After World War II, Erich Heller became a leading scholar and critic of German literature, teaching the subject at Cambridge in England and later at Northwestern in Evanston, IL. Born in Sudetenland, he was able to escape to England shortly after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. His niece, Caroline Heller, has made Erich and the rest of her family the subject of a novelistic memoir, about which Adam Kirsch writes:
Caroline . . . grew up in the 1950s as an American child in a prosperous suburb of Chicago, where her father Paul (Erich’s brother) was a doctor and her mother Alice a social worker. Yet she remembers her childhood as a long, failed attempt to fit in with American culture—“how we should look and who we should be,” as she puts it. Family life was anxious, dominated by her father’s “chronic sense of pending disaster,” and as a young girl she absorbed this feeling, which gave rise to bouts of depression and anxiety. Starting kindergarten was as hard, Heller recalls, as going to college would be twelve years later: in each case, she felt torn from the safety of her home, forced to adapt to a hostile world. . . .
The reason for this despair and fearfulness was the same reason the Heller family was the only one in the neighborhood not to have any family photographs on the walls. As Caroline Heller came to learn only as an adult, her father had been an inmate of Nazi concentration camps from the first day of World War II to almost the last. . . . Their way of protecting their American children, Caroline and her brother Tom, from this legacy was to hide it, or at least to let it remain hidden. . . . This kind of conspiratorial silence about the past, with its concomitant anxiety and dread, is one of the ways the Holocaust exacted its toll on the second generation. . . .
[With] the suggestion that Erich’s escape from prison was dishonorable—bought with sexual favors, or even by informing on his brother, as Caroline Heller seems to intimate in her endnotes—you have what is surely supposed to be a damning portrait. But was Erich Heller wrong to escape the Nazis, or to live the life of the mind as best he could at a time when that life was being extinguished in Germany? . . . Another version of the story, told by a more neutral observer, might leave us with a very different impression of Erich Heller. But that is the thing about family stories: the people who tell them are always still in the middle of them, just as we are all still in the middle of the Holocaust’s history.
Read more on Tablet: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/192768/scholar-survivor-caroline-heller