Free In Paradise: A Novel by Peter Matthiessen Page A

description “a damned unrepentant snob.” His son Alexei had inherited his father’s prejudice against “the Romans,” which was not only permissible, damn it all, but a prerogative of one’s legacy and common sense, and as a consequence of anti-clerical family attitudes, Clements worried that he himself might be a reflexive anti-papist. However, what worried him far more was how careless bias against Roman Catholics was used to paint over the mold and rot of a far more pernicious prejudice against the Jews.
    Olin’s Lutheran grandparents and their émigré friends had no hesitation in blaming Rome-stoked hatred for the demonizing of the Jews; for a thousand years, thanks to the clergy, anti-Semitism had been as ingrained in the coarse hides of Polish “serfs” as the earth under their fingernails, the old Baron said. Why else would so many uneducated Poles—and Croats, Ukrainians, Romanians, and other Catholics—have done so much of the dirty work for the Gestapo and the SS and, farther east, for the Soviet secret police?
    Though escape abroad had spared them harsh experience of either, the family had of course abhorred the loutish Nazis, then the barbaric Red soldiery who despoiled their chalet and estate. Appalled by that upstart in Berlin (“He brings his mouth to his food, they say, instead of his food to his mouth”) they professed great sympathy—
mais oui!
—for those unfortunate “Israelite” victims. (Was “Jew” a dirty word?) But the old Baron’s sniffing enunciation, his sifting of such words like small bones in the fish course, instantly (and to some degree intentionally, his grandson suspected) laid bare that time-honored disdain—not quite overt, always deniable, yet as pervasive in that house as the faint reek of Alexei’s old retriever.
    Growing up and learning more, Clements came to recognize the racist slights that surfaced in dinner conversations, those casual unkindnesses, occasionally quite clever (and considered more permissible on that account), that soiled his sense of self-respect when he smiled, too. The meanness was in the timing, the inflection. And in his youth, he’d often wondered what awful secret about Jews these émigré aristocrats seemed to know, when as a class, he was discovering, they knew so little of real substance about
anything
.
    The boy supposed he loved his family, what was left of it, since that, said his English grandmother, is “what one did.” But eventually he realized that in this household, the Shoah had never been experienced as an immense tragedy involving unthinkable numbers of fellow Europeans, but only as an abstract calamity, as far removed from real concern as mention of some overcrowded ferry lost in the eastern seas. And as time went on, he came to understand that he himself had been unseen in the same way.

    I N THE COLD MESS HALL, the evening meal is somber. Olin eats in silence with Anders and Rainer, the intense retreat leader from Berlin, and Eva, a Czech whose mother had survived the first selection only to die within the next few hours (of heartbreak, says her daughter). With Eva is another elderly survivor who smiles gently when spoken to but rarely speaks; he takes no notice when Eva whispers, “Mr. Malan is a great, great artist.”
    Sounding tired and discouraged, the old lady comments that to judge from the rude impatience of the few young people on this retreat, the Shoah has already lost its power as a cautionary lesson. Olin agrees. In reactionary circles in America, he tells them, despite the massive documentation, its very historical existence has been questioned, and even the degree of German guilt. He cites a right-wing Catholic review that bitched in print after the war about America’s “over-exposure to the luridities . . . the countless corpses and gas ovens, and kilos of gold wrenched out of dead men’s teeth. There is underway a studious attempt to cast suspicion upon Germany . . .”
    “
Cast