Book: The Beech Forest
By Marlis Wesseler
Published by Thistledown Press
Review by Brandon Fick
The Beech Forest by Marlis Wesseler is a novel that combines day-to-day life in rural Saskatchewan with a gradual reckoning with the Holocaust on the part of its protagonist, Lisa Braun. Lisa is a middle-aged retiree, a wife and a mother – with all the attendant regrets and worries – who is mostly separate from her German husband, Gerhardt, throughout the course of the novel. This causes her to reflect upon her marriage and far-flung children, induces general restlessness, and transforms a semi-detached understanding of the Holocaust into a morbid, all-consuming fascination. The latter is incited by meeting Ben Meisner, an elderly Jewish man who was interned at Buchenwald. Meisner’s harrowing recollection of life under Nazi Germany, coming at the novel’s midpoint, is the hinge that pulls all the story’s disparate threads together.
Wesseler’s writing is clear and understated. Much like the pristine German beech forest Lisa walks through in the opening scene, there is no “excess of any kind.” But while there are no rhetorical fireworks, secrets and ironies – familial, cultural, interpersonal – abound. The largest irony being that Buchenwald means “beech forest” in German. Wesseler contrasts “silver-grey birch trees with velvet bark,” their “perfect sprays of oval leaves” which “filter the light from above like stained glass,” with Meisner’s memories of being “treated like sewage… treated worse than they would have treated cattle,” with hunger “always there, ready to drive one insane at any prospect of food.” Despite Lisa’s feelings of emptiness, her now less-than rosy view of Gerhardt as a husband, her disappointment with her wayward daughter Stephanie, Meisner’s words lead to an important personal realization: “I was gently raised.” Many fortunate Canadians, including me, could say the same.
By no means is this a bleak novel – it’s enlivened with wry observations on marriage and motherhood, recognizable rural mores, scenes of warmth between friends, and awkward tension between neighbours – but it asks readers to sit with discomfort and accept the unacceptable. “How,” Lisa asks herself, “could an entire society either participate in or ignore such monstrous atrocity?” She asks this knowing full well the “banality of her questions, the universality of her bewilderment.” Even Meisner recognizes the “inadequacy of the words I must use.” Events like the Holocaust cannot be fully comprehended, but they must be reckoned with.
The Beech Forest is a very timely read. At a time when global conflict ignites old animosities, societies grapple with shameful pasts, and individuals are increasingly taking it upon themselves to learn about – and from – historical injustices, this novel shows us that we can see ourselves, warts and all, and continue to go on.
THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM