Book review: The Wherewithal, by Philip Schultz
Philip Schultz's The Wherewithal is a book in which time has come undone. Taking place in San Francisco in 1968, it also reaches back to the Holocaust - specifically, the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, when Polish civilians killed more than 300 Jews.
by Philip Schultz
W.W. Norton
4 stars
Philip Schultz's is a book in which time has come undone. Taking place in San Francisco in 1968, it also reaches back to the Holocaust - specifically, the Jedwabne pogrom of July 1941, when Polish civilians killed more than 300 Jews. The link is Henryk Stanislaw Wyrzkowski, whose mother sheltered seven Jews in a hole she dug in the floor of her Jedwabne barn.
Now, the 25-year-old Henryk has retreated to his own subterranean hiding place, trying to dodge the Vietnam draft by working as a clerk in a basement office, filing public assistance claims. What drives both stories is a sense of human misery, whether of the acute or chronic sort. "Hiding is existing," Henryk says, "in a constant state of alarm,/remaining undiscovered and inferior."
Here's where it gets interesting: Henryk is translating his mother's Jedwabne diary, a document created in her end-of-life dementia, which confuses "things she didn't see/but overheard and was later told,/with things she saw firsthand".
The same is true of Henryk, who asserts he was a young child during Jedwabne, although the chronology doesn't bear him out. He also recalls driving a cab in San Francisco on the night the Zodiac killer targeted a cabbie - but that murder didn't occur until October 1969.
So what is going on? Schultz offers a clue at the very end of the book: "In her delirium," Henryk explains, referring to his mother, "and in mine, scenes unfold/with the force of a living chronicle." What he's suggesting, then, is that is narrative as fever dream, chopped up, fragmented and stitched back together, less about realism than allegory.
