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"An Exlusive Love, A Memoir" by Johanna Adorján is a book you must read. I have read a lot of books and memoirs from the Holocaust, but this one is different and make you witness of the footprint that horrible massacre left even in third generations.
I gotb her book by accident, not even the cover was so strong, but as soon as you start reading that Johanna's granparents chose to end their lives together, it is incredible and powerful emotional hook...and then you cannot stop to read it. The elements that link the granmother Vera and the grandaughter Johanna show in a way that touch you: "well, maybe there is a connection and I am not crazy after all..."
From Toronto to where Johanna lives now, a poweful long distance Reiki embrace for her soul. Well done, colleague Johanna.
JUAN CARLOS CORDERO
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
“The motivation was I wanted to be able to imagine, in the most accurate way, the last day in their life. I put myself in it–I had the feeling I had to–because it’s not really fiction. It’s nonfiction. It’s imagination based in facts. I had to explain where I am in the story.”
From the very first sentence of Johanna Adorján’s memoir An Exclusive Love (translated by Anthea Bell), you know the outcome. “On October 13, 1991, my grandparents killed themselves,” she writes, before embarking on a 185-page exploration of what that day and the ones leading up to it were like for her father’s parents. She imagines them undertaking tasks monumental and mundane, conversing with one another both impatiently and lovingly as they might do on any day, as they prepare to take their lives by overdosing on sleeping pills.
A journalist at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin, Adorján also applies her reporting skills to learn more about who her grandparents were, through interviews with people who’d been close to them.
There is something romantic and triumphant about a couple ending their lives on their own terms. Still, it’s hard not to get attached to Istvan, in his eighties and terminally ill, and Vera, in her seventies and emotionally ill-equipped to go on without her lifelong companion. As you near the end, you want them to change their minds, and live forever.
SMITH sat down with Adorján recently to discuss her book; memoir in general; and Neil Genzlinger’s recent New York Times Book Review take-down of the category, in which Adorjan’s book was the only one of four books he reviewed favorably.
An Exclusive Love is very journalistic. It made me wonder, do you consider the book a memoir? So much of it is your own approximation of your grandparents’ last day, and then a lot of reporting and interviews with other people.
In the original German, they didn’t categorize it as memoir, and I didn’t give any thought when I was writing it to what category this should be. I knew it was nonfiction. I have the impression that in America this is a bigger issue, what side is a book on–fiction, nonfiction, memoir? In Germany, they only had to categorize it for the bestseller list. But I think that I am writing nonfiction. Even though one-third of the book is imagined.
But you’re not passing that part off as gospel.
No, it’s just a possibility, that part.
Here in the U.S. there’s sometimes a big deal made about how “true” a memoir is.
I tried to be as true as possible. I am a journalist. But in describing their last day, I had to use my imagination because no one was with them. So I used facts, but there are also things that I invented completely. My grandmother did not bake a cake that day, but I just wanted it to be there. It’s my truth about that day. There had to be this cake!
It was interesting to me the way you acknowledged early on that your version of their story might not be 100 percent accurate. You wrote that you and your aunt “knew” that your grandfather had learned to sleep on his feet in the concentration camp, but you soften that assertion by adding, “whatever knowing means.” And then you also point out that your grandfather was released from a different concentration camp than he’d said, or that you’d thought he had. It seems you are subtly acknowledging that the veracity of even our own understandings of our stories is up for debate.
I would also think, if somebody else from my family had written this story, it would be completely different. This is my view on that and on them.
At the very end of the book, you have the police report about your grandparents’ suicide. It’s an interesting companion piece, this unemotional police report, next to your imagined piece where your grandmother is baking a cake and your grandfather is playing Chopin–it’s very effective the way you did that. Had you gotten the police report before you started writing the book?
No. It’s strange because I always imagined that if I could get a hold of that, it would be interesting to put at the end, because it proves that it’s true. I could be sentimental or false, but it’s more objective. But I got it late in my research. I did the research first, I made notes, and I started writing. It was very interesting to get that because there were details I couldn’t have made up. For instance, they committed suicide in an apartment that was fully lit. Every light was on. So I could use that to have my grandmother go and turn on every light, and put flowers in the vases. All those details helped me to recreate their last day. I hope I didn’t write something sentimental. But this report is almost cruel in its unsentimentality. It mentions these death stains. I thought it was quite brutal, but they’re dead, so it makes sense.
It’s sort of clinical.
I like police reports. I’m amazed at the way that in so few words, they manage to really describe everything, while I use so many sentences to say the same thing.
You portray your grandparents that day as being very unsentimental about it.
Yeah, that’s my imagination about it. Who knows? This is the way I can cope with it. Who knows if in reality they had a different day and it was harder? But this was the way I could see it, and the way I could hear their voices, speaking dialogue. I heard a very sad story, and it makes this one a very happy one. My friend’s brother is an emergency doctor. He was called to a case where a couple had committed suicide together, but the husband survived. And the doctors take an oath that they are committed to saving lives, so they had to save him. They knew he wanted to die. My friend’s brother said it was the worst job of his life having to revive him. In that respect, this is such a happy story, to have it as they planned it.
In your memoir, you write about yourself only slightly. You examine the similarities between yourself and your grandmother, which you learn about through talking to people who knew her. You think about whether you’re unloved or unlovable, the way your grandmother saw herself. You explore your Jewish identity and what it means, and your dating life through JDate. Was that little bit of self-exploration the motivation for writing it?
The motivation was I wanted to be able to imagine, in the most accurate way, the last day in their life. That was the motivation. I put myself in it–I had the feeling I had to–because it’s not really fiction. It’s nonfiction. It’s imagination based in facts. I felt I had to explain where I am in the story. So I just put myself in there a little bit as necessary.
In that way, you as a character anchor the story.
Yes, in the part that is based on the present. The rest is either recent history, or further back in history. So there are layers of time: the present, the last day of their lives in 1991, and then much further back in their history.
I mention this because of something Neil Genzlinger wrote, relating to your book, in his New York Times Book Review essay excoriating the memoir category. You are one of four memoirists featured.
Well-hidden, at the end! The only one he liked.
I was so upset by that piece. I happen to have the most popular comment on the online version of that article. I just love memoir. And I thought, here’s a guy who hates memoir. I wondered what your take was on his piece.
Not having read the other three memoirs, I just focused on what he said about mine. But I didn’t quite understand why, if you don’t like memoirs, there is just one exception included. I mean, that’s very nice. But couldn’t he just have written about my book? I mean, I’m very flattered to even be mentioned in the New York Times. I am flattered most of all.
One of the things Genzlinger wrote, using your book as an example, was, “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.” Yours works so beautifully that way, but as a general rule, that struck me as bizarre. What do you think of that as a general rule–that memoirists shouldn’t write their books so much about themselves, but about other people instead?
Well, I don’t believe in general rules for any kind of books. To me, it’s all about style–style even before the story. You could have the greatest story in the world, but if you don’t tell it well, it’s bad.
Not long ago I interviewed Nick Flynn, and he said, “Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries.” What do you think about that?
Still, you have to feel that what you are telling is of interest or importance to other people, so in that way, you need an ego to be a writer. But I’m very bad at generalizing.
How long did it take you to write it?
It took five months to research it, and five months to write it. But I also had my newspaper job. So I just did it in the morning. I was very glad to have it limited like that because I was writing about some very heavy themes–suicide, the Holocaust, emigration, the Korean war. I was happy to work on it just for a short while. It took me so many years after their death to realize this could even be a book. I guess the story had grown inside of me, and I just wanted it out. The actual work was quite quick. It wasn’t difficult to find the structure.
Did any of the people in your family object to your writing this, or feel sensitive about it?
Sensitive, yes. Most of all, my father and his sister, they felt of course sensitive. My father helped me a lot. He went with me to the concentration camp, and he accompanied me on some of the interviews, sat there and listened. So in a way it was interesting for him to know whether I might be able to fill some gaps.
But they didn’t object?
No, they didn’t. I wouldn’t have done it if they did. I asked. My father was the first reader. My aunt was the second reader.
What was the hardest part about writing the book? I mean, there’s some really grave material.
I found it hardest to read this book, Final Exit, that they had used, a manual on how to commit suicide. My aunt told me, “Do you know about this book?” So I ordered it. This felt really spooky–this powerful book that killed my grandparents. But then I opened it and it described this method of gassing yourself with a plastic bag? And then I thought, “My grandfather should gas himself after surviving a concentration camp?” But then I came to see it as just a book, just words. It doesn’t force you to kill yourself. It just would be of help for people who decided to do so for their reasons.
It’s interesting that you came to see it as just something helpful. I was so sad after finishing your memoir. I described the story to my husband, and he said, “That doesn’t have to be sad. It sounds like it was good for them. They ended their lives the way they wanted to, when they wanted to.”
I can see beauty in it. I can see it as a love story and a self-determined way of living, and being also inseparable in death. Of course it’s sad for the people left behind–much sadder for the children than the grandchildren. But it’s a very powerful act of saying, “We are not going to separate.” They died exactly the way they wanted to.
Recently a friend emailed about an older, ill couple who decided to end their life together, and it was an email of celebration. Like, “Let’s salute these people who ended their lives on their terms.”
I think it’s very brave when people can see it that way. My grandfather would have died within weeks anyway, and I can’t see my grandmother surviving as an old lady of now 91 years. It didn’t suit her. This is the ending she chose, and it really fit her character. So I think it’s also a very beautiful story about being together forever.
Finally, Johanna Adorján, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Born in Sweden. Lived ever since.
+++
BUY An Exclusive Love.
READ an excerpt from An Exclusive Love.
READ the New York Times piece about memoir.
A journalist at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Berlin, Adorján also applies her reporting skills to learn more about who her grandparents were, through interviews with people who’d been close to them.
There is something romantic and triumphant about a couple ending their lives on their own terms. Still, it’s hard not to get attached to Istvan, in his eighties and terminally ill, and Vera, in her seventies and emotionally ill-equipped to go on without her lifelong companion. As you near the end, you want them to change their minds, and live forever.
SMITH sat down with Adorján recently to discuss her book; memoir in general; and Neil Genzlinger’s recent New York Times Book Review take-down of the category, in which Adorjan’s book was the only one of four books he reviewed favorably.
An Exclusive Love is very journalistic. It made me wonder, do you consider the book a memoir? So much of it is your own approximation of your grandparents’ last day, and then a lot of reporting and interviews with other people.In the original German, they didn’t categorize it as memoir, and I didn’t give any thought when I was writing it to what category this should be. I knew it was nonfiction. I have the impression that in America this is a bigger issue, what side is a book on–fiction, nonfiction, memoir? In Germany, they only had to categorize it for the bestseller list. But I think that I am writing nonfiction. Even though one-third of the book is imagined.
But you’re not passing that part off as gospel.
No, it’s just a possibility, that part.
Here in the U.S. there’s sometimes a big deal made about how “true” a memoir is.
I tried to be as true as possible. I am a journalist. But in describing their last day, I had to use my imagination because no one was with them. So I used facts, but there are also things that I invented completely. My grandmother did not bake a cake that day, but I just wanted it to be there. It’s my truth about that day. There had to be this cake!
It was interesting to me the way you acknowledged early on that your version of their story might not be 100 percent accurate. You wrote that you and your aunt “knew” that your grandfather had learned to sleep on his feet in the concentration camp, but you soften that assertion by adding, “whatever knowing means.” And then you also point out that your grandfather was released from a different concentration camp than he’d said, or that you’d thought he had. It seems you are subtly acknowledging that the veracity of even our own understandings of our stories is up for debate.
I would also think, if somebody else from my family had written this story, it would be completely different. This is my view on that and on them.
No. It’s strange because I always imagined that if I could get a hold of that, it would be interesting to put at the end, because it proves that it’s true. I could be sentimental or false, but it’s more objective. But I got it late in my research. I did the research first, I made notes, and I started writing. It was very interesting to get that because there were details I couldn’t have made up. For instance, they committed suicide in an apartment that was fully lit. Every light was on. So I could use that to have my grandmother go and turn on every light, and put flowers in the vases. All those details helped me to recreate their last day. I hope I didn’t write something sentimental. But this report is almost cruel in its unsentimentality. It mentions these death stains. I thought it was quite brutal, but they’re dead, so it makes sense.
It’s sort of clinical.
I like police reports. I’m amazed at the way that in so few words, they manage to really describe everything, while I use so many sentences to say the same thing.
You portray your grandparents that day as being very unsentimental about it.
Yeah, that’s my imagination about it. Who knows? This is the way I can cope with it. Who knows if in reality they had a different day and it was harder? But this was the way I could see it, and the way I could hear their voices, speaking dialogue. I heard a very sad story, and it makes this one a very happy one. My friend’s brother is an emergency doctor. He was called to a case where a couple had committed suicide together, but the husband survived. And the doctors take an oath that they are committed to saving lives, so they had to save him. They knew he wanted to die. My friend’s brother said it was the worst job of his life having to revive him. In that respect, this is such a happy story, to have it as they planned it.
In your memoir, you write about yourself only slightly. You examine the similarities between yourself and your grandmother, which you learn about through talking to people who knew her. You think about whether you’re unloved or unlovable, the way your grandmother saw herself. You explore your Jewish identity and what it means, and your dating life through JDate. Was that little bit of self-exploration the motivation for writing it?
The motivation was I wanted to be able to imagine, in the most accurate way, the last day in their life. That was the motivation. I put myself in it–I had the feeling I had to–because it’s not really fiction. It’s nonfiction. It’s imagination based in facts. I felt I had to explain where I am in the story. So I just put myself in there a little bit as necessary.
In that way, you as a character anchor the story.Yes, in the part that is based on the present. The rest is either recent history, or further back in history. So there are layers of time: the present, the last day of their lives in 1991, and then much further back in their history.
I mention this because of something Neil Genzlinger wrote, relating to your book, in his New York Times Book Review essay excoriating the memoir category. You are one of four memoirists featured.
Well-hidden, at the end! The only one he liked.
I was so upset by that piece. I happen to have the most popular comment on the online version of that article. I just love memoir. And I thought, here’s a guy who hates memoir. I wondered what your take was on his piece.
Not having read the other three memoirs, I just focused on what he said about mine. But I didn’t quite understand why, if you don’t like memoirs, there is just one exception included. I mean, that’s very nice. But couldn’t he just have written about my book? I mean, I’m very flattered to even be mentioned in the New York Times. I am flattered most of all.
One of the things Genzlinger wrote, using your book as an example, was, “If you still must write a memoir, consider making yourself the least important character in it.” Yours works so beautifully that way, but as a general rule, that struck me as bizarre. What do you think of that as a general rule–that memoirists shouldn’t write their books so much about themselves, but about other people instead?
Well, I don’t believe in general rules for any kind of books. To me, it’s all about style–style even before the story. You could have the greatest story in the world, but if you don’t tell it well, it’s bad.
Not long ago I interviewed Nick Flynn, and he said, “Memoir is actually the most egoless genre, even though it might seem ostensibly so much ego-driven. In order for it to succeed, you have to dissolve the self into these larger universal truths, and explore these deeper mysteries.” What do you think about that?
Still, you have to feel that what you are telling is of interest or importance to other people, so in that way, you need an ego to be a writer. But I’m very bad at generalizing.
How long did it take you to write it?
It took five months to research it, and five months to write it. But I also had my newspaper job. So I just did it in the morning. I was very glad to have it limited like that because I was writing about some very heavy themes–suicide, the Holocaust, emigration, the Korean war. I was happy to work on it just for a short while. It took me so many years after their death to realize this could even be a book. I guess the story had grown inside of me, and I just wanted it out. The actual work was quite quick. It wasn’t difficult to find the structure.
Did any of the people in your family object to your writing this, or feel sensitive about it?
Sensitive, yes. Most of all, my father and his sister, they felt of course sensitive. My father helped me a lot. He went with me to the concentration camp, and he accompanied me on some of the interviews, sat there and listened. So in a way it was interesting for him to know whether I might be able to fill some gaps.
But they didn’t object?
No, they didn’t. I wouldn’t have done it if they did. I asked. My father was the first reader. My aunt was the second reader.
What was the hardest part about writing the book? I mean, there’s some really grave material.
I found it hardest to read this book, Final Exit, that they had used, a manual on how to commit suicide. My aunt told me, “Do you know about this book?” So I ordered it. This felt really spooky–this powerful book that killed my grandparents. But then I opened it and it described this method of gassing yourself with a plastic bag? And then I thought, “My grandfather should gas himself after surviving a concentration camp?” But then I came to see it as just a book, just words. It doesn’t force you to kill yourself. It just would be of help for people who decided to do so for their reasons.
It’s interesting that you came to see it as just something helpful. I was so sad after finishing your memoir. I described the story to my husband, and he said, “That doesn’t have to be sad. It sounds like it was good for them. They ended their lives the way they wanted to, when they wanted to.”
I can see beauty in it. I can see it as a love story and a self-determined way of living, and being also inseparable in death. Of course it’s sad for the people left behind–much sadder for the children than the grandchildren. But it’s a very powerful act of saying, “We are not going to separate.” They died exactly the way they wanted to.
Recently a friend emailed about an older, ill couple who decided to end their life together, and it was an email of celebration. Like, “Let’s salute these people who ended their lives on their terms.”
I think it’s very brave when people can see it that way. My grandfather would have died within weeks anyway, and I can’t see my grandmother surviving as an old lady of now 91 years. It didn’t suit her. This is the ending she chose, and it really fit her character. So I think it’s also a very beautiful story about being together forever.
Finally, Johanna Adorján, what’s your Six-Word Memoir?
Born in Sweden. Lived ever since.
+++
BUY An Exclusive Love.
READ an excerpt from An Exclusive Love.
READ the New York Times piece about memoir.
Tags: An Exclusive Love, family, Johanna Adorjan, memoir, suicide
Journalistin Johanna Adorján über eine exklusive Liebe
10.03.2009 | 16:07 Uhr 2009-03-10T16:07:00+0100
Essen. Die Journalistin Johanna Adorján hat ein Buch über den letzten Tag der "exklusiven Liebe" ihrer Großeltern geschrieben – eine Familiengeschichte. Im Interview verrät sie: "Wenn ich mich umbringen wollte, würde ich es wahrscheinlich auch in hellen Räumen machen wollen".
// Johanna Adorján ist an diesem Tag ein bisschen verschnupft. In Berlin liegt Schnee, seit ein paar Tagen ist es unangenehm kalt und nass. In der hintersten Ecke der Ostfiliale des »Café Einstein« hat sie reservieren lassen. Man kennt die Feuilletonistin der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Sonntagszeitung hier. Der Radio-Reporter wird dann später in der Redaktion um die Ecke empfangen. Dort ist es leiser. Wobei es so richtig laut in der Edel-Kantine des Berliner Medienbetriebs nicht ist. Eher wundert es den aus der Provinz Angereisten, wer alles an diesem Mittag im Einstein nicht sitzt.
Am 15. März wird Johanna Adorján aus ihrem Debüt »Eine exklusive Liebe« bei der lit.Cologne lesen. Aus einem sehr persönlichen, anrührenden Buch über den Selbstmord ihrer Großeltern väterlicherseits, die als ungarische Juden den Holocaust überlebt hatten und 1956 von Budapest nach Dänemark geflohen waren. Gesprochen wurde darüber in der Familie Adorján nie. Die Enkelin hat dieses Schweigen gebrochen und verfolgt in »Eine exklusive Liebe« die Spuren eines ungewöhnlichen, exzentrischen Paares. Sie reist nach Budapest, Paris oder New York, um von Freundinnen und Verwandten der Großmutter mehr über die Geschichte einer außergewöhnlichen Verbindung zu erfahren, und sie beschreibt minutiös jenen 13. Oktober 1991, an dem ein schwer kranker Mann und seine gesunde Frau abends zu Bett gehen, um Hand in Hand zu sterben.
Über diese Arbeit hat Johanna Adorján, 1971 in Stockholm als Tochter eines in Ungarn geborenen Dänen und einer Deutschen geboren, nicht nur die von ihr bewunderte Großmutter neu kennen gelernt; sie hat sich auch mit der eigenen Ver- und Entwurzelung auseinandergesetzt, mit der als Traditionsbruch vererbten Lücke: »Was heißt es, alles Mögliche nur halb zu sein?« //
Am 13. Oktober 1991, am Abend, als sich Ihre Großeltern das Leben genommen haben, saßen Sie zufällig mit Freunden zusammen und sprachen von Ihrer Befürchtung, Ihre Großeltern könnten eben dies tun. Damals fühlten Sie sich im nachhinein unwohl, überhaupt über dieses private Thema gesprochen zu haben. Warum suchen Sie mit dieser Geschichte nun die Öffentlichkeit?
Johanna Adorján: Zwischen diesem Abend und der Zeit, als ich das Buch geschrieben habe, liegen 16 Jahre. Die Geschichte hat sehr lange in mir gearbeitet. Sie ist über diese Zeit immer mehr zu meiner Geschichte geworden ist.
Sie zeichnen das Bild eines eleganten, auf faszinierende Weise aus der Zeit gefallenen Paares, das aussieht, als hätte es eben den Oldtimer um die Ecke geparkt. Ist die Intensität dieser »exklusiven Liebe« bis in den Tod hinein heute unzeitgemäß?
Johanna Adorján: Es gibt doch immer mal wieder Paare, die so lange zusammen sind. Genauso wie es Scheidungen in der Generation meiner Großeltern gab. Unzeitgemäß an ihrer Liebe war vielleicht, dass sie sich gesiezt haben, jahrzehntelang und bis zum Tod.
»Ihre große Liebe ist die Antwort« stand damals in der Todesanzeige. War der Verdacht, dass sich Ihre Großmutter nicht nur aus großer Liebe das Leben genommen hat, Ausgangspunkt des Buches?
Johanna Adorján: Zunächst hat mich immer interessiert, wie der letzte Tag meiner Großeltern ausgesehen hat. Wie fühlt es sich an, wenn man weiß, dass man sich am Abend umbringt? In was für einer Stimmung ist man da? Ich wollte mir das so genau wie möglich vorstellen können. Also habe ich den letzten Tag ihres Lebens als Möglichkeit entworfen, und ich habe eine Antwort gefunden, die mich ruhig sein lässt.
Dabei sind Sie darauf gestoßen, dass Ihre Großmutter vielleicht gar nicht so souverän und stark gewesen ist, wie Sie sie erlebt haben?
Johanna Adorján: Ich kannte sie ja nur aus der Enkelpers-pektive: als Großmutter. Je mehr ich von ihren Freundinnen über ihren Charakter erfahren habe, desto mehr habe ich sie als Frau kennen gelernt, als eine vermutlich sehr unsichere Frau. Vielleicht ist das ja auch die Antwort darauf, warum sie sich zusammen mit meinem Großvater umgebracht hat. Aber das kann ich nur vermuten. Eine große Portion Angst spielte wohl mit hinein, Angst vor dem Älterwerden, vor der Schwäche und vor dem Alleinsein.
Vor anderthalb Jahren hat sich der Sozialphilosoph André Gorz gemeinsam mit seiner 83-jährigen Frau Dorine das Leben genommen. Er hat vorher die Geschichte ihrer Liebe als Brief geschrieben, darin heißt es: »Gemeinsam mussten wir uns, einer durch den anderen, unseren Platz in der Welt schaffen, der uns ursprünglich abgesprochen war. Doch dazu musste unsere Liebe auch ein Pakt fürs Leben sein«. Machen reale Ausgrenzung und das Gefühl, ausgeschlossen zu sein, eine Liebe exklusiv und stark?
Johanna Adorján: Ich kann das nur vermuten. Hinter all dem steht für mich noch immer ein großes Fragezeichen. Das Schicksal hat meine Großeltern offensichtlich zusammengeschweißt, so dass es wohl undenkbar war, dass der Eine ohne den Anderen hätte weiter leben können. Ich bewundere Lieben, die so lange halten. Abgesehen davon, dass es meine Großeltern waren, mochte ich es sehr, über ein altes Paar zu schreiben. Diese festgefahrenen Rollen und dieser Tonfall, der im Alltag häufig überhaupt nicht liebevoll ist, sondern eher gereizt.
Sie erzählen nicht nur die Geschichte einer exklusiven Liebe, sondern auch die des Schweigens über die KZ-Internierung Ihres Großvaters. Man könnte vermuten, der Selbstmord sei ohne diese Internierung nicht zu verstehen.
Johanna Adorján: Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass es eine Beziehung festigt, wenn man in Situationen gerät, in denen man davon ausgeht, seinen Mann nie wieder zu sehen. Vielleicht hat meine Großmutter meinem Großvater das Versprechen abgenommen, zusammen zu sterben. Doch bitte: das ist eine Mutmaßung.
Sie beschreiben Ihre Großmutter immer wieder als schöne, elegante Frau. Als eine Frau, die Sie bewundert hätten. War diese Schönheit ein Grund für Ihre Faszination?
Johanna Adorján: Ich war immer sehr stolz auf eine Großmutter, die so extravagant angezogen war, Kette rauchte und eine so beeindruckend tiefe Stimme hatte. Sie war, verglichen mit anderen, einfach eine sehr untypische Großmutter.
Schließt diese Bewunderung auch die Entscheidung mit ein, sich gemeinsam mit dem sterbenskranken Mann das Leben zu nehmen?
Johanna Adorján: Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob ich diese Entscheidung bewundere. Doch. Ich bewundere meine Großmutter dafür, eine solche Entscheidung so konsequent durchgeführt zu haben. Es mag komisch klingen, aber ich habe sehr großen Respekt vor dieser Konsequenz. Ich vermute, dass mein Großvater sie darum gebeten hat, es nicht zu machen. Sie wollte es so und basta.
Glauben Sie, dass dieser Pakt auch umgekehrt funktioniert hätte: Mit einer schwer kranken Großmutter und einem vitalen Großvater?
Johanna Adorján: Ich kann mir meine Großmutter überhaupt nicht sterbenskrank vorstellen.
Warum nicht?
Johanna Adorján: Sie hätte sich vorher umgebracht. Hat sie ja auch. Meine Großmutter hat sich keine Schwäche gestattet.
Aber die Entscheidung Ihrer Großmutter ist Ihnen nachvollziehbar?
Johanna Adorján: Ja. Wenn jemand beschließt, nicht mehr leben zu wollen, ist es nicht an mir, das zu beurteilen. Es ist ihr Leben, nicht meines.
Hat der Sohn dieser Großeltern, Ihr Vater, das Buch schon gelesen?
Johanna Adorján: Mein Vater war der erste Leser. Wenn er Einwände gehabt hätte, hätte ich es nicht so veröffentlicht.
Sie unterstellen Ihren Großeltern eine Portion Aggression, die dazu gehöre, vor den eigenen Kindern so zu tun, als sei man vollkommen allein auf der Welt. Exklusiv konnte diese Liebe also nur sein, weil sie andere ausschloss, auch die eigenen Kinder?
Johanna Adorján: Ihre Liebe und vor allem ihr Tod hatte etwas Ausschließendes. Das gilt auch für die Familie. Wobei ich das nicht so gespürt habe, denn die Generation, die zwischen mir und meinen Großeltern liegt, hat das abgefedert.
Ruhig ist der letzte Tag Ihrer Großeltern in Ihrem Buch. Beide gehen sehr gelassen und souverän mit dem bevorstehenden Selbstmord um. Ihre Großmutter räumt auf, bestellt das Haus, wozu auch frische Blumen und Geschenke für die Familie gehören. Am Ende ist alles erleuchtet, es herrscht eine feierliche Stimmung. Konnten Sie sich den letzten Tag nicht anders als so vorstellen?
Johanna Adorján: Es gibt ja die Polizeiakten, in denen drinsteht, dass alles aufgeräumt und hell erleuchtet war. Ich habe mir das nicht ausgedacht; und wenn ich mich umbringen wollte, würde ich es wahrscheinlich auch in hellen Räumen machen wollen.
Was bedeutet es für Sie, die Enkeltochter eines Mannes zu sein, der im KZ Mauthausen interniert war?
Johanna Adorján: Das ist schwierig zu beantworten, denn ich weiß ja nicht, wie es anders wäre. Was bedeutet es mir? Es ist einfach so.
Ihre Großeltern haben nie über die Zeit der Internierung ihres Großvaters im KZ Mauthausen gesprochen. Doch meinten Sie und Ihre Familie zu wissen, dass er dort gelernt haben muss, im Gehen zu schlafen, sonst wäre er erschossen worden. Im Laufe Ihrer Recherche über die Fußmärsche hat sich diese Geschichte dann bestätigt. Sie schreiben: »Es starben Tausende auf diesen Märschen. Ich bin natürlich erschüttert, als ich davon lese, aber ich bin auch erleichtert. Es stimmt also, ich bin diese Enkelin.«
Johanna Adorján: Wenn es etwas für mich etwas bedeutet hat, dass mein Großvater im KZ war, dann in ganz komischen Zusammenhängen. Beim Joggen dachte ich zum Beispiel immer: Ich kann jetzt nicht aufgeben, schließlich bin ich die Enkeltochter von jemandem, den man erschossen hätte, wenn er vor Erschöpfung zusammengebrochen wäre. Es hat mir bei etwas Banalem wie dem Joggen als Motivation gedient. In meinem Buch geht es auch um die Mischung aus großer Geschichte und banalem Leben.
Sie werfen Ihrem Großvater vor, dass er seine Kinder nicht in der jüdischen Tradition hat aufwachsen lassen, dass er damit auch Sie, die Enkelin, um einen Teil Ihrer Identität gebracht hätte:»Mir fehlt ein Stück von mir. Ich vermisse etwas und weiß nicht einmal genau, was.« Wie geht das?
Johanna Adorján: Ich habe die Erfahrung gemacht, dass ich mit jüdischen Menschen sehr gut klar komme, als wäre da irgendeine seltsame Art Verwandtschaft. Aber ich kann das nicht beschreiben. Es ist einfach ein Gefühl.
Was macht Sie so sicher, dass Sie das, was Sie vermissen, in Ihrer Familiengeschichte finden?
Johanna Adorján: Die Arbeit an diesem Buch hat mich ruhiger gemacht. Früher dachte ich immer, ich bin gar nichts richtig. Jetzt denke ich, ich bin alles: ich bin jüdisch und ich bin nicht-jüdisch, ich bin deutsch und ich bin ungarisch. Und dänisch. Und habe Großeltern, auf die ich sehr stolz sein kann.
An Exclusive Love
The purview and significance of the best memoirs extend well beyond the writer — a relief, since most people's lives aren't nearly as interesting as they think. The focus of Johanna Adorjan's An Exclusive Love is not herself but her paternal grandparents. Despite its schmaltzy title, her memoir is a haunting, beautifully composed book that aims to understand why this elegant couple — Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivors who fled Communist Budapest in 1956 and settled successfully in Denmark — committed double-suicide on Oct. 13, 1991, when the author was 20.
Like Francine du Plessix Gray's Them, Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, An Exclusive Love offers a fascinating new angle on the Holocaust filtered through the perspective of survivors' progeny. But rather than a full-scale family history, Adorjan's spare little masterpiece resurrects her adored grandparents with a two-pronged approach: imagining their last day down to the smallest details, and researching their past to trace the roots of their decision to die together on their own terms.
Her quest takes her to Budapest to meet her grandmother's ever-critical best friend, and to Denmark to visit her grandparents' old house and a doctor friend who knew of their plan. She questions her father and aunt as tactfully as possible, and visits Mauthausen, the category III ("extermination through labor") concentration camp in Austria where her grandfather, an orthopedic surgeon, was marched after the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944. (She is nonplussed by groups of texting teenagers.) She learns that her grandmother's parents were shot by Hungarian Nazis on the banks of the Danube toward the end of the war, and that her grandmother first considered suicide in 1945 at the specter of being left widowed at 25 with an infant son — the author's father, born soon after the Nazis seized Budapest.
Voice is key in a memoir, and Adorjan, cultural editor of a German newspaper and daughter of a classical musician, hits just the right notes in this well-tempered literary instrument (which has been beautifully translated by Anthea Bell). She's as adept at delving into questions about national and religious identity as evoking her grandmother's temperamental insecurity and cigarette-smoke-and-Guerlain-infused scent. Raised in Munich by her German mother and Hungarian-born, assimilated-Jewish/baptized-Protestant, Danish father, Adorjan asks, "Typically Jewish: does such a frame of mind exist?"
As for her grandparents' motivations for suicide, she wonders whether her 82-year-old grandfather, already terminally ill, and her still hale 71-year-old grandmother chose to die together because of a pact made 50 years earlier. If so, was that solemn promise undertaken out of great love or even greater fear—"A woman's fear of being unloved, alone, a burden on others, perhaps sick and frail herself some day?"
In imagining what her grandparents' feelings and actions might have been on their last day, Adorjan hits upon a powerful dramatic structure that builds from the quotidian to the shocking. She paints an eerily homey picture of her grandmother methodically cleaning the house, winterizing her rosebushes and wrapping gifts (heirlooms) for the family. The narrative crescendos to the final schedule found among their papers: a step-by-step procedure culled from Final Exit, a practical guide to suicide they went to great lengths to procure — 6 p.m., tea and toast; 7 p.m., anti-emetic; 7:30 p.m., toxic nightcap of pills. Sensitive, intelligent and profoundly moving, An Exclusive Love will leave you stunned.
An Exclusive Love
On 13 October 1991 my grandparents killed themselves. It was a Sunday. Not really the ideal day of the week for suicide. On Sundays family members call each other, friends drop in to go walking their dogs with you. I'd have thought a Monday, for instance, much more suitable. But there we are, it was a Sunday, it was in October. I picture a clear autumn day, because it all happened in Denmark. My grandparents lived in Charlottenlund, a suburb of Copenhagen where all the houses have gardens and you call your neighbours by their first names. I imagine that my grandmother was the first to wake that morning; I imagine her waking up, and her first thought is that this is the last morning she will ever wake up. She will never wake up again, and she will only go to sleep once more. My grandmother sits up quickly, pushes back the covers and puts on the slippers that she leaves neatly beside the bed every evening. Then she gets to her feet, a slender woman of seventy-one, smooths out her nightdress, and quietly, so as not to wake my grandfather, she walks the few metres to the door.
In the corridor she is welcomed by Mitzi the dog, wagging her tail. Mitzi is an Irish terrier bitch, a nice dog, phlegmatic, not particularly obedient. My grandmother gets on well with her. She speaks Hungarian to Mitzi. 'Jó kis kutya,' says my grandmother when she has quietly closed the bedroom door, good little dog. She has a low bass voice like a man's, probably as a result of all those cigarettes, she's a chain-smoker. In my imagined picture of that morning, I could go back again and place a lighted cigarette between her fingers directly after she wakes up, Prince Denmark brand, extra strong (advertising slogan: Prince Denmark for Real Men). Yes, she'll have lit herself a cigarette once she had her slippers on, at the latest. So as she pats the dog's head in the passage, quietly closing the bedroom door behind her, the air smells of fresh smoke.
A little later the smell of coffee mingles with the cigarette smoke. A keen nose would also pick up a hint of Jicky by Guerlain. My grandmother has her dressing-gown on, a silk kimono that my father once brought her back from Japan; she wears it loosely belted around her waist, and now she is sitting at the kitchen table. She holds a lighted cigarette between the fingers of her left hand. She has long, elegant fingers, and holds the cigarette very close to her fingertips, as if a cigarette were something precious. My grandmother is waiting for the coffee to finish filtering through the machine. A fountain pen and a pad of paper lie on the table in front of her.
Anyone seeing my grandmother now might think she was bored. Her eyebrows arch so far above her eyes that they always look as if she were raising them. Heavy lids lend her features a slightly blasé weariness. In photographs from her young days my grandmother looks a little like Liz Taylor. Or Lana Turner. Or some other film star of that period with long dark hair and chiselled cheekbones. She has a short, straight nose and a small mouth with a curving lower lip. Her eyelashes are perhaps a little too short to be perfect, and they are dead straight.
Even on this day, the last day of her life, she is still a beautiful woman. Her skin is tanned a deep, almost dirty brown by the summer sun. Her cheekbones seem to have risen even higher. She wears her hair in a chin-length bob. With the years it has become wiry, and surrounds her face like a thick, dark grey hood. On the morning of 13 October 1991 my grandmother sits at the kitchen table. As she waits for the coffee to run through the machine, she makes notes of things to do on her spiral-bound pad. Cancel the newspaper, she writes. Get the roses ready for winter. She isn't wearing glasses, she doesn't need them even at the age of seventy-one, and she is very proud of the fact. A cigarette glows in the ashtray on the table in front of her. It crackles faintly as the glow eats its way further into the paper. My grandmother writes: Mitzi. When she puts the pen down, a little ink drops off the nib, spreads into a blue mark on the paper and makes the word Mitzi invisible. Never mind. She's not going to forget about Mitzi. Over the last few days she has gone over her list so often that she can recite the items on it by heart anyway. She switches on the radio, a small, portable plastic set standing beside the toaster. The music is something by Bach. It's Sunday, after all.
From An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan. Copyright 2010 by Johanna Adorjan. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co.
Johanna Adorján. (c) Peter von Felbert/ k.west
Am 15. März wird Johanna Adorján aus ihrem Debüt »Eine exklusive Liebe« bei der lit.Cologne lesen. Aus einem sehr persönlichen, anrührenden Buch über den Selbstmord ihrer Großeltern väterlicherseits, die als ungarische Juden den Holocaust überlebt hatten und 1956 von Budapest nach Dänemark geflohen waren. Gesprochen wurde darüber in der Familie Adorján nie. Die Enkelin hat dieses Schweigen gebrochen und verfolgt in »Eine exklusive Liebe« die Spuren eines ungewöhnlichen, exzentrischen Paares. Sie reist nach Budapest, Paris oder New York, um von Freundinnen und Verwandten der Großmutter mehr über die Geschichte einer außergewöhnlichen Verbindung zu erfahren, und sie beschreibt minutiös jenen 13. Oktober 1991, an dem ein schwer kranker Mann und seine gesunde Frau abends zu Bett gehen, um Hand in Hand zu sterben.
Über diese Arbeit hat Johanna Adorján, 1971 in Stockholm als Tochter eines in Ungarn geborenen Dänen und einer Deutschen geboren, nicht nur die von ihr bewunderte Großmutter neu kennen gelernt; sie hat sich auch mit der eigenen Ver- und Entwurzelung auseinandergesetzt, mit der als Traditionsbruch vererbten Lücke: »Was heißt es, alles Mögliche nur halb zu sein?« //
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Johanna Adorján: Zwischen diesem Abend und der Zeit, als ich das Buch geschrieben habe, liegen 16 Jahre. Die Geschichte hat sehr lange in mir gearbeitet. Sie ist über diese Zeit immer mehr zu meiner Geschichte geworden ist.
Sie zeichnen das Bild eines eleganten, auf faszinierende Weise aus der Zeit gefallenen Paares, das aussieht, als hätte es eben den Oldtimer um die Ecke geparkt. Ist die Intensität dieser »exklusiven Liebe« bis in den Tod hinein heute unzeitgemäß?
Johanna Adorján: Es gibt doch immer mal wieder Paare, die so lange zusammen sind. Genauso wie es Scheidungen in der Generation meiner Großeltern gab. Unzeitgemäß an ihrer Liebe war vielleicht, dass sie sich gesiezt haben, jahrzehntelang und bis zum Tod.
»Ihre große Liebe ist die Antwort« stand damals in der Todesanzeige. War der Verdacht, dass sich Ihre Großmutter nicht nur aus großer Liebe das Leben genommen hat, Ausgangspunkt des Buches?
Johanna Adorján: Zunächst hat mich immer interessiert, wie der letzte Tag meiner Großeltern ausgesehen hat. Wie fühlt es sich an, wenn man weiß, dass man sich am Abend umbringt? In was für einer Stimmung ist man da? Ich wollte mir das so genau wie möglich vorstellen können. Also habe ich den letzten Tag ihres Lebens als Möglichkeit entworfen, und ich habe eine Antwort gefunden, die mich ruhig sein lässt.
Dabei sind Sie darauf gestoßen, dass Ihre Großmutter vielleicht gar nicht so souverän und stark gewesen ist, wie Sie sie erlebt haben?
Die Journalsitin Johanna Adorján. (c) Peter von Felbert/ k.west
Vor anderthalb Jahren hat sich der Sozialphilosoph André Gorz gemeinsam mit seiner 83-jährigen Frau Dorine das Leben genommen. Er hat vorher die Geschichte ihrer Liebe als Brief geschrieben, darin heißt es: »Gemeinsam mussten wir uns, einer durch den anderen, unseren Platz in der Welt schaffen, der uns ursprünglich abgesprochen war. Doch dazu musste unsere Liebe auch ein Pakt fürs Leben sein«. Machen reale Ausgrenzung und das Gefühl, ausgeschlossen zu sein, eine Liebe exklusiv und stark?
Johanna Adorján: Ich kann das nur vermuten. Hinter all dem steht für mich noch immer ein großes Fragezeichen. Das Schicksal hat meine Großeltern offensichtlich zusammengeschweißt, so dass es wohl undenkbar war, dass der Eine ohne den Anderen hätte weiter leben können. Ich bewundere Lieben, die so lange halten. Abgesehen davon, dass es meine Großeltern waren, mochte ich es sehr, über ein altes Paar zu schreiben. Diese festgefahrenen Rollen und dieser Tonfall, der im Alltag häufig überhaupt nicht liebevoll ist, sondern eher gereizt.
Sie erzählen nicht nur die Geschichte einer exklusiven Liebe, sondern auch die des Schweigens über die KZ-Internierung Ihres Großvaters. Man könnte vermuten, der Selbstmord sei ohne diese Internierung nicht zu verstehen.
Johanna Adorján: Ich kann mir vorstellen, dass es eine Beziehung festigt, wenn man in Situationen gerät, in denen man davon ausgeht, seinen Mann nie wieder zu sehen. Vielleicht hat meine Großmutter meinem Großvater das Versprechen abgenommen, zusammen zu sterben. Doch bitte: das ist eine Mutmaßung.
Sie beschreiben Ihre Großmutter immer wieder als schöne, elegante Frau. Als eine Frau, die Sie bewundert hätten. War diese Schönheit ein Grund für Ihre Faszination?
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Johanna Adorján, 1971 in Stockholm geboren, studierte in München Theater- und Opernregie. Seit 1995 arbeitet sie als Journalistin, seit 2001 in der Feuilleton-Redaktion der FAS. "Eine exklusive Liebe" ist ihr erstes Buch.
Johanna Adorján, Eine exklusive Liebe, Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2009, 192 Seiten, 17,95 €
Johann Adorján liest am 15.3.2009 bei der lit.Cologne im Alten Pfandhaus, http://www.litcolony.de/
Johanna Adorján, Eine exklusive Liebe, Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 2009, 192 Seiten, 17,95 €
Johann Adorján liest am 15.3.2009 bei der lit.Cologne im Alten Pfandhaus, http://www.litcolony.de/
Schließt diese Bewunderung auch die Entscheidung mit ein, sich gemeinsam mit dem sterbenskranken Mann das Leben zu nehmen?
Johanna Adorján: Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob ich diese Entscheidung bewundere. Doch. Ich bewundere meine Großmutter dafür, eine solche Entscheidung so konsequent durchgeführt zu haben. Es mag komisch klingen, aber ich habe sehr großen Respekt vor dieser Konsequenz. Ich vermute, dass mein Großvater sie darum gebeten hat, es nicht zu machen. Sie wollte es so und basta.
Glauben Sie, dass dieser Pakt auch umgekehrt funktioniert hätte: Mit einer schwer kranken Großmutter und einem vitalen Großvater?
Johanna Adorján: Ich kann mir meine Großmutter überhaupt nicht sterbenskrank vorstellen.
Warum nicht?
Johanna Adorján: Sie hätte sich vorher umgebracht. Hat sie ja auch. Meine Großmutter hat sich keine Schwäche gestattet.
Aber die Entscheidung Ihrer Großmutter ist Ihnen nachvollziehbar?
Johanna Adorján: Ja. Wenn jemand beschließt, nicht mehr leben zu wollen, ist es nicht an mir, das zu beurteilen. Es ist ihr Leben, nicht meines.
Hat der Sohn dieser Großeltern, Ihr Vater, das Buch schon gelesen?
Johanna Adorján: Mein Vater war der erste Leser. Wenn er Einwände gehabt hätte, hätte ich es nicht so veröffentlicht.
Sie unterstellen Ihren Großeltern eine Portion Aggression, die dazu gehöre, vor den eigenen Kindern so zu tun, als sei man vollkommen allein auf der Welt. Exklusiv konnte diese Liebe also nur sein, weil sie andere ausschloss, auch die eigenen Kinder?
Johanna Adorján: Ihre Liebe und vor allem ihr Tod hatte etwas Ausschließendes. Das gilt auch für die Familie. Wobei ich das nicht so gespürt habe, denn die Generation, die zwischen mir und meinen Großeltern liegt, hat das abgefedert.
Ruhig ist der letzte Tag Ihrer Großeltern in Ihrem Buch. Beide gehen sehr gelassen und souverän mit dem bevorstehenden Selbstmord um. Ihre Großmutter räumt auf, bestellt das Haus, wozu auch frische Blumen und Geschenke für die Familie gehören. Am Ende ist alles erleuchtet, es herrscht eine feierliche Stimmung. Konnten Sie sich den letzten Tag nicht anders als so vorstellen?
Johanna Adorján: Es gibt ja die Polizeiakten, in denen drinsteht, dass alles aufgeräumt und hell erleuchtet war. Ich habe mir das nicht ausgedacht; und wenn ich mich umbringen wollte, würde ich es wahrscheinlich auch in hellen Räumen machen wollen.
Was bedeutet es für Sie, die Enkeltochter eines Mannes zu sein, der im KZ Mauthausen interniert war?
Johanna Adorján: Das ist schwierig zu beantworten, denn ich weiß ja nicht, wie es anders wäre. Was bedeutet es mir? Es ist einfach so.
Ihre Großeltern haben nie über die Zeit der Internierung ihres Großvaters im KZ Mauthausen gesprochen. Doch meinten Sie und Ihre Familie zu wissen, dass er dort gelernt haben muss, im Gehen zu schlafen, sonst wäre er erschossen worden. Im Laufe Ihrer Recherche über die Fußmärsche hat sich diese Geschichte dann bestätigt. Sie schreiben: »Es starben Tausende auf diesen Märschen. Ich bin natürlich erschüttert, als ich davon lese, aber ich bin auch erleichtert. Es stimmt also, ich bin diese Enkelin.«
Johanna Adorján: Wenn es etwas für mich etwas bedeutet hat, dass mein Großvater im KZ war, dann in ganz komischen Zusammenhängen. Beim Joggen dachte ich zum Beispiel immer: Ich kann jetzt nicht aufgeben, schließlich bin ich die Enkeltochter von jemandem, den man erschossen hätte, wenn er vor Erschöpfung zusammengebrochen wäre. Es hat mir bei etwas Banalem wie dem Joggen als Motivation gedient. In meinem Buch geht es auch um die Mischung aus großer Geschichte und banalem Leben.
Sie werfen Ihrem Großvater vor, dass er seine Kinder nicht in der jüdischen Tradition hat aufwachsen lassen, dass er damit auch Sie, die Enkelin, um einen Teil Ihrer Identität gebracht hätte:»Mir fehlt ein Stück von mir. Ich vermisse etwas und weiß nicht einmal genau, was.« Wie geht das?
Johanna Adorján: Ich habe die Erfahrung gemacht, dass ich mit jüdischen Menschen sehr gut klar komme, als wäre da irgendeine seltsame Art Verwandtschaft. Aber ich kann das nicht beschreiben. Es ist einfach ein Gefühl.
Was macht Sie so sicher, dass Sie das, was Sie vermissen, in Ihrer Familiengeschichte finden?
After They're Gone, Understanding An 'Exclusive Love'
An Exclusive Love
By Johanna Adorjan
Hardcover, 186 pages
W.W. Norton & Co.
List Price: $24.95
Read An Excerpt
Like Francine du Plessix Gray's Them, Edmund de Waal's The Hare With Amber Eyes and Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost, An Exclusive Love offers a fascinating new angle on the Holocaust filtered through the perspective of survivors' progeny. But rather than a full-scale family history, Adorjan's spare little masterpiece resurrects her adored grandparents with a two-pronged approach: imagining their last day down to the smallest details, and researching their past to trace the roots of their decision to die together on their own terms.
Her quest takes her to Budapest to meet her grandmother's ever-critical best friend, and to Denmark to visit her grandparents' old house and a doctor friend who knew of their plan. She questions her father and aunt as tactfully as possible, and visits Mauthausen, the category III ("extermination through labor") concentration camp in Austria where her grandfather, an orthopedic surgeon, was marched after the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944. (She is nonplussed by groups of texting teenagers.) She learns that her grandmother's parents were shot by Hungarian Nazis on the banks of the Danube toward the end of the war, and that her grandmother first considered suicide in 1945 at the specter of being left widowed at 25 with an infant son — the author's father, born soon after the Nazis seized Budapest.
In imagining what her grandparents' feelings and actions might have been on their last day, Adorján hits upon a powerful dramatic structure that builds from the quotidian to the shocking.
Peter von Felbert Johanna Adorjan, author of An Exclusive Love, was born in Stockholm and now lives in Berlin. She is an editor of the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, and also writes theater and screenplay works.
In imagining what her grandparents' feelings and actions might have been on their last day, Adorjan hits upon a powerful dramatic structure that builds from the quotidian to the shocking. She paints an eerily homey picture of her grandmother methodically cleaning the house, winterizing her rosebushes and wrapping gifts (heirlooms) for the family. The narrative crescendos to the final schedule found among their papers: a step-by-step procedure culled from Final Exit, a practical guide to suicide they went to great lengths to procure — 6 p.m., tea and toast; 7 p.m., anti-emetic; 7:30 p.m., toxic nightcap of pills. Sensitive, intelligent and profoundly moving, An Exclusive Love will leave you stunned.
Excerpt: 'An Exclusive Love'
An Exclusive Love
By Johanna Adorjan
Hardcover, 186 pages
Norton
List Price: $24.95
In the corridor she is welcomed by Mitzi the dog, wagging her tail. Mitzi is an Irish terrier bitch, a nice dog, phlegmatic, not particularly obedient. My grandmother gets on well with her. She speaks Hungarian to Mitzi. 'Jó kis kutya,' says my grandmother when she has quietly closed the bedroom door, good little dog. She has a low bass voice like a man's, probably as a result of all those cigarettes, she's a chain-smoker. In my imagined picture of that morning, I could go back again and place a lighted cigarette between her fingers directly after she wakes up, Prince Denmark brand, extra strong (advertising slogan: Prince Denmark for Real Men). Yes, she'll have lit herself a cigarette once she had her slippers on, at the latest. So as she pats the dog's head in the passage, quietly closing the bedroom door behind her, the air smells of fresh smoke.
A little later the smell of coffee mingles with the cigarette smoke. A keen nose would also pick up a hint of Jicky by Guerlain. My grandmother has her dressing-gown on, a silk kimono that my father once brought her back from Japan; she wears it loosely belted around her waist, and now she is sitting at the kitchen table. She holds a lighted cigarette between the fingers of her left hand. She has long, elegant fingers, and holds the cigarette very close to her fingertips, as if a cigarette were something precious. My grandmother is waiting for the coffee to finish filtering through the machine. A fountain pen and a pad of paper lie on the table in front of her.
Anyone seeing my grandmother now might think she was bored. Her eyebrows arch so far above her eyes that they always look as if she were raising them. Heavy lids lend her features a slightly blasé weariness. In photographs from her young days my grandmother looks a little like Liz Taylor. Or Lana Turner. Or some other film star of that period with long dark hair and chiselled cheekbones. She has a short, straight nose and a small mouth with a curving lower lip. Her eyelashes are perhaps a little too short to be perfect, and they are dead straight.
Even on this day, the last day of her life, she is still a beautiful woman. Her skin is tanned a deep, almost dirty brown by the summer sun. Her cheekbones seem to have risen even higher. She wears her hair in a chin-length bob. With the years it has become wiry, and surrounds her face like a thick, dark grey hood. On the morning of 13 October 1991 my grandmother sits at the kitchen table. As she waits for the coffee to run through the machine, she makes notes of things to do on her spiral-bound pad. Cancel the newspaper, she writes. Get the roses ready for winter. She isn't wearing glasses, she doesn't need them even at the age of seventy-one, and she is very proud of the fact. A cigarette glows in the ashtray on the table in front of her. It crackles faintly as the glow eats its way further into the paper. My grandmother writes: Mitzi. When she puts the pen down, a little ink drops off the nib, spreads into a blue mark on the paper and makes the word Mitzi invisible. Never mind. She's not going to forget about Mitzi. Over the last few days she has gone over her list so often that she can recite the items on it by heart anyway. She switches on the radio, a small, portable plastic set standing beside the toaster. The music is something by Bach. It's Sunday, after all.
From An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan. Copyright 2010 by Johanna Adorjan. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Co.
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