“This is a book that repels you.” So begins the quotation printed inside the cover of the English paperback edition of Dr. Josef’s Little Beauty. Indeed, award-winning Polish novelist Zyta Rudzka constantly and casually shows us how time ravages her characters, residents of a retirement home near Warsaw over the course of a long, hot summer. “Skulls thinly coated in sparse, dry hair,” she writes. “Faces like several pieces of skin sewn together. Cheeks marked with bruises, wounds and suppurating scratches. Tissue-paper eyelids. Bellies swollen by disease. Furrowed hands. Gnarled fingers. Ruffled thighs.… Growths. Lumps. Watery tumors.” No matter how much these characters assert their humanity, the author keeps reminding us to see the horrific cages of their bodies.
But for a book that makes such a spectacle of the body, very little comes to pass. The residents talk about their pasts, lament their presents, and treat each other with tenderness — but even more often with cruelty. At its best, the book has a subtle, Woolfian sense of narrative movement. Temperatures rise, plants grow, bodies change: “The residents were moving away from themselves.” Sometimes, though, the book’s formal choices are harder to interpret. A passage in which the residents recall their favorite kinds of cherries — forbidden in the retirement home because of their hazardous pits — appears twice, seventy pages apart. The passage seems to fit in both places; maybe the author is showing us how the residents repeat themselves.
In fact, these characters do talk a lot, though rarely because they’ve been asked. Those who say nothing are regarded with suspicion; the only thing other residents ask them is “Why don’t you ever talk?” Well, it isn’t easy to get a word in edgewise. The residents have to carve out space for themselves amid all the impromptu speeches; they talk past one another and try to bully each other into shutting up. But the effort is worth it, because they absolutely need to be heard. They were somebodies once. They want the record to show that their spouses were abusive or indifferent or that their kids are cold.
When they were children, they all suffered the privations of war. Helena and Leokadia are Jewish sisters who pretended to be twins in Auschwitz in order to survive. Josef Mengele performed “experiments” on Helena’s arm, which eventually withered and had to be amputated. But what Helena wants to talk about now is how beautiful she used to be — how the doctor loved her long, wavy, auburn hair and perfect skin. She proudly refers to herself as “Miss Auschwitz.”
To Rudzka, remembering is always a kind of boasting, even for characters who are less outwardly vain than Helena. And what they are boasting about is having a past — however awful — where they can go to escape the hell of the present. Rudzka’s characters are trapped, and they are destined to torture each other for the rest of their lives. Some show signs of dementia, but they trace the landscapes of their pasts with great specificity.
Leokadia, a perpetual optimist, advises her sister not to dwell on the past, but to focus on the natural world, the things growing all around them. While she doesn’t prattle on as much as the other residents, Leokadia herself isn’t immune to the lure of the old days. She remembers that toward the end of his life, her husband, slipping into senility, put on his camp uniform and ordered her to stand at attention, barked out commands, and abused her mentally and physically. A captive as a child, he now relished playing the role of the torturer, and Leokadia willingly submitted to his charade. “She understood him, he wasn’t longing for the camp, he was missing childhood, even one spent amid lice, nits, and on all fours.”
Rudzka teaches us that it isn’t such a paradox that her characters dwell on their brutal pasts in order to escape their miserable old age. They consider the retirement home a kind of camp, one with cruel captors, the constant presence of death, and food that chokes more than it sustains. Rudzka’s characters, however repulsive they are to readers and one another, are wise enough to know that you can’t let go of the past or even fully understand it. The best you can do is relive it with as much dignity as possible.
Jason K. Friedman is the author of the story collection Fire Year, which won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and the Anne and Robert Cowan Writers Award. His article on the Solomon Cohen family, published in Moment magazine, won an American Jewish Press Association Award. He lives in San Francisco, with his husband, filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman.
