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Peter Apap Bologna, Lost Generations, 2012. Progress Press, 477 pp.
I had lost touch with my cousin Peter Apap Bologna for 50 years, as he and I wandered around different countries and continents, until, early last year, I was very touched to see him at my mother’s funeral on a bitterly cold day in Sliema.
We caught up with those 50 years in a few hours, and, among other things, Peter told me he was writing a historical novel covering, roughly, the second quarter of the last century.
To my knowledge, Peter, now into his 70s, had not tried his hand at creative writing before. So when the book, Lost Generations, appeared at the end of last year, I wondered what it would be like. A copy of it reached me in Australia last April.
I was amazed to find myself accompanying Peter’s wealthy, unattached, young, Anglo-Irish narrator, Harry Sterne, around Paris, and, subsequently, also Berlin, and London, and beyond, from the 1920s, hobnobbing with the bohemian and cosmopolitan literary and artistic set on the Left Bank and in Montparnasse. These included James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, Harold and Vita Nicolson, the Woolfs and more.
This sombrely brilliant book delves into the personal experience of confronting the Europe-wide horror
What immediately captivated me was the seemingly artless casualness both of the language and of the narrative. The narrating Larry tells his story in English in so natural a manner as to seem invisible. He is perfectly transparent, and perfectly matching the upper-crust, social set in which he circulates.
Likewise, the succession of events or incidents, trivial or momentous, unfolds with the seeming matter-of-factness of everyday life. And yet, virtually all the characters, with the exception of Larry himself and his immediate circle, are drawn from the historical record, down to minute incidents and verbatim remarks. Thus, the 1933 Berlin Reichstag fire that gave Hitler the excuse to seize dictatorial powers, enters the narrative almost incidentally. Peter is really a consummate storyteller.
The affluent celebrity tittle-tattle of the 1920s, with its seductive glitzy glamour, is set against the misery of post-war inflation-stricken Germany.
This Germany is haunted by sinister trends that grow more threatening in the 1930s, and erupt devastatingly with the invasion of Poland in 1939.
The narrative, for all its seemingly random host of characters and its seeming lack of direction, leads inexorably towards Larry’s increasingly anguished awareness of the rising tide of anti-Semitism, most ominously in Germany, but also in France.
This happens just as he increasingly values the Jewish side of his own identity, which his family had previously suppressed. Larry finds himself drawn into journalism, reporting on German politics, focusing on the rise of Hitler, seen at close quarters.
His engagement becomes increasingly conspiratorial, as Nazi Germany confronts rival powers and heads towards total war and the final solution of the ‘Jewish problem’.
Eventually he goes undercover, helping to organise the release of Jews from the extermination camps through the philanthropic action of highly-placed people in neutral countries, both Jews and non-Jews.
Larry slips in and out of several assignments, including working for the precursor of the CIA and as unofficial liaison officer between President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. He thus comes to witness at first hand most of the moves at the highest level that see Europe stagger from the fall of France to the eventual defeat of Germany.
An interesting aspect of the book is Larry’s unostentatious, gay sexuality. But what might at first sight appear to be a distraction from grimmer themes, may in fact be instrumental to the narration of those themes, as the narrator is not tied to a family of his own, being an only son and having lost his parents at the age of 18.
He is thus more mobile and free to engage in a variety of relationships with varying degrees of intimacy, and in different countries.
The Holocaust may be for some readers all too familiar territory. Do we need to be reminded? I would suggest two answers to this question.
One is that each new generation needs to engage anew with the hideous reality of the systematic Jewish genocide and the all too recurrent genocidal tendencies that still afflict our world.
The other is that each new perspective on that Nazi-inspired horror brings to light new insights into the feelings and responsibilities of those involved.
Two fact-based novels from distant Australia, Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark and Anna Funder’s All That I Am, have shed new light on the resistance to Hitler.
Now, from Malta, Peter’s sombrely brilliant book delves into the personal experience of confronting the Europe-wide horror.
It deserves to be read far beyond the Maltese Islands.