The Rest Is Memory: A Novel

by Lily Tuck

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

A fictionalized account of the haunting true story of fourteen-year-old Czeslawa Kwoka, The Rest is Memory is a profound depiction of humanity’s darkest hour through the eyes of a child.

The heartbreaking story of a young Catholic girl transported to Auschwitz becomes a Rashomon-like rondo by one of our greatest novelists.

Esquire • Best Books of Fall 2024

"The Rest Is Memory is a literary resurrection, as shattering as it is astonishing. Lily Tuck has done the impossible; from darkness and hideous cruelty, she has woven an unforgettable paean to hope, to life, to justice." —Junot Diaz

First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy’s motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.

How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa’s story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tuck’s novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do.

“Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror” (Susanna Moore), Tuck’s language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa’s tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawa’s fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck’s near otherworldly prose.

In Lily Tuck’s hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324095736
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/10/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	809 KB

About the Author

Lily Tuck, the winner of the National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, is the author of seven novels, three short story collections, and a biography of Elsa Morante. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, she lives in New York.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

October 10, 1939

Place of Birth:

Paris, France

Education:

B.A., Radcliffe (Harvard); M.A., Sorbonne, Paris

Editorial Reviews

★ 09/16/2024

Tuck (Sisters) draws on the true story of a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz in her unflinching latest. The reader first meets Czeslawa Kwoka shortly before the German invasion in 1939. She lives on a rustic farm with her hardworking, “tired and too thin” mother, Katarzyna, and father, Pawel, where she tends to the family’s livestock and is smitten with an older local boy named Anton. In 1941, the Nazis implement Hitler’s Germanization plan and seize land from local farmers. When her father and uncle protest, they’re killed by Nazi soldiers. The following year, Czeslawa, now 14, is sent with Katarzyna to Auschwitz, where they are interned alongside camp photographer Wilhelm Brasse, whose images of Czeslawa and other children in the camp inspired Tuck to write the novel. Tuck also chronicles Anton’s escape from the Nazis and subsequent capture by the Russians, who imprison him in Siberia. With graphic imagery and lyrical prose, Tuck vividly evokes Czeslawa’s innocence and resilience, as she tries to hold out hope by imagining Anton in Auschwitz with her. It’s an unforgettable portrait of buoyant youth in the grimmest of places. (Dec.)Correction: A previous version of this review mischaracterized the reason why the protagonist’s father and uncle were killed. The review has also been updated for clarity.

Publishers Weekly

"This slender, potent novel imagines the life of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic teen-ager from the Zamosc region of Poland, who was killed in Auschwitz in 1943. Tuck deftly animates Czeslawa and her family, situating their lives within the larger context of Hitler’s effort to eradicate Poland and its culture. The novel sets up a powerful contrast between its intimately rendered characters and its steady accretion of facts delineating the objective horror of life in Auschwitz."

New Yorker

"The overwhelming force of the novel comes from the sense it conveys of the relentless march of historical events.... None of this makes for easy reading, but it’s part of Tuck’s great skill that the story never loses momentum under its own emotional weight. Every page contains something interesting as well as moving.... It’s a deeply impressive achievement from a wonderful writer and loses none of its power from the fact that the ground has been well covered."

New York Times - Benjamin Markovits

"Tuck weaves her story around the photo, part of a triptych of images of Czeslawa, and anchors it within a carapace of historical fact. Her tale, structured as a series of short takes, is a shimmeringly delicate invention. Cool and spare, the third-person narrative zigzags through time, accumulating authenticity and power. It is hard to stop reading.... The Rest Is Memory evokes the work of W.G. Sebald, a German writer who similarly merged fact, fiction and photography in his treatment of Holocaust themes. Tuck’s descriptions of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family share the icy blankness of Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 film, The Zone of Interest, adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel."

Los Angeles Times - Julia M. Klein

"A short but searing new novel by Lily Tuck. . . . [T]he National Book Award winner brings to vivid life just one of the thousands killed in the Nazi death camp. . . . As Tuck shows us in this short, brutal book, Czeslawa Kwoka was a human being rather than a statistic, robbed of a life that can only be imagined."

Boston Globe - Clea Simon

"A wonderful novel, as formally innovative, controlled, and moving as any I have read in a long while. Lily Tuck is a stunning prose writer, a true original."

Phillip Lopate

"A spare, short novel that shines a light on the 6 million Poles who died during World War II. Critics say The Rest Is Memory is somehow shattering and hopeful at the same time."

Parade - Michael Giltz

"Though brief and austere, this novel is epic in its power to restore: first a girl, then her family, and at last an epoch in human history. Addictively compulsive, Lily Tuck’s story powers forward like the growing tragedy it chronicles, yet it never sacrifices the human moments, serenely and tenderly observed. Like a white stork rising from a dark forest, The Rest Is Memory fills the silence with a great beating of wings."

Adam Johnson

"Lily Tuck writes with sensitivity of a young girl’s struggle to understand . . . the inevitable anguish that awaits her."

Susanna Moore

"Tuck’s profound historical novel imagines Czeslawa’s life leading up to this photograph and during her time at Auschwitz... Tuck intersperses Czeslawa’s haunting narrative with varied historical accounts and figures, holding a resolute eye to the atrocities of the time and the lives cut short."

Booklist

"An extraordinary achievement. . . . Like much of her output, including her mesmerizing The Double Life of Liliane, her book is a hybrid work that deftly mixes fact and fiction and blurs genres and boundaries. . . . Tuck has sensitively and skillfully created a memorial to a life cut short while shining necessary light on the darkest chapter of the 20th century."

Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Malcolm Forbes

"There’s something in the simultaneous sparseness and specificity of these imagined facts that manages to fill out the whole — without doing it explicitly . . . There should be millions of individual books such as this one, one each for every person who lost their life in the Nazi’s death machinery. But who would find the time to write all of these, let alone read them? In any case, the presence of a single book is more searing than what millions of them could achieve, in particular since Tuck leaves so much unimagined."

Conscientious Photography Magazine

"Clocking in at just 144 pages, this slim novel will devastate you all in one sitting . . . Haunting and austere, The Rest Is Memory captures a child’s struggle to understand the unimaginable. It’s nothing short of a literary resurrection, tenderly and unflinchingly observed."

"The Best Books of Fall 2024" Esquire

"The book is exactly as harrowing as longer Auschwitz novels inevitably are, but its beautiful, spare, unflinching language and its insistence on the primacy and persistence of human dignity — and, yes, its brevity — make a brutal story more bearable."

New York Times - Margaret Renkl

"A name, a photograph, a tattooed number. Not much more is known about Czeslawa Kwoka, a Polish Catholic girl who died in Auschwitz on March 12, 1943. But out of those few dry facts Lily Tuck has made an extraordinary and disturbingly brilliant novel, one that can stand with the best of W.G. Sebald or Patrick Modiano, and The Zone of Interest too, as a testament to what we must always remember."

Michael Gorra

"Clocking in at just 144 pages, this slim novel will devastate you all in one sitting . . . Haunting and austere, The Rest Is Memory captures a child’s struggle to understand the unimaginable. It’s nothing short of a literary resurrection, tenderly and unflinchingly observed."

Esquire

★ 2024-09-14
The haunting story of one real-life Polish teenager amplifies the infinite horror of Auschwitz.

Fourteen-year-old Czeslawa lives with her parents on a rural farm in the Zamość region of Poland. It's not an easy life. Czeslawa’s parents, who are Catholic, don't own the property they live on. Hitler’s program to rid Poland of Poles and repopulate the country with Germans is first executed in Zamość, and more than 100,000 residents are removed from the area, with the least fortunate sent to Auschwitz. When Czeslawa and her mother arrive in the camp and are stripped of their belongings, shaved of their hair, tattooed with identification numbers, and photographed for the camp’s extensive records, the reality of their dire circumstances—and their helplessness to do anything about it—becomes apparent. Czeslawa’s actual existence was documented by Wilhelm Brasse, the photographer at Auschwitz. Brasse, himself of Austrian and Polish descent and imprisoned at the camp, was chosen for the position due to his background in photography and his ability to speak German. Tuck became aware of Czeslawa when she happened upon Brasse’s obituary—which included three of his photos of the teen—in theNew York Times. With myriad references to the historical realities of the Holocaust, the work beautifully interweaves Tuck’s imagined story of Czeslawa’s constrained life before the German occupation and the hideous conditions she faced during her short, brutal months at Auschwitz. Extensively annotated and researched, Tuck’s brief novel returns, time and time again, to the subject of memories, a theme alluded to in an epigraph consisting of a fragment of a Louise Glück poem. The author'sskillful blending of facts and fiction reanimates the memory of one of the countless lost children of the Holocaust.

A painful, essential, unflinching memento.

Kirkus Reviews