LITTLE EDEN: A CHILD AT WAR

Memoir by Eva Figes, 1978

The British writer Eva Figes emerged as a writer in the mid-1960s with the publication of the novel Equinox (1966). She has since published numerous novels, translations, and works of nonfiction. Her works, especially her early novels, have been well received, and she won the prestigious Guardian Fiction Prize in 1967 for the novel Winter Journey. Despite critical acclaim, her readership has remained small due to her experimental and aesthetically challenging style of writing. In her article "The Long Passage to Little England," published in the Observer on 11 June 1978, Figes connects her discomfort with the prevalent aesthetic traditions in postwar England with her personal history as a German refugee from the Holocaust. This experience left her with a sense of permanent statelessness that precludes the notion of continuity, be it aesthetic or political. Although the Holocaust is evoked directly in only two of Figes's novels—Konek Landing (1969), a complex, highly experimental text exploring the relationship between victims and their executioners, and the autobiographic Little Eden: A Child at War (1978)—the recurring themes of alienation, angst, and paranoia point to its underlying impact on the author's entire work.

Born Eva Unger on 15 April 1932 into a culturally assimilated German Jewish family in Berlin, Figes, along with her younger brother, experienced a typical upper-middle-class childhood without any instruction in the Jewish faith. On 9 November 1938—the notorious Kristallnacht —her father was arrested and imprisoned in Dachau. After his release the family succeeded in obtaining an exit visa, and in March 1939 they emigrated to England. The political realities of Nazi Germany, their father's imprisonment, and their grandparents' later deportation were kept from the children. Only much later did Figes comprehend these events, which she then experienced as a loss of innocence.

These events and her early years in England are the subject of the autobiographical text Little Eden: A Child at War (1978). Writing from an adult perspective, Figes links her childhood experiences to her later artistic views and convictions. The majority of the book is devoted to the description of the small town of Cirencester, Gloucestershire, where the child is sent to attend a small, unconventional school in order to escape the daily bombings of London. In this "Little Eden" she discovers the world of literature and the beauty of language as an outlet for her imagination and sensitivity, and it is there she conceives the notion of becoming a writer. Nonetheless, a shadow is cast on this Eden when a classmate calls her a Jew. Once again she feels the sense of alienation and otherness that she had experienced so keenly in London. Only shortly before the end of the war, when her mother sends her to the local cinema "to go and see for yourself," does she understand and relate to the term "Jewish": "I sat alone in the dark cinema and watched the newsreel of Belsen: mounds of corpses, dazed survivors with huge haunted eyes staring out of skulls which had become too heavy for the frail emaciated bodies, mute evidence for the prosecution posing for the camera. At last I knew what it meant to be a Jew, the shameful secret which had been hinted at but kept from me for so many years …" For Figes this new knowledge marked both a final expulsion from Eden and the beginning of a sense of guilt. For years she was haunted by the memory of her family's departure from Berlin: "And a row of abandoned loved ones standing outside the airport building, waving wistfully at survivors whom they could no longer see."

A tension created by the knowledge of the adult narrator (and the reader) and the political innocence of both the child and the place is tangible throughout the text. Figes's portrayal of Cirencester, consisting of her fragmented memories augmented by research into the history of the area, reveals a place that is touched little by the horrors of the war and the Holocaust. Seemingly unchanged, Circencester appears to have sustained the innocence, which the child has lost irretrievably. Figes's memoir reflects a longing not only for the innocence of childhood but also for the innocence of a pre-Holocaust world.

—Helga Schreckenberger