In Night, Juliek, amidst the mess of emaciated corpses, played a sweet tune on a violin, pouring out the souls of all who are dead. His music communicated the agony of his life and for the "extinguished futures" (95) of the fallen. Juliek himself suffered death.
In Nightfather, Friedman conveys her father's similar desires; to let music communicate with the dead, and not the living. The father's song is uttered in a foreign language, and so the living (his children) cannot hope to understand the music:"His long, drawn-out Slav vowels float over our head, but they're not meant for us" (29). It is for his dead comrades and enemies in the concentration camps that he sings and for their "extinguished futures." This can be interpreted as survivor's guilt however, because both Juliek and Friedman's father wonder why they survived, and so many others suffered death. And so they play music for them.
I think that this also pertains to the relationship between "it must be told" and "it cannot be told". We have discussed this issue numerous times in class, and have talked about how writing novels like Nightfather and Night is an indirect way of "telling" the horrific stories of the Holocaust. I feel that conveying the loss for people in song is another one of Carl Friedman's oblique ways of telling the story, or in her father's case mourning his loss. Singing could be a way of telling what must be told without actually speaking about it.
ReplyDelete