SUZANNE LEAL The Deceptions. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart
The deceptions in Suzanne Leal’s third novel span World War II Czechoslovakia and the Holocaust to present-day Sydney.
The genesis of this novel was the story of a Czech gendarme who had formed a relationship with a young Jewish woman he was guarding. Leal had spent many hours recording interviews with her neighbour Fred Perger (Bedřich) and his wife Eva, who were Holocaust survivors. She learnt their stories over many weeks and months when she was researching her first book, Border Street, gradually becoming dear friends with both.
This particular story intrigued her. When Leal realised that she would not be able to find out sufficient detail to render it faithfully, she turned to fiction. In a talk she gave about the book in November 2020, Leal described herself as an intimate observer, and keenly aware of the need for rigour and care. Factual inaccuracies in depictions of Auschwitz in some recent bestselling works by non-Jewish authors have caused distress and controversy.
In his 2018 essay ‘On the Future of the Holocaust Novel’, Bram Presser writes that the problem with distortion is less that it can get individual stories wrong — though that manifestly fails survivors — but that it gets the truth of the Holocaust wrong. The risk is that the version that it describes may become dominant as ranks of survivors thin until there are no longer those with first-hand knowledge to correct the record. Leal has been fastidious in her research, and in her Acknowledgements she thanks Presser for reading the manuscript and providing invaluable feedback.
The novel has two timelines, Czechoslovakia and Auschwitz during the Second World War, and Sydney today. It alternates between four narrators — in the past, Hana, daughter of a wealthy and hitherto protected dentist who has been taken from her home and imprisoned in the Jewish ghetto, and Karel, a local Czech gendarme guarding the ghetto; in the present, Ruth, a Uniting Church minister who has received confidences from those carrying secrets from the war, and Tessa, granddaughter of a member of Ruth’s congregation whose relationships will be shaped by those secrets.
The interweaving of time, place and narration creates a complex story and the characters are well-drawn. In the contemporary timeline, Ruth’s pastoral responsibilities to her congregation, as well as an ageing parent, are taking a personal toll that she is finding almost too hard. Tessa is having an affair with an older, married colleague — the allure is potent and she has trained herself not to think of the consequences.
However, the book becomes truly compelling in the wartime settings. Hana and her parents have been removed to the Czech ghetto:
Like everything, the Germans had given it a new name, a name befitting the Third Reich. And so it became Theresienstadt. A city for the Jews, this is how it was advertised. Only, it was not a city for the Jews. No. It was a ghetto for the Jews. It was a prison.
It is from here that people are gradually taken to the camps. ‘The panic, the despair as again we braced ourselves for the news. As I lay awake wondering if this time I, too, would be going.’ Hana is not transported first, for her father is useful, but when that protection ends, she becomes ‘fodder’, put onto a train, destination unknown, ‘And that was that. First I had parents, and then I did not.’
Leal’s descriptions of the transports, the camps and, most horrifically of all, the 450-kilometre death march to Gross-Rosen, are based on her primary research, including testimony collected through the Shoah Foundation.
And now as we marched away from Kurzbach, we kept to our group of five, with Eliška as our leader. On the second day, after we had marched all night, we believed we would die. All around us, this was happening: all around us there were those who would simply sink into the snow. Quietly they would sink, quietly they would drop. And then, as punishment for stopping, they would be shot.
In her clear prose, Leal reminds us why we need to hear these stories again, and again. Fiction, Presser says, has an important place in telling stories about the Holocaust. He says, ‘Create, create, create. But do so from a place of knowledge, and always speak the truth.’ The Deceptions is one such contribution.
Suzanne Leal The Deceptions Allen & Unwin 2020 PB 288pp $29.99
Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.
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