better than to rock boats. Saturdays would become special to Sabina not because of any religious traditions but because it was the day her beloved Mama was home.

So this is how Sabina first comes to us, a small-town Polish Jewish princess, much-spoilt and much-loved, the shoelaces on her boots tied by an obliging maid. What do we do with this idyllic picture, knowing what we do about the fate of European Jewry in the 20th century, knowing that Sabina was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust? All we can do is count backwards from 1939, when first the German and then the Soviet troops entered Boryslaw, to 1927 and 12 blessed years of peace, of Sabina blossoming, playing piano and devouring books while sitting astride a sack of sugar or rice at the back of the family's shop.

Andrew Riemer's family comes from another ``cumbersome Babel'' of the old Europe, perhaps the most breathtaking still: the Austro-Hungarian empire. A small village with an unpronounceable name on the border between Austria and Hungary, where Riemer's paternal great-grandfather David was born, was typical of that world, in which multiple languages and ethnicities mingled freely. It was, as Riemer writes in his richly evocative memoir, A Family History of Smoking, ``one of those border worlds, where people could easily move from one language to the other, one view of the world to its opposite''.

From the closing years of the 19th century through to the beginning of the 20th, Riemer's great-grandfather, who is a flesh-and-blood presence in the book, was a successful merchant, not unlike his counterpart Fischel Haberman in Boryslaw. Yet, while Fischel lost everything in 1939, David Riemer's luck would run out two decades earlier, when, in the aftermath of World War I, the raping, pillaging, murdering Bolshevik uprising came to the Hungarian countryside.

Before the war, both sides of Riemer's family were loyal and industrious subjects of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were Jewish but, as with the Habermans, this was never the focal point of their identity; together with other thoroughly assimilated Jews, they spoke German as their principal language. Riemer captures the essence of this world, marked in equal measure by the enchantment and foreboding. The family's loyalty was to the Habsburg monarchs. And it was reciprocated, at least in part, as the Patent of Tolerance decreed by Joseph II in 1781 guaranteed Jewish subjects tolerance and equality. Profound prejudice and anti-Semitism was still there, of course, never too far from the surface, but as long as the empire stood firm, its Jewish subjects felt protected and, at least partially, embraced.

Riemer tells a complex and at times unsettling story of cultural assimilation that, in its most extreme if not entirely unusual manifestation, produced that fabled cultural figure, the self-hating Jew. This is a difficult story and to get it right Riemer, who is chief book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, draws on a range of seminal European texts from the first half of the 20th century: Stefan Zweig's Beware of Pity, Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Schweik and Arthur Schnitzler's Fraulein Else. These literary sources, skilfully unpacked, leave us with a picture of assimilation as more than a dirty word: neither merely a deeply internalised anti-Semitism nor simply the height of tragic self-delusion.

And then there is the small matter of smoking. His mother's side of the family were and are devoted tobacco users, determined to view smoking as ``one of the greatest joys and comforts of life''. Riemer stands proud among them, grown wiser, not deterred, by years of short-lived attempts to kick the habit. On his father's side, however, the smokers are far outnumbered by stern enemies of tobacco. This is by no means trivial. Smoking has been a powerful force in Riemer's family history, a harbinger and a sealer of fate. In one of the most devastating lines of his memoir, Riemer notes that while most of his mother's family survived the Holocaust, most of his father's family went up in smoke in 1944.

The theme of smoking transcends the story of Riemer's family as it comes to stand for the history of ``the European heartlands''. Austria Tabak, he writes, ``survived the collapse of the Habsburg world, the chaotic Austrian republic of the years between the two wars, Hitler's annexation of Austria, the horrors of World War II, the humiliation of occupation by foreign powers and the emergence of a new republic, only to fall victim to the universal lust for privatisation in 1997''.

We should not be surprised that despite the obvious differences, Riemer's and Wolanski's families have a great deal in common, not least their shared cultural geography, in which Vienna reigns supreme. In Riemer's striking words, theirs was the world ``that always looked, no matter how obliquely or even resentfully, towards Vienna, that sweet, beguiling and treacherous navel of their civilisation in all its variety and contradictoriness''.

There was famously, Wolanski tells us, a train that ran once a week between Boryslaw and Vienna. You made money in Boryslaw, the saying went, but you spent it in Vienna. The fast and frequent railway service also brought Riemer's great-grandfather David to Vienna in an hour or so. There, on his frequent business trips, he would purchase the best cigars he could find. For Sabina's parents, Vienna as well as Germanic language and culture ``epitomised civilisation as they knew it''. For Riemer's family, German was ``the language of culture'', an essential ingredient in its self-image.

In the end none of this mattered because it was in this language of culture that the Final Solution was formulated. It was this very culture, the pinnacle of civilisation in the eyes of so many European Jews, that would become unstoppably, insanely genocidal. It made no difference even for those who walked the furthest distance from their Jewish roots, such as one of Riemer's distant relatives who showed great enthusiasm for ultra-nationalist and fascist forces. They were all swept like that much rubbish from the surface of the earth. The Holocaust was the greatest leveller of them all.

The Germans arrived in Boryslaw on July 1, 1941. The first pogrom carried out by the local population came two days later. Then came countless others, and the armbands: white with a blue Star of David. Soon after Nazis did not have to use Poles and Ukrainians to kill the Jews. They were more than happy to do the job themselves. Wolanksi's mother was murdered in the gas chambers of Belzec concentration camp together with 500,000 others. Her father and brother were executed by a firing squad.

When, in one of the many moments that she (God knows how) cheated death, Wolanksi was taken to a police station to be executed the next morning, she asked for something to scrub the floor of her cell with. ``Tomorrow is tomorrow,'' she explained. ``Today I am alive, and I am not going to live like a pig.'' This story tells you all you need to know about Wolanski. It cannot explain why she survived. But it can tell you how.

This is not only how she survived, this is how she lived her entire life, determined to retain her dignity at all costs, to reclaim life's joys and to not be flattened by the burden of the past. And, boy, did she succeed. Does it make us feel uncomfortable? Her multiple marriages, her love of comfort, her ability to make and spend money? Her mother, she writes, ``raised me to be loved, and who's to say that developing a healthy appetite for love in a child isn't the best protection a mother can offer?''.

Destined to Live is addressed to Wolanksi's mother, whose loss still feels raw. The underlying conversation between mother and daughter never seems contrived. When in 2005 Wolanski was chosen to represent the six million murdered Jews at the opening of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, she wished her mother could see her there. Mama, can you imagine? she writes, I was there in Berlin, in the lion's den, speaking to all the dignitaries, cool, calm and collected, your little Binka, Mama. I may have not taken Paris, the city of my dreams, but Mama, I did take Berlin.

There is one more ongoing conversation throughout this book: with Wolanski's lifelong friend Roza, a devoted cousin of her first boyfriend Imek who, too, died in the Holocaust. The serious, austere and deeply intelligent Roza could never quite reconcile her feelings towards the love of her cousin's short life. Was Wolanski a floozy? Here she is after the end of the war, her family's only survivor, yet all she wants to do is go dancing every night with just about anyone, including, God forbid, an assortment of Russian soldiers. What kind of a young woman would behave like that? Here she is, not even 20, recklessly entering a marriage doomed from the start. After Auschwitz, could there be men? Passion? Abandon? Dancing?

In his powerful book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (2000), Philip Gourevitch gives us the words of Bonaventure Nyibizi, a genocide survivor. Survival, Nyibizi says, is meaningless until one finds ``a reason to survive again, a reason to look to tomorrow''. The so-called survival instinct, Gourevitch writes, ``is often described as an animal urge to preserve oneself. But once the threat of bodily annihilation is relieved, the soul still requires preservation''.

Destined to Live and A Family History of Smoking are more than chronicles of survival. They are important and wonderfully written books about wounded souls finding reasons to survive again and again, about what it takes and what it means to be fully, tirelessly alive.