Emotional Arithmetic
By Matt Cohen
Lester & Orpen Dennys
Seven years ago, Canadian author Matt Cohen decided to begin writing about “Jewish themes.” After publishing stories about rural Canada for fifteen years, he knew that this decision would have “important consequences for [him] as a writer,” but even he underestimated the radical reaction his readers and critics would display to his change of focus.
“They thought I had gone completely insane … because of their sense that I had betrayed by Canadianness by writing about being Jewish.” Despite the pleas of the critics (from whom artists are often inclined to take advice), Cohen has continued to write in this vein and has published four books since 1984.
His most recent novel, Emotional Arithmetic, concerns itself with a somewhat fragmented Canadian family, each member of which has a different perception of the war and the holocaust. The story is partially told by Benjamin Winters, a middle-aged, first generation Canadian. Initially, his narrative style seems as disinterested and unbiased as one could reasonably expect from a first person narrator who is also a main character. His confidence and ironic wit quickly earns our trust that he will responsibly take on the important task of being our eyes in his world. Benjamin will surely be the one to endure the family crises, see through the shallowness of others and make all the right value judgments with incisive insights and cutting wit, so that despite his own small problems, he will emerge at the conclusion of the story as a well-balanced, clearheaded and mature third person narrator with whom we can all identify.
Then again, maybe he won’t. Early in the novel, Benjamin recalls for us his frustration at being forced by his father to learn French while staying on the family farm one summer. His father informs him that a Frenchman had cleared the land for the farm, and the Frenchman’s son, who was missing a leg from the war, had built the barn. Benjamin muses:
Because the son of a Frenchman had got
his leg shot off, I, Benjamin Winters,
had to learn to speak French. It was a
familiar kind of equation. For
example: because the Germans had baked
six million Jews, I, Benjamin Winters,
was one day going to have a bar
mitzvah in a Kingston synagogue.
Something about his tone causes one to doubt that his portrayal of people who survived the war and holocaust is wholly accurate and sensitive. Once our suspicion is aroused, we become more and more aware that Benjamin’s analysis of life around him is not a wholly accurate one, just his own.
Fortunately, we do not experience the entire story from Benjamin’s point of view, as the first several chapters would have us believe. Much of the character development in the novel takes place within the thoughts and memories of the individual characters. Melanie, Ben’s mother, had been held as a child at Drancy in Paris, from where Jews were regularly shipped to concentration camps. At Drancy, having lost both of her parents, she was cared for by Jakob Bronski, a Russian translator and poet. After the war, Jakob was held until the present time in a mental hospital in the Soviet Union, while Melanie grew up in New England, married an eminent historian and had a son. Upon Jakob’s release, which gains considerable press, Melanie invites him to live with the family in Canada.
Melanie maintains file upon file of statistics about the number of Jews taken during the holocaust, where they were detained, how they were killed, how many committed suicide and how few survived. Her study is an obsession which overtakes her and leads to manic depression. Cohen periodically punctuates the memories of her internment with numbers and statistics from her files; hence the title of the book, Emotional Arithmetic. Melanie receives no emotional help from her promiscuous husband Doctor David Winters, who prefers to philander rather than face anything which might resemble a problem. While Melanie’s memories are mostly concerned with her childhood during the war, her son Ben frequently recalls bitter events during the course of his parent’s turbulent marriage and frequent break-ups. The two streams of memory piece together the puzzle of Melanie’s present mental illness.
Throughout the novel our sympathies are unquestionably with the mentally ailing Melanie, while her husband David continually escapes the troubled world of his family to seek solace in not-so-illicit affairs. Near the conclusion of the novel, in an argument with Melanie, Ben defends his father, saying, “Maybe he only anted to marry you, not six million dead Jews.” Thus son follows father into a world in which marriage is only for better, and in which to escape the weakness of one’s loved ones, one need only flee to another “universe of soft skin, warm arms.” Our narrator has lost his vision and refuses to put on his glasses. The book concludes with Melanie reaching out to her grandson, perhaps homing against hope that the cycle of cynical indifference can be broken.
Matt Cohen communicates various aspects of his characters’ “life stories” at once in a manner which attempts to imitate the inimitable ways of the mind and memory. Important details are withheld and then spring upon us suddenly out of the past. The past thus becomes the present, both in the respect that the memory takes us back to the event when the character experienced it, and in the respect that the experience and especially the suffering then becomes part of the character in the present as we perceive her or him.
Concerning the question of his own Jewish identity, Cohen has said “I feel I have to understand — although I know I won’t — what happened to the Jewish-European dream. If we cannot understand what in us has been destroyed then we can’t understand how other peoples suffer in similar circumstances.” Emotional Arithmetic represents both sides of this observation. The novel concerns itself both with those who suffer and with those who do not try hard enough to understand.
