Levys Testament by Ulrike Edschmid

Reading Ulrike Edschmid’s latest novel has been a bit like settling down for a chat with an old friend: I’m a fan of her work and have enjoyed her previous novels, The disappearance of Philip S., My mother’s lovers, and A man who falls. So meeting again her succinct narrative style, her cool tone and intense gaze in Levy’s Testament felt like a real treat. Until I realised I shouldn’t be getting too cosy: like her previous work, this novel deals with political protest, specifically the bombing campaign of The Angry Brigade in early 70s London, the trial of the defendants, and the controversially tough prison sentences meted out to the four young people found guilty of conspiracy. It also tells a story rooted in the Jewish community who arrived in East London in the early 20^th century, fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe. This is a story of homelessness and not belonging—the protagonist’s mother often tells him, You’re Jewish, you’ll never fit in here.

The link between these two themes is der Engländer, the Englishman- yes, Ulrike Edschmid again reluctant to name her characters- whom the young German woman and first person narrator meets in London. He’s in the throes of supporting and campaigning for the Angry Brigade defendants, also known as the Stoke Newington Eight, they become lovers, and she joins him in preparing leaflets, protesting outside Brixton Prison, sleeping in different squats. There’s a wonderful energy in this section, which vividly captures the heady atmosphere of spontaneity and protest in the 70s, together with some quieter and more reflective observations on London, its brick terraced houses and the modest flat where the Englishman’s parents live. We learn that his parents both came from humble Jewish origins and are very hard up. Being a bright lad, he won a scholarship to a posh school, went on to university, and so moved beyond his parents’ ambit—though he shares a passion for football, and Spurs in particular, with his father, which lasts a lifetime.

With the trial over, the Englishman joins his lover in Europe. The narrative becomes rather anecdotal, recounting his political activism in movements around housing and the rights of guest workers. Again, what I loved best here is the evocation of the counter-culture, the alternative lifestyles lived by groups in shared houses, who rushed across Europe at the drop of a hat in solidarity with political movements. One of my favourite chapters is the account of the Portuguese revolution in 1974, which overturned 36 years of Salazar’s dictatorship in 18 hours. Portuguese women placed red carnations in gun barrels, while our two lovers set off for Lisbon in their Citroen, their cassette recorder blaring out kein Fado, keine ‘Saudade’, keine traurigen Lieder von unerfüllter Liebe und Sehnsucht nach der Vergangenheit. Wir fahren mit Rockmusik in die Zukunft.( No fados or saudade, no sad songs of unrequited love and longing for the past. It’s rock music that’s travelling with us into the future.)

Their relationship eventually ends, though it’s replaced by a strong friendship, and the Englishman stays on in Europe, teaching and producing plays and opera. I found this section the least successful—too much anecdote, so the narrative dragged rather, and I found his talent for the stage tested the bounds of plausibility. Nevertheless threaded through this is the Englishman’s restlessness, his lack of ease, a sense of having nowhere he felt he could call home. This is compounded by the sad awareness he has nothing in common with his father, apart from football, and that he knows nothing about his father’s family. He saw his paternal grandmother, Leah, a silent, worn down woman, occasionally during his childhood, but the only other link to this family was his father’s dark utterance: They did not look after me.

The novel picks up momentum again with the Englishman in his sixties visiting London on his father’s death. A phone call out of the blue informs him he’s the missing piece in the family puzzle and invites him to a family party where for the first time he meets his father’s family and learns about the eponymous great-grandfather Levy. His intense emotion on discovering this family makes for compelling reading—as does his subsequent questioning of what this, what family actually means, when you haven’t been brought up with these cousins, aunts and uncles, when you haven’t shared a childhood. He’s shown a photo of his grandfather’s wedding, the only photo he’s ever seen of his grandfather, and goes back again and again to the relationships displayed there. At the same time he spends hours at the National Archives at Kew, researching the family’s past, trying to uncover the reasons for his family’s estrangement from the wider clan—and his parents’ grinding poverty.

This novel really spoke to me, and I think will speak to many readers of a certain age whose youth coincided with the protest movements of the 70s. Memories of toes freezing, protesting Berufsverbot along Stuttgart’s Königsstrasse, came flooding back. Not to mention 12 hour journeys by MfGs to the Channel, followed by hovercraft hell on December seas. But apart from the personal nostalgia I enjoyed the excellent account of the Angry Brigade trial (see Will Simpson’s January 21 article in The New European for more on this movement) and the story of the working class Jewish families. But what’s stayed with me most is the Englishman himself—this character whom education took right away from his own parents, and who found it impossible to settle anywhere. One of my favourite images is of him in the bath, a radio each side, listening simultaneously to one game in English and another in German. Then the ending where he’s sitting in White Hart Lane with the one cousin he keeps up with, commiserating about Spurs’ performance: Our team lost..but the game was better than Shakespeare. Thank goodness for the football.