"In her new novel, Edie Meidav has created a vivid panorama of the modern world, refracted through an amazingly intricate character. The secrets of history, the unrequited loves and betrayals, the disgraces and disappointments and confusions-all are revived for Emile Poulquet, who, in trying to escape his past, runs headlong into the trap of memory and guilt. CRAWL SPACE is the work of a fearless writer with a cosmic imagination." -- Joanna Scott
What Did You Do in the War, Emile?
(by the author of SCHINDLER'S LIST, in the WASHINGTON POST)
"Fifty years after the end of World War II, 84-year-old Emile Poulquet is standing trial in Paris for his part in the Nazi deportation of thousands of Jews and others from his native Bistronne region in the French Pyrenees.
Having escaped from Paris while on temporary release from prison, he recounts for us his return under the disguise of age and a certain amount of surgery to the town of his childhood and his crimes. He does so with little respect for the process that has finally picked him up and declared him a murderer for what he calls "satisfying the occupiers with numbers but retaining our France." He is, he says, "one more unjew jewed by history."
Such a fellow should not be good company for the substantial pilgrimage we undertake with him in Edie Meidav's troubling new novel, Crawl Space. But he is. He is quite a creation indeed, this aging anti-Quixote with his residual windmills to tilt at. For, like other men's, his destiny is not solely historic but created by personal issues as well -- a childhood facial deformation and a botched operation gave him his sneer of command, and both before and since childhood he has remained the emotional lackey of a woman named Arianne: "Arianne my cud, who tore my childhood's skin off and then danced over me."
. . . Secretly observing the visitors, Poulquet is happy to see that they too are uneasy with the artificiality of formal remembrance, or else with its inadequacy. He understands (and so of course does the author) that remembrance and punishment can never match the terrifying anomie that characterized the mass crimes of such functionaries as he was. By comparison with it, normal human outrage seems small and clichéd. Poulquet's contempt for his pursuers is based on this awareness of the contrast between his dispassion and their vulgar desire to punish him. It might have been tempting for a novelist to show Poulquet crumbling with guilt, self-accusation and awareness; the quality of his whimsical hauteur is not the least of Meidav's triumphs as a storyteller. "Now I am living in the era of experts about my era," he complains.
As true as it is that there were crimes, it is also true that only those who have been there fully understand their complexity. For example, Arianne's husband, the Resistance leader, at one stage of the war punished Vichy Prefect Poulquet for his deportation lists by stealing one and inserting the name of Poulquet's Jewish mistress and her mother. Poulquet found it impossible to save them from this sabotage and from the system's bureaucratic thoroughness. He also remembers he was not alone in his sins, recalling, from "before our true deportations began in the Bistronne, the plethora of folded letters which good citizens brought under cover of night and deposited in secrecy in my prefect's mailbox, speaking of this or that 'member of a spiritual community which has always been outside France.' "
By keeping to the shadows in his old town, pending his final meeting with Arianne, Poulquet mingles with a new generation of refugees, "the wastrels," homeless detritus of the New Europe, drifters from Paris and elsewhere. He finds himself a beneficiary of the company and tolerance of these "people sans-logements, sans-papiers, sans everything."
Ironically, before the novel's end, such folk will be the subject of a new cleansing of the homeless and rootless. "We wish for the moment before shame began," a young woman tells a journalist, suggesting that there are only two ineffectual remedies tormenting all the characters in this tale: amnesia and remembrance.
In her energy as a writer, Meidav floats so many issues, throws so many balls in the air, that she runs the risk of anti-climax. Can the final meeting with Arianne, for example, carry the weight Poulquet puts on it as he travels toward it? Some novelists have the capacity, the narrative goodwill and the generosity to override and allay such readerly qualms. In this accomplished novel, Meidav shows herself to be one of that happy company. Given how long we wait to read Poulquet's will and testament, it's a relief when its content is both sufficiently enlightening and cunning that it succeeds as a device.
-- Thomas Keneally, Washington Post, 8-05
"Emile Poulquet, age 84, a former official of France's World War II Vichy regime, condemned thousands of fellow citizens to death camps. After decades of hiding and several plastic surgeries, he is apprehended and tried but not convicted for lack of anyone who could identify him. After escaping from the Paris prison in which he might be taken for a new trial, Poulquet returns to the scene of his crimes, a town in southern France. This quintessential French bureaucrat spends the rest of the novel rationalizing his conduct while tracking down past acquaintances. Meeting up with a band of teenage "wastrels" who offer shelter and companionship, he little suspects that he faces the biggest betrayal of all. Meidav . . . skillfully exposes the criminal mind that refuses to accept responsibility for its acts and instead blames the victim. A highly impressive and original treatment of the Holocaust; recommended for all literary and French history collections." -Edward Cone, New York, Library Journal, July, 2005
"Meidav embeds the reader in the mind of a narcissistic, self-loathing, obsessive, vengeful narrator — a French Nazi collaborator — whose oddly compelling voice is the achievement of this complex novel (after The Far Field)... With a tale both chilling and comical, Meidav considers the struggle to define history." -- Publisher's Weekly, June, 2005
LOS ANGELES TIMES: THE SATURDAY READ:
HUMANITY AND INHUMANITY IN WWII
"One of the most hushed-up episodes of the German occupation of France came in July 1942, when Marshal Henri Philippe Petain's police rounded up more than 7,000 Jews, detaining them for five days without food or water in a Paris sports stadium. The Germans had specifically requested only able-bodied adults for the concentration camps, but many of these Auschwitz-bound victims were children. Pierre Laval, Petain's diabolical right-hand man, justified it, saying it
would be cruel to separate Jewish children from their families.
In her remarkable second novel, Edie Meidav revisits the French occupation and distills it into a heart-chilling tale of love and hate. Her villain is Emile Poulquet, a former Nazi collaborator and town prefect, who finds himself standing trial in Paris for signing the deportation notices of Jews 50 years earlier. Poulquet sees himself as a Laval-like patriot, "satisfying the occupiers with numbers but retaining our France," and a humble nationalist, "not spiritually superior, not intellectually superior, not even by the dint of the richness of French culture which has lifted our nation above all others...."
The case against Poulquet falls apart when Arianne, the widow of his old Resistance nemesis, Paul, refuses to identify him in court. During a temporary release from prison, the 84-year-old escapes and makes his way back to Finier, his childhood hometown in the Pyrenees, and a final reckoning with the last woman he would have expected to save him.
Poulquet encounters unexpected opposition the day he arrives in Finier. Arianne has organized a "refugees reunion" and the cafes are packed with themJews who survived his deportations, including the "reincarnated horror" of his former best friend, Izzy, whom he now views as "a Banal, Successful American Man." With nowhere to hide from those he had sent to concentration camps, Poulquet takes shelter with a callow crew of young wastrels, attracted to this remote region of France where a McDonald's recently was pillaged.
His derelict companions are fantastically realized -- to the point that it puts some strain on Meidav's story to imagine the refined Poulquet shacking up with them in the "crawl space" of her title . . . The sheer claustrophobic pressure of their ignorance has the effect of driving Poulquet into deeper meditations.
Poulquet has prepared his "last will and testament" to give Arianne, with whom he has been obsessed since boyhood, when he and Izzy worked as waiters at her family's hotel. It includes, among other things, a history of his own virulent anti-Semitism, almost as deep-seated and twisted as his relations with Arianne, whom he hopes to make executor of the will. To complicate matters, Arianne's deceased husband, Paul, turns out not to have been quite the Resistance hero she has portrayed him to be.
We learn that during the war, when Poulquet refused to hand over his deportation lists to the Resistance, Paul punished him by adding Poulquet's Jewish mistress' name to a list. Poulquet was unable to save Natalie from the bureaucratic machine, but even his affection for her comes drenched with lurid contempt: "Natalie was as much Salome as any Parisian whore, perhaps born with the perversity jewesses have long been known to bear, something like a primal script in Hebrew letters glowing cryptically within their very marrow, which must instruct their behavior."
"The Sorrow and the Pity," Marcel Ophuls' 1971 documentary film, was the first brilliant treatment of the disparate factions that animated the French occupation: Petainistes, members of the Resistance, Nazi-sympathizers and foreign diplomats all contributed interviews to a film that followed one town's experience. Meidav's novel illuminates this landscape with all the brilliant Technicolor that well-honed fiction has to offer. She dexterously manages her complex pageant of vandals, shopkeepers, collaborators, survivors and the journalists who have come to cover their return, and brings the story to a
worthy climax.
But the enduring success of "Crawl Space" will be the creation of Poulquet: a morbid opportunist who artfully isolates his guilt with the lie that men are mere cogs in the wheel of history. "We all have some kind of right to belong to life," he entreats us, "even if our version of it ends up possessing a morality equivalent to that of a fishbowl: somewhat arbitrary, eminently replaceable and eternally transparent."
-- Thomas Meaney is a critic whose reviews have appeared in The Times, the Globe and Mail and the New Criterion.
From the opening of CRAWL SPACE:
"You think you know me and still my name slips away on your tongue. You've probably seen me countless times, but you never noticed. There has been surgery on my face, yes, to disguise me. Yet I live in your pile of clippings, I exist in your mind as a niggling question, a thing troubling your sleep certain nights. I understand your dilemma. You would not give it the importance of a dilemma but having been on your side, I understand how denial becomes an easier route."
