A Sea Change

by Michael Arditti

Genres: General Fiction; World War II

Synopsis

The enthralling story of a refugee from Nazi Germany and his voyage to a new life across the Atlantic

'A moving and heartening story in which spirit triumphs over political barbarity' Edna O'Brien

'Brilliant use of a momentous journey . . . A gripping and adroit fusion of history with personal drama' Rose Tremain

'This is the story of how I became a man . . .'

In May 1939, the SS St. Louis left Hamburg for Havana, carrying almost a thousand refugees from Hitler's Germany. Over the following weeks, the ship criss-crossed the ocean, buffeted alternately by hope and disappointment, as it sought asylum in a friendly port and war drew inexorably closer.

Based on actual events, Michael Arditti's enthralling novel is the memoir of one of the passengers, fifteen-year-old Karl, heir to a department store fortune. He recounts both the horror and excitement of the trip, along with his personal voyage of discovery, as he learns the truth about his family, battles Nazi crew members and plans mutiny. Most momentously, he describes his first, passionate love affair with the beautiful young Johanna.

Release date: September 1, 2006

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 304

Sample

 

Praise for A Sea Change


 

‘Brilliant use of a momentous journey to tell the story of a Jewish boy’s rite of passage into adulthood. A gripping and adroit fusion of history with personal drama.’

Rose Tremain

 

‘A moving and heartening story in which spirit triumphs over political barbarity.’

Edna O’Brien

 

‘Michael Arditti has got into the head of a young boy who is both facing an uncertain, and possibly terrifying, future, and finding his first love. This tale of the ill-fated St Louis carrying a thousand German Jewish refugees to Havana, with its determined, fair-minded German captain, is moving, understated, and beautifully and sensitively described.’

Rabbi Dame Julia Neuberger

 

‘Using fictional characters, Arditti sensitively recreates the historical incidents that took place on board ship. By grafting a coming-of-age drama on to a gripping episode in international history, Arditti succeeds in creating fiction that is morally serious, moving and intense.’

Sarah Davison, Times Literary Supplement


 

‘This is a famous story, retold by Arditti with warmth, vividness and gentle wisdom.’

Kate Saunders, The Times


 

‘This moving rites-of-passage tale is as readable as it is profound.’

Neil Richards, Daily Express


 

‘As in his last novel, Unity, Arditti brings historical events and private emotions seamlessly together, his instrument here his storyteller’s steady yet flexible voice. Karl is a superbly realised fifteen-year-old. Less formally experimental than Arditti’s previous fiction, A Sea Change is an advance in sheer intellectual authority and breadth of sympathy.’

Paul Binding, Independent on Sunday


 

Tender and perceptive, Arditti’s novel fuses history and fiction into a totally absorbing read. The horror of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, seen as it affects one family, makes it all the more involving. And Karl’s bumpy progress to manhood is as revealing a picture of tortured adolescence as I’ve read.’

Clare Colvin, Daily Mail


 

‘Arditti brilliantly evokes the ever-changing emotions of Karl as a fifteen-year-old passenger on the SS St Louis. Central to the story is Karl’s first love affair, with Johanna, a beautiful fellow passenger. It shows how a first love can still make every second precious and magical. Arditti makes historical memories come alive in this haunting narrative about a momentous voyage.’

Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post


 

‘Fact and fiction are seamlessly brought together in Michael Arditti’s latest novel, A Sea Change. The timeless themes deal with the emotional angst of coming of age and the way people – rich or poor – respond to the profound challenge of displacement. A skilled storyteller with a sharp eye for detail, Arditti vividly captures mood and atmosphere so that we can almost taste the food and feel the great swelling of the ocean.’

Emmanuel Cooper, Tribune


 

‘Arditti skilfully blends the fifteen-year-old boy’s adolescent embarrassment with the knowing voice of the elderly grandfather. The effect is powerful, as is the mixture of serious philosophical, political and religious debate with outrageous humour.’

Julia Pascal, Jewish Chronicle


 

‘It is all beautifully told and observed, well-paced and full of insight. Gentle and coy in its descriptions of Karl’s love for Johanna, thoughtfully mixing notions of faith with identity and politics, it is an outstanding novel.’

Peter Stanford, Catholic Herald


 

‘As serious, compassionate and morally engaging as anything he has done.’

D. J. Taylor, Independent


 

‘A Sea Change by Michael Arditti shows a writer whose talent becomes more obvious with every book.’

Allan Massie, Scotsman Books of the Year 

This is the story of how I became a man. Millions of people died and I became a man. Which, as I would be the first to admit, is a gross imbalance. I have no ambition, however, to elegise a nation. To quote that other great twentieth-century monster, the Georgian peasant not the Austrian corporal: ‘A single death is a tragedy, a million a statistic.’ I know how profoundly statistics bore you, so I shall stick to the singular: my family – your family – and some of the people we encountered as we fled from Germany: our fellow exiles; our oppressors; and the girl who was torn between the two, Johanna Paulsen. Just writing her name brings back all the promise of first love, along with all the torment of its loss. But I anticipate myself. You will meet her in due course, off the coast of France. We were in the same boat: a phrase that in English has a double meaning but in German, like so much else, was extremely precise. The boat was the ill-starred St Louis and it was taking us from Hamburg to Havana to begin a new life.

I am writing the story for my grandchildren: for you, Marcus, and for you, Leila, and for you, my little Susan, who, unless I am to defy fate a second time, will be unable to read it until long after my death, and especially for you, Edward, who appear to have inherited a streak of your great-great grandfather’s entrepreneurial spirit. I remember your parents’ horror at the first hint of it – when you sold the conkers you had gathered from my garden to your friends at nursery school – and your own dejection when the expected approval was withheld. On the surface, it seemed that such mercenary schemes offended their milky socialism, but I wonder whether there were a deeper reason, one that they might not have realised and certainly could not have acknowledged: a fear that there was some truth in the old anti-Semitic slurs and that you were reverting to type.

I harbour no illusions that any of you children will rush to read this. None of you has so far shown the least curiosity about your heritage. The present is so vast and fast-moving that the past appears to be doubly obsolete. You search for stories in other galaxies rather than other ages. You create your myths in the infinite expansion of space. Nevertheless, had you studied the basic facts, Marcus, you would never have admired a rock band called Stormtroopers or failed to appreciate the distinction between shock and offence. Nor would any of you have turned wicked into a term of commendation. Your mother sees it as the sign of a living language; I see it as an abuse. I have witnessed how easily language can be distorted and a whole group of people objectified. I am aware that to insist on purity of any sort makes me seem like a relic. Yet, when I am dead and these notebooks have attained a sentimental value to outweigh their literary flaws, one or other of you may flick through the pages and a word or an image catch your eye. You may even look back in sympathy at your grandfather’s guttural accent and his emphatic refusal to contemplate buying a German car.

This is also the story of how I became a Jew. I was born to Jewish parents in 1924, but I became a Jew nine years later when Adolf Hitler seized power. It was not the ultimate perversity, let alone a protest on the lines of the Danish king’s threat to wear the Yellow Star when the Nazis occupied his country. It was rather that race became my sole definition. I collected stamps; I supported Hertha BSC; I was a champion swimmer and an avid bird-watcher, but the only thing that counted was that I was a Jew. I suspect that this will seem utterly alien to children whose mother sets school essays such as Religion is the opium of the people: discuss, when what she means is Religion is the opium of the people: approve. It made little enough sense to me, whose religion had until then been a fact rather than a factor in life. It wasn’t that I had attempted to hide it. After all, I was born into one of the most distinguished Jewish families in Germany. Frankel-Hirsch is a name for you all to be proud of – or it would be if it hadn’t been chopped to Frank when we settled here. It was balanced by Karl, as neutral as a name could be – and far too neutral for the Nazis, who decreed that any Jew with a first name outside a narrowly Semitic list had to take Israel for a second. In our tradition, whenever a person is in mortal danger, he is given a new name in order to deceive the Angel of Death. Which may be how I survived.

My family was not observant. My mother and grandfather were what was known somewhat derisively as ‘three-day Jews’, which meant that they attended synagogue on Yom Kippur and the two days of Rosh Hashanah. The rest of the year they expressed their faith by serving the community. My grandfather was on the board of numerous charities and even my mother, who baulked at assuming anything resembling a traditional female role, organised galas and concerts on behalf of those less fortunate than ourselves, which, in material terms, meant virtually the entire population of Germany. My grandfather, whose constant concern was to show himself a German first and a Jew second, was meticulously even-handed. If he gave to a Jewish organisation, he was careful to make an equal, if not larger, donation to its gentile equivalent. He adopted the same principle in politics, his belief in the middle way informing his decision to give to both Left and Right. It was rumoured that, in the early days, he had even helped to finance the Nazis. But, by the time I was old enough to put the question to him, it would have been too cruel.

I went to a regular, rather than a religious, school, which was called a gymnasium. I see your eyes light up, Edward, but that didn’t mean that our lessons consisted of climbing ropes and jumping through hoops (or, if they did, the hoops were metaphorical). Gymnasium was the name for a secondary school and its emphasis lay less on athleticism than on Latin and Greek. I was one of a handful of Jewish boys in a school that, until the terms were redefined, catered to what was known as the elite. But, in spite of certain physical distinctions most apparent in the changing room (I trust I have no need to elaborate), I did not stand out.

My grandfather encouraged me to bring my friends home and, at first, they were keen to accept my invitations. I fear that you wouldn’t have found it to your taste, Leila – you who dislike houses that you ‘have to go around with a guidebook’, but I’m sure that, had you grown up there, you would have appreciated its charms. It was one of the finest houses in Berlin and filled with furniture that required you to be on your best behaviour even when there were no grown-ups present (so no motor races across Biedermeier sofas or crayons on Persian carpets – I name no names, not even ones that begin with an E!). The walls were hung with Old Master paintings that generations of my ancestors had lovingly collected. The subjects were largely religious although, with the same even-handedness that informed my grandfather’s philanthropy, there were as many Christian saints as Jewish patriarchs – a range that drew increasing scorn as the country grew more sharply divided. We even had our own synagogue, with a roof that could be winched open at Sukkot, our harvest festival, and replaced by a canopy of branches and fruit although, no matter how hard I begged, it remained closed. The room itself was only put to its designated use on the anniversaries  of my grandmother’s and uncle’s deaths. At other times it hosted chamber concerts and recitals. And before any of you asks – yes, even you Leila – whether you can go to see it, I should point out that it was destroyed in an Allied air-raid during the War. In the 1950s, they built high-rise flats on the site. You may as well visit a tower block in Bethnal Green.

I presume that I have now caught your attention since no child can resist a peep into Aladdin’s cave, but it is not my intention to seduce you with a story of lost wealth. Besides, our treasures were looted by the Nazis long before the house was bombed. Yet, when the opportunity arose, I made no claim for reparations. This was not on account of asceticism or self-sacrifice for, as your grandmother could tell you and your mother no doubt has, I am a creature of comfort. I have, however, seen where such claims have led in the past: the resentment stoked, followed by the search for scapegoats. I was too afraid of provoking it again – especially when the beneficiaries and scapegoats would be one and the same.

The foundation of our family’s fortunes was the Frankel department store, which would have been both a household name and a civic landmark to any Berliner in the fifty years before 1939. It occupied an entire city block and was so well-known that it didn’t identify itself anywhere on the facade. In its heyday, it employed fourteen thousand people and such is the lingering effect of Nazi propaganda that, even now, I feel obliged to state that they enjoyed exemplary conditions, including a holiday complex in the Black Forest, to which my grandfather himself made frequent visits – although, much to my relief, my mother drew the line at our accompanying him. The store’s proud boast was that it sold everything. My grandfather used to sit my sister and me beside him and challenge us to find exceptions. To my frustration, Luise only ever asked about toys and dolls, but I thought up ever more ingenious items until one day I demanded an armoured tank, and he had to admit defeat. But by then more than the game was over. Aside from the range of its stock, the store’s most celebrated feature was its lobby, from which a series of intricate staircases connected with the upper floors. It was dominated by a life-size portrait, originally of President Hindenberg and then of Hitler. It seemed to me that the entire decline of Germany was embodied in the switch from the Great War hero’s luxuriant whiskers to the Führer’s mean moustache. At the entrance, liveried footmen greeted customers, offering adults a glass of punch and children a sweet, or several if they made particularly shameless use of the revolving door. You might suppose such munificence to be a ploy, but you never knew your great-great-grandfather. He regarded the store as an extension of his home and everyone who stepped inside as his guest. So he laid down strict guidelines for the treatment of customers. The assistants should never put pressure on them: their job was to serve, not to harass. Needless to say, when positions were reversed, no one extended the same courtesy to him.

By the time of the Nazi ascendancy my grandfather was an old man, although I realise as I write that he must have been at least ten years younger than I am now. His appearance was a measure of his distinction. He was of medium height and slight build with a full head of white hair and a trim beard that was tinged with yellow. He sported a pince-nez on the bridge of his nose, a balancing act which, try as I might, I was no more able to master than a walk on the high wire. His invariable dress of a dark grey suit and tie, and a shirt with a wing collar, gave him the air of a professional mourner – and it suddenly strikes me that that may have been deliberate. The austerity was relieved only by the gold chain of his pocket watch which hung across his waistcoat. It had belonged to his grandfather and he, in turn, had promised it to me, although, as you shall see, it was sold on the St Louis. How Luise loved that watch! At an age when other girls were dressing up or playing hopscotch, she would sit on my grandfather’s lap and twist it to and fro. Then she would put it to her ear and listen to the tick, chuckling as if it spoke a language only she could understand.

My grandfather left for his office at seven thirty every morning except Sunday. His timekeeping was such that I could have set my watch by him, although mine was a mere wristwatch and as wounding to my pride as short trousers. My mother used to fret about his health, urging him to step aside for a younger man. But she knew, and he knew that she knew, and she knew that he knew that she knew (and I know from listening to Leila that this sentence could go on forever), that he had no choice. For, although he had sold a share in the store to an American consortium, whose annual visit was the occasion for great excitement (and a frenzy of present-giving), he ran it alone. Frankel, as the name suggests, was a family concern and I was his designated successor. I had, in fact, made a solemn vow to decline the honour, partly from a determination to become an ornithologist and partly from an aversion to early rising (I conveniently discounted the dawn chorus), but, since I was still at school, the matter wasn’t pressing. My grandfather’s original heir was my Uncle Karl, after whom I was named, who had been killed in Lithuania in 1917. My grandmother died of grief six months later, leaving my mother and grandfather doubly bereft. My mother sometimes spoke of her brother, usually to express the disappointment he would have felt in his nephew; my grandfather rarely uttered his name. My mother urged me to respect his reticence, warning that any mention of my uncle would plunge him into misery. There could have been no stricter injunction on a boy who dreaded the prospect of other peoples’ anguish more than his own. I would examine my friends and relations for signs of grief like a medieval officer searching for symptoms of plague.

For a few years my grandfather had a successor in my father. For a few years I had a father. He had also fought in the War but escaped without a scratch: a blessing which my mother at times articulated as a reproach. Having discovered a talent for poetry at the Front, he went to university to study literature. Shortly afterwards, the country was hit by a slump and people – even relatively rich ones – found themselves short of food. My father, with uncharacteristic altruism, abandoned his studies to help his parents. The best way, or so he later asserted, was to marry my mother. Here I must digress for a moment. Hard as it may be to credit in an age in which personal choice has been raised to a moral imperative, marriage at the end of the First World War was not the private matter that it became at the end of the Second. My grandfather was looking for a husband for his daughter and a director for his firm, my mother’s consent having been assured by her brother’s death. My father was their distant cousin and therefore eligible. Introductions were effected, a contract drawn up, and the ceremony took place. By all accounts it was a glittering occasion, although for me it became a mystery since, after my father’s defection, the photographs were taken down from display and I was made to understand that asking my mother about her wedding was as taboo as asking my grandfather about the War. What I do know is that my father moved into our house and into an office alongside my grandfather. Eighteen months later I was born, supposedly the cause of great jubilation although, by the time of my earliest memories, little joy remained. The reason for the change was my father, who had disgraced himself by, as I was to learn much later, falsifying accounts at the store. Why, as my mother asked, he should have needed the money, when he had been given everything that he could ever want, was a puzzle. From then on, Thou shalt not steal became my obsession, especially since Honour thy father and thy mother had lost half its force.

My father, meanwhile, had taken to drink. This was not the measured tots enjoyed by my grandfather and his friends but great gulps of whisky, sometimes straight from the bottle, that transformed his kisses into bierkeller blasts. So I squirmed to escape and he accused my mother of turning me against him. He was quietly dismissed from the store but he could not be so easily removed from our lives. Aunt Annette (don’t worry, I’ll catch up with myself soon), in a rare criticism of my grandfather, charged him with doing too little to promote a reconciliation. But, in an equally rare criticism of Aunt Annette, I charge her with being too harsh. It was surely enough that he tolerated my father’s presence: that he sat down with him at the end of each working day (that is for my grandfather) and swallowed his disgust; that he didn’t put a padlock on the cellar door but left my father to struggle with his conscience, which was never the most daunting opponent. My father and mother started to lead separate lives, meeting only at mealtimes, when the length of the table militated against intimacy even as my grandfather’s presence precluded confrontation. My father drank more and more until one night, when the drink had, in that serviceable English phrase, got the better of him, he forced himself on my mother. Nine months later Luise was born, and my father’s impact on our family was complete. He had stamped his image on her innermost being, poisoning her cells and befuddling her brain. She was steeped in father’s whisky long before her first taste of mother’s milk.

 

The day after Luise was conceived, my father left us. He leant over my bed, and for once I did not recoil since his breath was as fresh as my mother’s. He whispered, even though it was morning, that we might not see each other for some time but I must always remember that he loved me. Then he clasped me as hard as if he were squeezing out the last drop of toothpaste, laid me back on the pillows, and disappeared. He was right, at least in one thing, since, in the eight years before we quit Germany, I never set eyes on him again – although I was to do so soon afterwards, as you will discover. I made as determined an effort to forget him as I did Johannes von Hirte, my former blood brother, whom I had seen waving a banner in the Hitler Youth. Sometimes my guard slipped, such as when I was driving through Berlin with Aunt Annette and we passed a line of vagrants, themselves soon to be expunged from the Third Reich. ‘There’s Daddy!’ I screamed, taken in by a fleeting resemblance and refusing to be silenced until Aunt Annette ordered the chauffeur to stop and let me out. My mistake acknowledged – and my embarrassment assuaged by the gift of a handful of marks – she informed me that my father was living comfortably in Breslau on an allowance provided by my grandfather. She did not, however, offer any explanation as to why my parents were flouting every precept in my schoolbooks. She simply declared that my father needed time to work through his problems. But, as time wore on with no sign of his return, I grew increasingly certain that the chief problem was me.

Dear Aunt Annette…. I promised to flesh out my reference to her and I do so with more pleasure than almost anything else in this account. She had been my grandmother’s best friend although, with the strict demarcations of my schoolboy mind, I was surprised to find that she was nearer in age to my mother. She told me that, when my grandmother lay dying, she had made her a solemn vow to take care of her husband and daughter – yes, and her grandchildren too, she added quickly to quieten my clamour. She had acted not as a house-keeper but as a house-preserver – assuming that such a title exists. She had a sitting room, which she imbued with her own warmth and to which she would retreat at times of tension with my mother. She found such tension particularly painful since, as I pointed out to my mother, her entire existence was dedicated to smoothing everyone’s path. ‘Starting with her own,’ my mother replied, with disturbing disloyalty to the adult cause. I hated to see them quarrel, but Grandfather assured me that it was inevitable when two women shared a house. Which was odd because, when I was fretting about him and my father, Aunt Annette had used the very same phrase of men. It filled me with apprehension. If two women or two men could not live together in harmony, what did that bode for the Christians and the Jews?

While Mother was so thin that Grandfather was always tempting her with titbits, Aunt Annette was so plump that he shook his head whenever she reached for a cake. Mother once banished me from the dinner-table for suggesting that they should have an operation so that some of Aunt Annette’s fat could be transferred to her. Yet, when I crept upstairs to apologise, Aunt Annette was so far from taking offence that we shared a tray of truffles. The one meal at which she could eat as much as she liked was breakfast, which she had in bed – a privilege that was never extended to me, even on my birthday. I had only to conceal a biscuit beneath the covers for my mother to detect a telltale crumb. To her, lying in bed was a form of malingering – a charge that carried added weight when I discovered its usage during the War. She herself rose early, hurrying to her studio and spending as much time as possible at her easel before she was beset by distractions – for which read ‘me’. She accused me of lacking respect for her art and yet, try as I might, I was unable to repress my innate reverence for realism. My efforts to praise her paintings always fell flat. Once, when Grandfather described Aunt Annette as looking ‘as pretty as a picture’, I asked if he meant one of Mother’s. The words were no sooner off my lips than I regretted them. But, instead of issuing the expected reprimand, my mother tore into my grandfather, itself an extraordinary occurrence. ‘Congratulations, Father,’ she said, ‘you’ve bred yet another Frankel with no feeling for art.’

By then, of course, my mother had come to hate me. It was quite understandable. In addition to my own failings, I offered her a daily reminder of my father’s. Our physical resemblance, regularly remarked upon by scores of malevolent well-wishers (‘He’ll grow into such a handsome man, the spitting image of his father’), was a pointer to the moral. It was small wonder that I longed to remain a boy.

Aunt Annette did her best to reassure me, insisting that, far from hating me, my mother loved me so much that she would sometimes grow impatient with my imperfections.

‘But she’s not impatient with Luise,’ I replied, ‘and she has far more imperfections.’

‘It’s not the same and you’re intelligent enough to know that,’ Aunt Annette said, as ever cushioning the rebuke. ‘Which is another reason not to take everything your mother says to heart. She’s constantly worried about what will happen to Luise.’

‘In which case,’ I said, ‘she should treat me better since, when she and you and Grandfather are dead, I’m the one who’ll have to take care of her.’

‘I don’t suppose she’s looking that far ahead,’ Aunt Annette said.

With hindsight, I think it was that casual remark that gave me my first intimation of Luise’s mortality. I saw then what everyone else had seen since the day she was born: in the eyelids that constantly fluttered and the eyes that failed to focus; in the arms and legs that gripped her in a permanent tug of war; in the massy forehead and lumpen chin; in the slurred speech that didn’t emerge at all until she was five years old and then only in burst-pipe spurts of inarticulacy; in the wild, self-destructive furies that would flare up for no apparent reason. I saw the fear, not of what would happen to Luise when she grew old, but of whether she would grow old at all. And yet, in spite – or perhaps because – of that, my mother insisted on preserving the illusion that Luise was simply slow and that, in true fairytale fashion, she would grow up and amaze us all. I don’t know if she felt that, by articulating the wish, she would make it happen, as she did with everything else in her life, or rather that, by stressing my sister’s normality, she could justify ignoring her. Either way, the pretence became harder and harder to maintain.

Luise was born with Foetal Alcohol Syndrome. Although we didn’t have a name for it then, we had the diagnosis of a visionary doctor: one, moreover. . .