Book Review: Testament

Eva prefers to maintain Silk’s privacy out of her deep love for him but, as the story of three generations moves across Eastern Europe, she realises that the weight of historical truth falls on her alone to divulge. And thus faces that fundamental question: who are the keepers of memories?

Silk’s story is not unusual. Many survivors kept silent until the approach of old age. Some never spoke at all. What is exceptional about Kim Sherwood’s compassionate, poetic and deeply researched novel, is the way she interweaves the twisted threads of his story: the tragedy of his parents’ murder and that of his younger sister; and his complicated relationship with his surviving younger brother László — they compete for the love of the young musician Zuzka, who played in Theresienstadt while her mother was sent to Auschwitz.

Sherwood has taken on the major tragedy of the 20th century with a psychological insight rare in a writer who is not yet 30. She has not flinched from revealing graphic details about the Holocaust, and her description of Silk’s homecoming to find his family gone and his home requisitioned by strangers, is almost unbearably poignant.

Rescued and rehoused in the Lake District and, later, London, the young survivors still face alienation and deep-seated prejudice. József, who once “longed to hear a Magyar tongue shape his world, just once before exile”, must now balance Jewishness and Zionism against a new English identity.

Sherwood sees parallels between refugees from Nazism, cold-shouldered in Britain by ignorance or misunderstanding, and today’s refugees escaping their own broken homelands and dying in the Mediterranean, echoing others who had died in the Danube in József Silk’s time.

“In the background, the Danube is vertiginous, threatening to swallow me,” Sherwood writes. “We are here because history doesn’t happen in the past tense.”

 

Gloria Tessler is the JC’s obituaries editor.