The quintessential Anne
View(s):Anne Ranasinghe is perhaps the best-known internationally of our writers of poetry and of prose. Even for those who are familiar with her work, this collection which brings together in a single volume her autobiographical writing, short stories and 32 Holocaust Poems, offers a rare insight into the quintessential Anne.
I first met Anne as the happy, charming, saree-clad English (as I mistakenly assumed) wife of Prof. D.A. Ranasinghe, about 60 years ago, when we both brought our daughters to the kindergarten of a Colombo school. We became friends. I never dreamed that she was one who had plumbed such depths of human grief and pain.
Many years later, Anne informed me one day that she intended enrolling at the Colombo Polytechnic in Wellawatte for a course in journalism. That was the turning point, I think. I hope Anne will pardon me if I am wrong, but it seemed to me it was the realisation she had a gift with words (even in a language that was not her mother-tongue), that eventually unlocked the restraining doors which, for years, had prevented her from looking into her past or of giving expression to the feelings that lay dormant within her. It’s possible that she had lifted the veil for her husband and maybe her intimate friends, but for such as I, the revelation of who she was and what she and her people had endured, came as a complete shock. I have most of the books she authored, yet as I hold this latest volume in my hands I am thankful that Anne thought of putting it together the way she has.
The excellent Introduction by Dr. Lakshmi de Silva serves a useful purpose.
We glean information of Anne’s early years in Ceylon and her passion for reading everything she could lay hands on, to give her the `feel’ of her adopted country.
Not having read it before, I found the excerpts given of what had been first published in 1990 by Nagasaki University in the form of an interview with Le Roy Robinson, fascinating. Titled “An Interview with Anne Ranasinghe on Aspects of Culture in Sri Lanka”, it shows us how thoroughly Anne follows up any subject that interests her.
Part 1 of the book bears the heading, “Our beginnings never know our ends’- a very apt quotation from T .S. Eliot. Anne’s first impressions of the island are recorded, as is her immediate response to its scenic beauty. Anne was keenly interested in Buddhism which was her husband’s religion and all the children (three children by his first marriage and four of their own), studied Buddhism in school. Anne’s natural desire to give her own children grounding in her own faith of Judaism was realised when the Israeli Legation opened in Colombo in the early 1960s. “For me, it was of course fantastic to re-establish contact with what were after all my own people,” she writes, “and with my own heritage.” The children too, Anne says, “Enjoyed the warmth of this new Jewish `community’ and loved participating in the celebration of the various festivals. The closure of the Israeli legation in 1967 by Mrs. Bandaranaike was a matter of deep personal regret to Anne who had moved closely with the Charge d’Affairs, Itzhak Navon, and his wife Mira.
When they left, Anne wrote a moving poem of several stanzas, titled ”Arrival and Departure”. One stanza is particularly significant. It reads:
“We are
What our heritage has made us.
Our unextinguished past
Book facts - Snow by Anne Ranasinghe. Reviewed by Anne Abayasekara. Price Rs. 1,200
Burns in blood and flesh and bones.
And just as it is not possible
To learn a people’s history
And thereby become part of it
So also
I cannot share my heritage.”
That is Anne’s predicament.
She was by birth a German citizen and grew up in a happy environment in which Jewish people were an unquestioned part of the whole community.
German was her mother-tongue. Then, just before she entered her teens, her world was turned upside down in the most unbelievable manner with the advent of Hitler and his Nazis. Anne’s father managed to put her on a train to England and that was the last time the bewildered 13-year-old saw him. World War Two was declared soon after Anne’s arrival in England and English replaced her mother-tongue.
After her marriage to the widowed Ceylonese doctor she met in England, she came to Ceylon and then faced another language problem! Anne says she tried to learn Sinhala, but she can only speak the language and that inexpertly. Anne writes about our customs and culture and of the differences she noticed here in the rearing of children, horoscopes and marriage customs, attitudes to male and female children, funerals, almsgivings that bestow merit on the departed, etc.
Not one to wear her heart on her sleeve, she gives a rare glimpseinto her private feelings in writing about Prof. Ranasinghe’s funeral. After the cremation, she says she broke down completely as the full import and the total finality of death hit her. She looked for comfort – “something that spelt out hope rather than this total despair” –and turned to a Buddhist monk who had been a frequent visitor to their home. “But he rejected my anguish with a coldness that I have never forgotten -or forgiven.”
This section of the book reveals the woman, not just the writer. Even if we have not experienced the losses Anne suffered in the Holocaust, she touches our hearts in writing honestly, without any melodrama, about her feelings as she came to learn about the fate of six million Jews including her own family, during the war years. Her paternal grandparents were the only members of her clan “who had the privilege of a grave. Everybody else died an unnatural death in Hitler’s concentration camps.” The enormity of that is overwhelming.
The account of the steps that eventually led to Anne’s returning to Essen after a lapse of 44 years makes very interesting reading, as do the consequences of that trip. Anne also found she could not regain the fluency she had with the German language as a child and she felt the loss keenly and explains why she feels that a second language can never really replace one’s mother-tongue, however proficient one is in it. But I take issue with her contention that she speaks no language properly, and ends up as “a jack of all trades, or many trades, and master of none.” She has proved herself a master of the trade or craft of writing both English prose and poetry that has been widely acclaimed even beyond our borders. The postscript to this section, added in 2013, should be noted.
Part 2 contains 16 of Anne’s short stories and in reading them I cannot fault her English. The stories are written as a sort of detached narrative that succeeds in conveying to the reader exactly how things happened, with no attempt on the author’s part to persuade the reader to judge the actions of the characters.
To illustrate what I mean, I’d like to dwell briefly on the first story, “Desire”. Although I was horrified at the outcome, this story of human folly on the one hand, and human greed on the other, unfolds to its inevitable end like a Greek tragedy. The horror of its climax is powerful, but – although your sympathy is engaged on behalf of the victims – you feel you cannot judge or condemn – it’s just the way it happened, that’s how those people were and the end was inevitable.
The title story, “Snow”, is very short and falls into a different category. It is a poignant story of a child’s first encounter with death, when her little playmate and friend dies of diphtheria. The sight of her in her coffin, dressed in her Sunday best dress and with her favourite doll lying beside her, only suggested she was asleep. She was terrified by the mother’s grief as it was the first time in her life that she saw an adult cry. She noticed that her own father’s hands trembled as he held the prayer book in his hand at the graveside. It’s only when the little coffin is lowered into the ground and the clods of earth fall on it and finally cover it completely, leaving only a mound of earth, that realisation dawns on the living child that her friend has gone away permanently to the loneliness of the grave.“And then, through the gathering darkness, the snow began to fall.’
Part 3 – “A Question of Identity” – explains a great deal. Anne had lived happily here for over 20 years when the bomb fell in a most unexpected way. Anne grew bougainvillea for sale and she was having coffee with an acquaintance, a French lady, who also did the same and wanted to ask Anne for the finer points about their care. It so happened that this lady was also an expert Egg Noodle Maker and she complained to Anne about the difficulty of getting some clients to pay up. She said that she couldn’t be running behind these people to collect money – “who did they think she was – “some dirty little Jew?” It was thoughtlessly said, but it took Anne back in memory to the time, way back in her childhood, when Nazism first reared its ugly head even in her own town and Anne tried to hold her head high while kids who had been her friends all her life, suddenly cold-shouldered her or screamed abuse. She could hear her father’s voice speaking gently to her: “Hold your head up high, and be proud you are a Jew. Never forget it, my daughter. It is your greatest heritage.”
We learn what it was like to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. It took a long time for Anne to uncover all that had happened to her family and her community during those years of war. The mystery surrounding the death of her parents, who had been sent to the Lodz Ghetto in Poland during the last stages of the war, was finally cleared: along with a few thousand others, they had been, “suffocated by engine exhaust in lorries specially constructed for the purpose in Berlin.”
Anne recalls how fearful she had felt for her mother all those years ago when she was still with her parents and her mother had announced that she would not fast at Yom Kippur that year – I think it may have been 1938. When she asked her mother why, there had been a long silence after which her mother had softly said: “Because I am angry with God. I shall never fast or pray again until all this stops and I can again believe that there really is a God.” Anne trembled, for she felt this was a sin. Her doubting mother’s life was eventually snuffed out, but you feel the question in Anne’s own mind when she records, “But so did my father and he fasted on every Yom Kippur and never once missed out on his prayers.”
The book comes to an end with 32 selected Holocaust Poems which had been published earlier in her book, “At What Dark Point”. I am tempted to linger over these poems so stark yet so evocative of that incredibly cruel period in human – particularly German – history. Anne witnessed the ugliness of our July 1983 and mentioned it in a poem.it. It’s no wonder that she writes, in the title poem:
“I know
That anything is possible
Any time. There is no safety
In poems or music or even in
Philosophy. No safety
In churches or temples
Of any faith. And no-one knows
At what dark point the time will come again”
We ourselves can testify to the truth of that conclusion.
All Anne’s literary triumphs and her many awards are recorded in Dr. Lakshmi De Silva’s introduction, I will mention only two. The award of a Presidential Honour – Kala Suri (Eminent in the Arts) in 2005 for her “services to the Literature of the country.” And in 2007 she was awarded the highest honour of Sahityaratne (Gem of Literature), at the State Literary Festival in recognition of “her distinction as a writer and of her lifetime services in promoting the development of literary skills among writers in English.” No mean achievement for one who feels that writing in a language other than her native tongue, has its limitations.
Every reader of this book (published in her 89th year), will surely join me in saluting Anne Ranasinghe for her lifetime achievement as an outstanding writer in English of both prose and verse.