Kluger's Reflections

¶ … Ruth Kluger in Part I: Vienna The objective of this study is to examine the reflections of Ruth Kluger in Part I: Vienna and her relationship with her parents and how it was problematic for her to speak about her relationship with her parents in light of the Holocaust. This study will explain each relationship and how and why the historic events make it difficult to speak about them honestly. Finally, this study will answer as to how Kluger's narration of these relationships confirm or contradict the reader's expectation.

Kluger reports that Vienna became her first prison and that Vienna was "a city with no exit, a city that banished you and then didn't allow you to leave." (p. 26) According to Kluger their bags were always packed and they were always "on the brink of moving to another country, and we were never comfortably settled, not even for the near future." (p.

26) Kluger did not know her half brother very well and her memory of him is limited to such as knowing he could ride a bicycle and that he was her role model more knowledgeable than was she.

Although she did not know her half-brother Schorschi well, she notes that he was her "first great loss" and that "every subsequent loss seemed a replay of that first." (p.28) Kluger's mother states to her when a child that if it had not been for Kluger that she would have saved Schorschi but that she could not leave Kluger alone in Vienna which leaves Kluger questioning if it were her fault that her brother had died.

Kluger remembers asking her mother who she loved more, herself or Schorschi and that her mother answered that she loved Schorschi more since she had know him longer. Kluger reports that sixty years later she could still recall her mother's statement. Kluger's recall of her father includes that he was a handsome man and that he appeared to her as more dignified than did other parents. Kluger explains that her father, a doctor, was only allowed to treat Jewish patients and that he learned the side trade of making sausages.

Kluger states that she wants to celebrate her father in some manner or to "find or invent an appropriate way of mourning, some ceremony for him." (p.30) However, she sates that she suspected of such ceremonies "mendacity, and often to strike me as ridiculous." (p. 30) Kluger reports her Grandfather to be much beloved by herself because he always "had a welcome smile and his pockets full of presents for me." (p.

30) Kluger states that if she were other than Jewish that she could "mourn my ghosts in some accepted public way, like saying kaddish for my father, I'd have a friendlier attitude towards this religion, which reduces its daughters to helpmeets of men and circumscribes their spiritual life within the confines of domestic functions.

Recipes for geflite fish are no recipe for coping with the Holocaust." (p 30) Kluger states that when people ask why she wants to say kaddish that she holds that certain tasks are set out by the dead…they want to be remembered and revered, they want to be resurrected and buried at the same time. I want to say kaddish because I live with the dead." (p.

31) Kluger states that her father's generation did not pay a great deal of attention to younger children and while her mother had made claims that her father was crazy about her, Kluger states that is much like "staging and then retouching a family photo" and that she "knew better." (p. 31) She recalls her father beginning to be of some interest to her father when she began to read and how he took her to a bookstore and allowed her to choose a book.

Her father taught her to play chess but she was not really interested in the game although later in her life that she was consoled by the game and that it gave her a great deal of pleasure with "its esthetic of pure cohesion, unspoiled by questions of means and ends, since the means are the end: a game like a dance." (p.32) Playing chess to Kluger is like "an ongoing conversation with my father; You see, you didn't waste your time with me in your Herrinzimmer.

I haven't forgotten what you taught me." (p. 32) Kluger was afraid of her father since she was not very close with her father and explains it was therefore very difficult to gauge his moods. She explains that she reflects on childhood events that are trivial because "they are all I have of him and because I can't make them jibe with his death.

Try as I may, I can't change these images or the feelings that go with them, and concentrate instead on what I know happened to him in the end. For I only know of his fate, I don't recall it, and imagined pictures have a lower priority than remembered ones." (p. 33) Kluger explains that it is impossible bridge the "gap between knowledge and memory." (p.

33) Kluger writes that the normality is to have a "set image of a person we know and love and can visualize him or her within a stable mental frame, we don't have to cope with a dozen snapshots that split and turn like the images in a kaleidoscope." (p. 34) Kluger additionally states that when one speaks of a finished like that they have.