... ye shall not realize the absurdity of most matters in life." That's the commonest rationale for anyone to write a whole book in 'first person' narrative from the point of view of a child, to reveal the inanity and insanity of the adult world. And when that "adult world" is Europe in the 1930s, amid economic stagnation, the rise of fascism, and the impending catastrophe of persecution of Jews and others, there's so much insanity to reveal that even a child can fathom the horror of it.
This "Child of All Nations" is Kully, a nine-year-old girl from Köln who starts her narrative in 1936 in a hotel in Ostende, where she and her mother are waiting for her 'famous writer' father to return from Prague with enough money to pay their hotel bill and redeem his family from hostagedom. The family has just escaped into exile from Hitlerian Germany, and Kully still speaks only the Köln dialect of Deutsch. By the end of the book, the girl will be conversant in French, Italian, Polish, several dialects of German, and English. Kully is indisputably precocious, as slyly resourceful as any kid in an American 'Home Alone' film. She's also amusingly naive at times. She understands some things one might not expect a nine-year-old to understand; at the same time, she 'intuits' the meaning of some things in ways that are bizarrely apropos despite being utterly wrong from an adult viewpoint. Kully's "voice" is remarkably convincing most of the time, or at least as much off the time as her author/creator wants it to be. But since Kully exists really as a spokesperson for poignant satire, one does need to make allowances for bits of wry insouciance here and there. When the child's perspective is altogether too narrow, the author is ever ready with an adult conversation quoted verbatim or a letter from Father, which Kully has opened secretly. All one learns directly from Kully about the political and economic crises around her is that Fear is universal and that adult despair seems overwhelming.
Kully's narrative has no plot -- no beginning or ending -- as she is dragged from hotel to hotel, to Poland, Italy, Netherlands, France, eventually to America, to Virginia Beach VA, and back to Amsterdam. Kully develops an odd concept of the nation state and the borders thereof; she and her parents are always on the edge of expulsion from one country, for lack of visas, yet unwelcome in any other. Kully hopes to find a 'border' wide enough to let her mother and herself just plant themselves between hostile states. Kully's father is the "moving" force in her narrative... "moving" in both senses. His leftist writings have made his life decidedly perilous in Hitler's Germany, but how can a writer of German words support himself elsewhere? Besides, he's a man near collapse, frightened out of his wits at his prescience of the impending catastrophe of war, as well as quickly degenerating, a 'charming' drunk who sometimes remembers to feed his family by begging and borrowing shamelessly, cadging advances from stingy publishers for books less than half written. Father's life is a runaway booze-wagon plunging toward a precipice; Mother is the hapless maiden bound and tied to that wagon. And the whole chase never quite disheartens Kully, in part because she takes it for granted and in part because her own childish 'joy of life' makes an adventure of every pratfall. Kully's world is an outlandish, surreally comical place.
Irmgard Keun had been briefly a 'best-selling' novelist in the Germany of the early '30s, but by 1936 her books had already been banned as 'decadent' by the Third Reich. From '36 to '38, she was the lover/companion of the Austrian Jewish journalist/novelist Joseph Roth, himself already in exile in France, penniless and rapidly destroying himself with alcohol. In fact, he died in '39. "Child of All Nations" was published in '38, so it must have been written during or just at the close of Keun's relationship with Roth. Hardly anyone has ever read this book without supposing that Kully's Father is a depiction of Roth. If so, it's certainly not an idolatrous depiction. The Father/Writer is manic, boozy, cagey, self-centered, a horrible mate and father nonetheless desperately loved. It's obvious that he'll never pull himself together or write anything more of value. Oddly enough, the real-life Roth wrote one of his deepest and most polished novellas - The Legend of the Holy Drinker - in his last paroxysms of self-destruction.
But if Father is Joseph Roth, who is Kully and who is her Mother? Roth and Keun did not have a child and were together unmarried only two years. I have a curious intuition that both Mother and Daughter are the author herself. That is, that Keun chose to reveal herself as a child, a wise innocent, in relation to Roth, who must have been a holy terror to live with. In other words, the "child' is a mask, which allows the author to disguise her harshest criticisms in clever naivete.
This is a great little book! Read it for laughs! It is funny. Read it for sorrow! It is full of anguish. Or read it for insight! Kully's misunderstandings and cock-eyed insights compel the reader to experience the chaos of the 1930s as a child would have, without the benefit of historical hindsight. But don't forget to read Joseph Roth also! Roth was one of the giants of 20th C literature and one of the sharpest observers of his doomed society.
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Top reviews from other countries
Ann Fairweather
A gem from the past to read absolutely!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 5, 2018