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Vampires of Disasters: A Commentary on the American Love for History in Lev Raphael’s The Tanteh
Is not History stealing the lives of those spoken about in its pages? Lev Raphael’s The Tanteh (2006) is a short story telling of a boy’s fascination on her great maternal grandmother’s stories about the Holocaust, which led into an unwitting invasion of her life’s privacy and a gnawing anger that led to her death in a foreign land away from her family. At the heart of the story is a young narrator, whose love for his Tanteh inspired him to tell about her story as a class project, which found publication in the school’s yearbook, and resulted to a conflict between him and his Tanteh, who felt strongly offended by the disclosure. Intertwined in the story is Raphael’s commentary on the cultural differences between the Jewish and the American view of history and life’s story. Raphael achieves this effect through his use of character, symbolism, and setting.
In the first element, character, the Tanteh reflects the Jewish perspective on history as a personal story, and its horrors exclusively for the person who went through those experiences. As a Jew, she lost her religion in the cruelties of the Holocaust. “’Another month,’ she told us once at dinner. ‘The Allies would have found nothing. No one. Cholera,’ she explained. ‘Dysentery.’” (20) Her disbelief stemmed from the sight of a Jewish God who let millions of Jews die in the War. “’They prayed,’ the Tanteh called after Mother, ‘And still they died.’” (16) She considered her Holocaust experience as a personal history that must stay within the confines of her family, not for the public to read. Moreover, telling people outside the family, to her was tantamount to a betrayal of confidence, an invasion of privacy. The Tanteh told the narrator in disbelief when they were alone in his room, “’How could you? Why do you want to hurt me? That’s love?’” (19) The only postcard she sent to him continued to reflect her wounds: “’You had no right to steal from me,’ it said. ‘My life is not an assignment.’” (21)
In addition to the character element, the second element that highlighted the difference between the Jewish and the American cultures is symbolism. It helped deepen the cultural difference as embodied in the character sketch report – “a character sketch of the most unusual person we knew” (18) – the crux that moved the story into its tragic end. “I remembered overhearing her on the phone one time, years before. ‘Americans are like vampires,’ she said She went on in English: ’They feed on everyone’s disasters because it makes them feel happy and safe. Pauvres petits.’” (21) The youthful impetuosity and adoration of the Tanteh led him to breach the culture-imposed privacy that his American culture could not understand, or even realize existent. “And I heard all the times she had marveled at me: ‘You’re so American.’” (21, 18) Such impetuosity of his culture evidenced in his passion to please his teacher, not realizing the cultural discordance it will create. “The Tanteh was mine, someone to write about, rich with possibility. I was important; I imagined writing a book someday that would gleam down from her shelves. I brought the years of reports, skits, and sketches and put all my writing in a box under my bed. I had history.” (18) His sketch on the character of his Tanteh reflected what she referred to as a feeding on “everyone’s disasters,” in this case her and the dead Jews’ disasters.
The third element that pushed Raphael’s commentary on the Jewish and the American cultures is the setting. From the Tanteh’s stories, Raphael illustrated the horrors of the Holocaust for the readers, evidenced in the reactions of those listening to her: “Those rare times the Tanteh talked about the War, we all shifted nervously at the table, unable to change the subject or know how to respond, captured like a circle of unwilling believers in the occult, whose medium has sunk into a trance” (15). She continued: “’The day we were liberated, the Elbe was flowing with bodies.’” (15) Another instance in the story when Raphael illustrated the horrors of History is in the narrator’s flight to the theater, which has its own horror story to tell. “I fled the room, grabbing my jacket from the bench in the foyer. I missed dinner that night, staying out to see a James Bond movie twice, hiding in the shadows and the light of the balconied, gold-ceilinged Depression-era theater.” (19) Finally, the distant, unobservable European locations where the Tanteh fled with enormous hurt and anger allowed the readers to experience the pang of isolation and distance from family and loved ones, as she returned to the place of history where the roots of her hurt originated. “She wrote my parents from Brussels; then Paris, Marseilles, Madrid, Rome, Venice, Vienna. The postcards, even the stamps, dazzled me. She was triumphantly the woman of Europe, distant and immense, but colored by my shame now” (20)
Is not History stealing the lives of those spoken about in its pages? Raphael’s The Tanteh successfully presented his commentary on the differences between the Jewish and the American culture and perspective of History through an impressive use of characterization of the Tanteh, the symbolism of the rift of two cultures at the crux of a senior high’s biographical sketch project, and settings that brought back History in rich pictures with its losses, pain, and tragedy. Raphael has driven his commentary home to the heart of the readers: History steals the lives, particularly of those whose lives they refused to be disclosed in the printed pages for others to read. History of lives deserves the protection of privacy.
Works Cited
Raphael, Lev. “The Tanteh.” Secret Anniversaries of the Heart. Wellfleet, MA: Leapfrog Press, 2006. 15-21. Print.
