Freud's Sister [Paperback]

The award-winning international sensation that poses the question: Was Sigmund Freud responsible for the death of his sister in a Nazi concentration camp?

The boy in her memories who strokes her with the apple, who whispers to her the fairy tale, who gives her the knife, is her brother Sigmund.

Vienna, 1938: With the Nazis closing in, Sigmund Freud is granted an exit visa and allowed to list the names of people to take with him. He lists his doctor and maids, his dog, and his wife's sister, but not any of his own sisters. The four Freud sisters are shuttled to the Terezín concentration camp, while their brother lives out his last days in London.

Based on a true story, this searing novel gives haunting voice to Freud's sister Adolfina--"the sweetest and best of my sisters"--a gifted, sensitive woman who was spurned by her mother and never married. A witness to her brother's genius and to the cultural and artistic splendor of Vienna in the early twentieth century, she aspired to a life few women of her time could attain.

From Adolfina's closeness with her brother in childhood, to her love for a fellow student, to her time with Gustav Klimt's sister in a Vienna psychiatric hospital, to her dream of one day living in Venice and having a family, Freud's Sister imagines with astonishing insight and deep feeling the life of a woman lost to the shadows of history.

Adolfina Freud was the youngest of Sigmund Freud's sisters. Sickly and shunned by an unloving mother who keeps telling her she should never have been born, Adolfina develops a strong bond with her eldest brother whom she adores. He shelters her and loves her as they grow into adulthood. Sigmund marries and becomes successful. His work into mental illness gains acclaim and his career reaches loftier heights, bringing much distance in his relationship with his sister. Adolfina's life, on the other hand, begins a downward spiral that plummets her into madness and depression, and ultimately institutionalized for a period.

As World War II heats up, and the Nazi's seize control of Austria, Sigmund, because of his career, has the paperwork necessary to flee the country with members of his family. He takes his wife and even his dog, but does nothing for his sisters. Sigmund ignores their please to get them out of the country and ultimately results in their capture and execution in the gas chambers at Terezin.

This is a very complex, and emotionally moving book, which left me feeling a bit unsettled as to Sigmund's behavior with Adolfina, at times treating her experimentally and coldly like a test subject and at other times, treating her like a beloved sister. I had trouble understanding why Sigmund would deliberately leave his family in Austria under threat of the Nazis when he had the means to save them, but no one but Sigmund Freud will ever be able to answer that question. It is for these very reasons that this novel is so captivating, so haunting, so fascinating, and so richly deserves the prestigious international award and all the attention it has garnered.

This is an excellent book for smart guys: who, like me, like big ideas, and who admire guys who express big ideas in books and art, like Freud, Klimt, Kafka. This book is about people with those names.

But not about those whom we exclusively associate with those names, while ignoring that there must have been others.

It's about those with the names Adolfina Freud, Klara Klimt, Ottla Kafka, sisters of the famous smart guys. Also appearing briefly are Mia Krauss the grandmother of famous writer Karl, and Johanna Broch the mother of famous author Hermann. The women, except for Klara who has died by then, meet in a Nazi prison, consigned to die in gas chambers. And forgotten since.

Not so for the famous men: they if still living, like Sigmund, had more worldly regard and were provided with the means for escape, and a better afterlife.

This book is about what the world, with us smart guys following along, usually disregards, consigns to the margins, ignores, forgets, now as then.

Adolfina, the narrator, and her friend Klara, despite spirited attempts to engage the world on their own, came to recognize that they're not much wanted or respected. Deemed depressives, they volunteered to spend years in a madhouse. Among the authoritative sane, only the director of the madhouse, named Dr. Goethe, a relative of the famous one, tried to understand them respectfully, on their own terms, but his path seemed eccentric, antiquated, too romantic, a path not taken by the modern age which increasingly accorded empathy and imagination much less sanction than scientific detachment and rigor -- the smart, dry, perhaps delusional, rationality championed by Sigmund and so many others.

But Sigmund was the family's champion, always supported, and a champion for the modern age, while Adolfina's needs and desires were usually annoyances, distractions, embarrassments, and worse. She didn't seem smart. Her mother often disparaged her. Others saw her as silly and ridiculous. Klara's situation was much the same, but she made herself useful at times by looking after brother Gustav's many illegitimate children, about whom Herr Klimt didn't care much as he was a wild and crazy guy, a loose cannon, but one well-regarded and rewarded by society: he produced very marketable, very profitable goods. Something mere madness with its excess of empathy, nurturing, love, vulnerability, sorrow . . . usually doesn't produce.

We still live where reason must be rationality -- the ordering of life with math and physical science as exclusive model, metaphor and method, with quantifiable, marketable results much preferred. Where that which is not rational is unreason, and is consigned at best to entertainment -- rationality's silly little timeout. And if not entertaining, then to be discarded.

But this novel offers us a journey toward the other side, toward the reason of the arational, the unquantifiable, disrespected, useless, discarded Other, almost unbearably sad sometimes to take us to depths of feeling out of mind's grip, past rationality's control, maybe only slumming there, but back up . . . The novel's Adolfina experienced and perhaps came to understand the inner and outer life, the unconscious and madness and all that, more poetically, more tragically and therefore more spiritually, what Germans call geistlich, than her famous brother. Do we have a use for that? Toward the end, she presents us with an incipient Neo-Platonism akin to that of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" . . .

This book is partly a poet's, a vulnerable dreamer's argument against critics who always seem more knowing, more mature, more rational, smarter. The author, like Flaubert on Madame Bovary, might be inclined to say, "Freud's sister, that's me!" And his achievement is that this work made me want, see, accept this to be so for me also. Great books seductively force us to recognize characteristics within ourselves, internalize characters, and so make us more.

Disclaimer: I received a copy via Netgalley.

It is perhaps a little known fact that Freud's sisters died in the Holocaust while the man himself and other members of family were able to escape. That is pretty much all I know about the Freud family. Regardless, it made me interested enough to request a copy of Freud's Sister by Goce Smilevski.

I'm not entirely what I was expecting but the book wasn't quite it. And that's not a bad thing. It is the books that surprise us, but that don't disappoint us, that are gems.

Smilevski's novel is told from the viewpoint of Adolfina and starts with the days prior to the Second World War before moving into the War and then into the past, tracing Adolfina's life . Mr. Smilevski writes in his author's note that "The silence around Adolfina is so loud that I could write this novel in no other way than in her voice". I find myself thinking about that line as I think about this book and struggle to do the book justice with this review.

For while the book wasn't quite what I thought it would be and while it is quiet in terms of action, it is a beautiful, stunning, and powerful book. What Smilevski has done is taken a quiet life and made a quiet, yet engrossing story. While she is acquainted with famous men - her brother and Klimet - Adolfina's story is her story. It is a story of a life that does shake the universe, a life that doesn't call down the heavens, and a life that doesn't seem to change anyone who history declares matter. If you take the action of the book alone, and just the action, then you have a book where what is of most interest is the discussion of philosophy and psychology. That's it - well, that and a desire to smack Freud upside the head (as if the whole women wanting a penis thing didn't make you want to do that already).

To look at the book in terms of action and solely in terms of physical action does the book and Smilevski a huge disservice. It is the language of this novel that makes the novel, that shows that there her brother, and her lover that makes the book. The language is like a melancholy poetry that yet, somehow, contains a kernel of hope in it.

Adolfina's view of life is different, and perhaps more real, than her brother's, a brother who the reader seems to only know though his coming and going, a figure that seems as distance and as dream made as the trees that other residents of the Nest see.

Ah the Nest, some of the best writing in this book deals with the Nest, a madhouse that is center in two ways to Adolfina and her friend Klara, sister of the famous Klimet, who campaigns for woman's rights as well as more encompassing view of love and family than that expressed by Freud and Klara's own family.

In many ways, this juxtaposition of two sisters of two famous men seems to be part of the point, the theme of the novel. It is like Woolf's Shakespeare's sister. What could have these women done if they had been offered more support in terms of parents and siblings as well as society? Part of the tragedy is how alone some of the characters are, as they are separated in various ways from both family and the society . It is hard, impossible really, to not think of Woolf's A Room of One's Own when reading this book. The sense of waste and undervalue simply because of the sex of the characters, because of the gender of the characters is major aspect of the novel.

While the book may not have been what I thought I wanted, it was exactly what I needed to read. The quietness of life is an aspect that gets overlooked in much fiction, undoubtedly because it is difficult to write an interesting book about it. There is a reason why stories end with the happily ever after - it's boring to read about it. What Mr. Smilevski has done is take what many authors would only show as boring and make it magical.

Brilliant!