After reading Axiomatic, Australian cultural historian Maria Tumarkin’s first book to be published in the U.S., I thought of how her blended method of autobiography, criticism, and reportage both echoes and diverges from fellow genre bender Emmanuel Carrère. Like Carrère, Tumarkin looks for the truth beneath society’s layers of myth, bourgeoisie consensus, and media sensationalism. She’s also mindful of the writer’s ethical and moral responsibility for the people one writes about. But while Carrère weighs these ethics against the desire for a good story, reflected in his recent essay collection 97,196 Words: Essays, Maria Tumarkin isn’t interested in crafting a story at all.
So what is Axiomatic? It’s not easy to pin down. The five essays cover teen suicide, miscarriages of justice, legal aid workers, Holocaust survivors, and challenges faced by immigrants in Australia, where Soviet-born Tumarkin has lived since the age of fifteen. While reporting on these subjects, Tumarkin unpacks the phantom baggage of her immigrant life, surviving anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe while having a relatively un-traumatic childhood. This perspective informs the relationships she develops with her interlocutors, whose points of view are often misunderstood or ignored by Australian society.
While Carrère often writes about men who commit grotesque behavior, seizing the opportunity to gaze into the abyss beneath our shared humanity, Tumarkin writes about women who have something to say — or a way of being — that she believes is worth fighting for. Describing Holocaust survivor Vera Wasowski’s memoir, Tumarkin celebrates Wasowski’s “disdain for euphemisms” and “refusal to make herself into something (a role model, a sage) she is not.” After Wasowski upsets the organizers of the somber March of the Living in Poland by declaring her love for her home country’s food and landscape, Tumarkin takes her side. Once they meet, she writes, it becomes clear that she’s found her book’s central “heroine.”
Tumarkin’s advocacy on behalf of her heroines, as well as her self-examination, are illuminated by frequent and wide-ranging literary references, from Saint-Exupery and Knausgaard to Szymborska and Milosz, which gradually build toward a statement about writing: Don’t write because you want to, write only if you have to. Tumarkin cites Dina Rubina, another writer who emigrated from the Soviet Union shortly before its dissolution: “if you decided to write something, you had to be prepared to wage a war for your reader. You had to be prepared not to hold back.”
The book’s opening piece, “Time Heals All Wounds” — an axiom full of cracks even before Tumarkin is finished with it — focuses on Frances, a young woman who lost her sister to suicide when they were in high school. Frances is an indelible point of entry to Axiomatic, having attracted the attention of her writing teachers for her incisive work in the aftermath of her sister’s death. Tumarkin shares excerpts of the work, which bolsters her argument that children are resilient and capable of processing trauma, but that they need to talk about it and share their feelings — they shouldn’t just be forced to move on after the death of a friend, family member, or peer, as many schools encourage them to do. When a teacher defies the silence, encouraging a student whose sister died to stand in front of the class and speak about his feelings, it’s the opposite of what happened in Heathers. Rather than seize on the drama, the students continue talking and working through their experiences through the rest of the year.
Tumarkin’s reportage on high schools develops into a portrait of children coping through a disaster age. After Japan’s 2011 earthquake, “School gyms became relief distribution points. School walls were message boards. Many students seized control of apportioning food and medicine, and this granted them purpose, and structure.” After a school in north Queensland was nearly destroyed by a cyclone, the principal worked to quickly re-open the school to “make things as normal as possible for [the students],” perhaps recognizing what Tumarkin infers: “A local school can hold things together … As long as it was there, intact, the rest of a community could be reimagined around it.”
In contrast, this passage reminded me of my last visit to New Orleans in spring 2018, when I passed a shuttered school in the gentrified Marigny. Out front, an ivy-encrusted letter board read “Welcome back students” and announced it would reopen in September 2005. According to a recent Tulane study, segregation in the city’s public school system has increased in the years after Katrina, and Naomi Klein has written extensively about the devastating impact of charter schools on equal distribution of resources. It would be interesting to see Tumarkin’s method applied to American school systems, where governments have committed catastrophic failures of imagination when it comes to meeting the needs of all children.
In her recent speech on climate change at the UN, Greta Thunberg lashed out at adults for endangering her generation. Tumarkin’s emphasis on children’s resilience and resourcefulness echoes in her critique of Anglo societies’ obsession with protecting children from danger, when she notes that the greatest danger they face is generally from adults. In “Those who forget the past are condemned to re—,” she interviews a woman who was convicted for kidnapping her grandson. While her reticence before the judge and prosecutor was evidence of her guilt, the rest of the story came out later: she was protecting her grandson from an abusive stepfather. The woman’s foreignness and her own past trauma were used against her. She was from Eastern Europe and survived the Holocaust in Poland as a hidden child; she didn’t fit in, was misunderstood except in terms of the horror she’d lived through, which explained why she would hide her own son in a “dungeon” in her house.
“‘The reason I speak with such disgust about the so-called justice system here,’ the woman says to me, ‘is not because I am some poor victimised traumatised child survivor and this is just another layer. No, this has nothing to do with my old trauma.”
Tumarkin goes on, employing her method of translating that which is impossible for her subjects to say: “Can you see what she is saying? — do not use the horrors of my childhood to cancel out what happened to my grandson, do not use my trauma to cover up the vast compounded injustice that smashed my family … Don’t use my tragedy to mask your moral failure.”
Despite its many strong, uncompromising and forcefully delivered opinions, the book does not shrink or mold into a shape you easily explain — or explain away. Its inner workings are complex. It’s guided by a secret system that only the author knows about. In that way it’s the best kind of book for writers, one that will continue calling you back with invitations to rethink what you think you know, listen to others, and find voices worth amplifying.
[Published by Transit Books on September 3, 2019. 224 pages, $16.95 paperback]