Cheryl Pearl Sucher - Writing to survive

By MARGIE THOMSON

New York novelist wrote her way out of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust.

Cheryl Pearl Sucher's parents were Auschwitz survivors and their ghost-laden stories haunted her childhood.

It wasn't until she wrote her first novel, The Rescue of Memory (Scribner, 1997), a fictionalised account of their wartime and post-war experiences in Poland and her own tortured growing-up following their emigration to New York, that she felt she had come to terms with her experience and was able to begin living life on her own terms. But it's not a subject area she wants to dwell on as a writer.

"So many writers have this little patch of land that they run the lawnmower over all the time," says Sucher, who has won several awards in the United States for her short stories. "I don't want to be characterised as a Holocaust writer but I needed to write this book. I had been contracted by the publisher to write a completely different sort of book, but when my father died I realised I needed to excavate this material. I think the publisher was rather surprised when The Rescue of Memory arrived instead of that other book."

Sucher's father, in particular, felt the need to talk to his young daughter about his experiences, constantly replaying the horrors he had endured. For her, the engraving on her own mind of the horrific stories and imagery became a kind of plague from which she could never escape.

Her own reality was constantly denied in the face of her parents' problems, which always outweighed anyone else's.

"It was like, you have food, you have toys, you have clothes. What's the matter with you?" Sucher says. Yet her father's incessant stories, and his exhortations that as a Jew she could trust nobody, haunted her and trapped her in a sense of difference that kept her apart from the easy social lives of other children. Fat, awkward, chronically anxious, Sucher became bulimic, her early adulthood punctuated by periods of anxiety and paralysis.

It was only as she approached her mid-30s, and with her father dying, that she at last began to learn to negotiate the world on her own terms. Her father's death was, she says, "a clarion call to my own healing."

One of the stories her father told her so often that she could mouth the words silently as he spoke, brought added meaning to her life following his death. It was the story of his journey in a cramped cattle car from the Lodz ghetto to Auschwitz in 1944. Huddled with his mother, his sister Pearl, her husband and their three little children, they travelled for days and nights without food or sanitary facilities.

"My father would seize up as he relived the moment when the doors to the car were violently pried open and he was assaulted by the glaring spotlight and the sadistic SS officers with their rabid guard dogs," Sucher says. "As the new arrivals were shoved into lines, he was recognised by a childhood friend."

That friend called out to Sucher's father, gesturing to the elegant Dr Mengele, who was ordering the weak, elderly, sick and young to one side, then to the huge chimney of the crematorium. Sucher's father understood and begged his sister to save herself by giving her children to their mother.

His sister wept, realising the decision she had to make, but she refused to abandon her children, and so Sucher's father had to watch as his mother, sister and the children walked hand in hand to the gas chamber.

It was about four years ago, after her father died, that Sucher found out the truth.

Her only aunt told her that, before the war, her father was married. It was his first wife and their young children whom he had watched walk to the crematorium.

The shock of learning she had siblings who had died and that her father, so voluble, had his secrets helped Sucher towards understanding the role she had played in his life. He had always, she says, "held her too tight," metaphorically and literally.

Sucher has been living in Dunedin with her Kiwi husband for a year and a half, and says he is like a breath of fresh air, acting against the suffocation of her dark heritage. But, while he is non-Jewish, she continues to find solace in the humanistic aspects of her religion, and in the music, stories and humour of her Yiddish background.

She is an extremely cheerful and articulate speaker, her quick intelligence and even faster speech conforming absolutely to the stereotype of the New York Jew.

There's no doubting her bounce-back ability. After all, she says, "I come from the people who survived the greatest tragedy of the millennium."

Sucher talks at 4 pm today at the Going West literary festival in the Titirangi War Memorial Hall, where she will talk with novelist Barbara Anderson in a session called "Remembrance of things."

Among other sessions today are this year's Montana book award winner Owen Marshall, in conversation with poet Kevin Ireland at 1 pm; and readings from Catherine Chidgey, Graham Lay, Stephanie Johnson, Kevin Ireland and Tessa Duder at 1.45 pm.

The full programme on Sunday includes poetry in the morning; a session called "Mean streets and gravel roads" in which novelists Chad Taylor and Stephen Sinclair chat with broadcaster John Campbell at 11.15 am; poet J. C Sturm (also known as J. K Baxter's widow) takes the stage at 12.15; and Janet Frame's biographer Michael King can be heard at 4.15 pm. It's not too late to turn up: tickets are available at the door.