Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap

Austrian fiction

Original title – Engel Des Vergessens

Translator – Tess Lewis

Source – Personal Copy

I start this Woman in Translation month off with a book from the Austrian writer Maja Haderlap. She was born into a family from a part of Austria where hr family where historically Slovenian and they were the only people to Stand up to Hitler in Austria this book is a family history of one such family living there and how this standing up to the nazis has effect the ethnic Slovenians that live there. It was a prize-winning book when it came out in German winning one of the biggest book prizes the Ingeborg Bachmann prize. Her own grandmother was in a concentration camp and her father was tortured by Nazis and was in the Partisans during the WAR. he hated the way even post war he and other ethnic Slovenians had been treated post-war.

GRANDMOTHER has her own understanding with nature She believes the fields and forests must be propitiated, not adorned with verses. A poem means nothing to nature, she says, we must always be humble before it. In the attic, she has gathered willow branches that she pulls from the palm bundles blessed in church every year on Palm Sunday. She makes small crosses from the willow branches, crosses we bring out to the fields in spring and stick in the ploughed earth to keep the potato fields fertile and the wheat plentiful. When a thunderstorm is brewing, she places pieces of willow on glowing embers and carries them through the house in a cast iron skillet. The bitter smoke is meant to clear the air and appease the atmospheric forces. You must carry your belief in God in your heart, Grandmother says, it’s not enough to put it on show in church. You can’t rely on the Church, according to her, the Church cannot be trusted.

I loved her grandmother she just jumped of the page

It is hard not to see this as part of this novel as auto fiction as the little girl the main narrator of the book who is growing up in post-war 60s and 70S Austria is about the age the writer would have been at the time. The grandmother and Mother are linked back to the dark day of the war years and the suffering these pheasant Slovene farmers had suffered for standing up and still do it shows how the shadow of the dark past is still there in everyday life . The way the Austrians talk around the ETHNIC Slovenians. But it is also a book about growing up on a farm and the connection a young girl can have to the creatures around her from a cow she loved that lost a calf to the horses. Her father is a man we see smoking but a man that has been broken by what happened to him in the war. The past and the inner conflicts that cause within the family the grandmother’s hours during the war Father’s sorrow and grief add to that a  mother who is often missing in the little girl’s eyes. This is a young girl; trying to make her way and seeing how her family had suffered and still are the way others talk about them as a group this is a picturesque forest and farming area but behind the natural beauty, there is some real evil still there.

When I arrive, Father is usually sitting at the end of the kitchen table with a bottle of beer in his hand. And presides near the stove on which she keeps her children’s dinner warm. As soon as I enter the kitchen, I start to examine her face and hands for scars. She was able to hide behind the stove, And says, but her little brother, who was in her arms, was shot.
On the front of the house is a marble plaque with the names of the children, the parents, and grandparents, engraved and gold-plated.
Father says he could never live in a house where he’d be reminded of the dead every day, several times a day, every time he went in or out.

I was so touched by her father and the ghost of the past here

This is one of those books that walk the line between Memoir and fiction yes it is easy to see them as her family but they are any family in those villages in the Carthinia region of Austria that were Ethnically Slovenian. This is also a universal story from the Marsh Arabs in Iraq to the Kosovian Albanians. I was reminded so much of a good friend I had working in a factory in Germany he was an Albanian from Kosovo who at the time was part of Serbias and like the girl they were classed as some sort of second-class citizens because of who they were and this is the same here the scar of the war is running deep in the locals and what they had done in standing up and the way they as a people are discussed is still the same as in the war the shadow of those acts are still there even twenty years after.I can see why this win a couple of prizes it shines a torch on a subject that few people other than those growing hip there and maybe those in Austria know about. The child narrator mixes growing up under this shadow but also the beauty of the land and the animals around them on the farm. Heidi mixed with a classic slice of war history. Have you read this book or any books on a similar theme ?