Nazis steal who you are, turn you to what their Zyklon eyes desire so their balls shudder with righteous loathing, their tongues coil in intoxicated revulsion. Most of their victims become wraiths haunted by memories of what was, if they can remember, and what could have been.
I was rather enchanted by Gary Barwin’s previous novel — Yiddish for Pirates — and his latest, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, returns to familiar ground: Once more tracing the improbable adventures of a Jewish man with punning wordplay, Borscht Belt groaners, and the inkiest of black humour. While the earlier novel tells a swashbuckling tale (as narrated by a parrot, no less), this time we’re set in the jaws of the Holocaust as our hero, the middle-aged Motl, fancies himself a cowboy like the heroes in his paperback Westerns, riding off into the sunset, one step ahead of the Nazis even as he gallops towards them. There’s nothing funny about the real horrors that Motl witnesses — the jokes are the powerful coping mechanism of a powerless people — and as the adventure progresses, Motl is forced to consider whether his spurs and six-gun fantasies put him on the wrong side of the Cowboys vs Indians mythos. Once again, I find myself enchanted by Barwin’s writing and am moved by his use of humour to reconfigure ugly historical fact; you can laugh or you can cry, boychik. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Motl. Citizen of Vilna. Saddlebag of pain. Feedbag of Regret. At forty-five, he had a history. As a Lithuanian Jew, he was pickled in it. But though neither he nor his mother knew it at the time, something had changed. Somewhere, deep down in the overworked mine shaft of his imagination, it had been determined that he would set out on a perilous adventure, this time of his own choosing. He would get up on his horse and ride. And he would have a child. At his age. And avoid being killed. Sometimes you have to save your own bacon, when you’re a Jew.
Due to events he experienced during WWI (oh, the poor Penelopes, the frozen plums, those lost and hairy grails), Motl is compelled to find his way to Switzerland just as the Nazis are starting to round up his neighbours, so he hitches his ol’ hoss (the bull-headed Theodor Herzl) to his wagon, deposits his kvetching mamaleh (Gitl the Destroyer) on the seat beside himself, and sets out for “the lonesome hinterland of Lithuania and the uncertain southeastern border”. Nearly immediately, the quest is sidetracked by efforts to find or save this or that relative, and as the adventure progresses, Motl’s tale is one of narrow escapes, improbable coincidences, and selfless strangers (but isn’t that how every survivor story reads looking back?)
The history of Jews and Indigenous people, a picaresque, a cowboy shoot-’em-up, an adventure tale. One narrow escape after another. One damn unbelievable thing after another. Apparently, this would be another. Two wolves and a sheep vote on what to have for supper. This, also, was the woolly history of Jews and the Indigenous. Except the sheep has a gun. But so do the wolves.
I don’t know if it’s only because I read an ARC, but the following (attributed to Hitler) is quoted twice in this book: Why should Germans worry that the soil that made their bread was won by the sword? When we eat wheat from Canada, do we think of murdered Indians? And this equivalence between a judenrein Germany and a “clearing” of the North American Plains seems to be the real crux of this book (apparently the Métis author Cherie Dimaline once quipped in reference to herself and Barwin, “we’re genocide buddies”). And that’s really something to think about: when Hitler makes the equivalence between his murderous efforts and your own country’s bloody founding, maybe your ancestors aren't left unstained. The final section of the book becomes a bit more overt (and less entertaining overall), but I still think that this book presents an important, even urgent, concept to bring into the public forum: We’re quick to recognise the Holocaust as an act of genocide but we continue to think of the cowboys as the good guys who brought order to the Wild West. What an imagination Barwin has, to write this Ballad of Motl the Cowboy; to make it entertaining in the midst of a Holocaust escape, and to make it perfectly relevant to the issues of today.
