From Holocaust dreams to family complicities
Marika Sosnowski, 58 Facets: On Law, Violence and Revolution, Melbourne University Press, 2025.
Marika Sosnowski recounts being recently stopped at a checkpoint during the COVID-19 lockdown in Australia. This event, she writes:
triggered me in ways I was completely unprepared for…As my car was forced into a lane with no escape route, awaiting verification of my identity document by an agent of the State, I thought, this is something that happens ‘over there’ to ‘others’ where I travel to do field work and then have the privilege to leave. Checkpoints like this do not, I had felt quite sure up until then, ‘happen here’.
Sosnowski identifies this experience with her grandfather’s family’s last-minute passage through a Nazi checkpoint in 1940. Resonance runs deep: ‘Despite being born in the mid-1980s, my sister told me the other day that many of her friends have “Holocaust dreams”’. Later in the book, the author also suggests that flying, an activity she undertakes frequently, also cues somatic flashbacks that mine this same seam of ‘everwhen’ memory.
The book’s thematic axis is said to be ‘revolution, war, governance and legal systems in Syria’. Along the way, there is also a free-wheeling mix of family history and self-reflection, poetry and Buddhism, epigenetics and soft psychiatry. Divided into 58 very short chapters, it is said to be ‘the story about living with, or under, or in spite of, Nazi rule’. It is also stated that the book is:
About the Syrian revolution and about individual revolution. About violence and the law, and what they leave behind—their afterlife. Violence and the laws flow through time and space like a river. They eat tributaries into people’s bodies and minds.
These are different purposes. Moreover, the allusive nature of much of the text has the reader struggling to find a thematic through-line or consistent point of view. For example, after noting that her maternal great uncle, Colonel Chaim Gaon, administered Gaza and was responsible for the killing of Palestinians in 1956, she offers this comment: ‘Perhaps it is becoming clearer that Nazi Germany is not the only case when the law has been used as a means of repression.’ Later, an admiring account of her paternal great uncle’s actions as a partisan in occupied Poland, blowing up trains and killing members of the Wehrmacht, ends with Sosnowski exclaiming: ‘What a family.’
Hopping between family history and contemporary commentary, academic plurality and personal reflection means one does not have to identify one’s politics or the book’s telos. Perhaps the author’s role—she is described as a legal anthropologist in a brief bio that precedes the text—induces a multi-partial, see-it-from-all-sides disposition.
The book’s chapter structure recycles the convention that diamonds are best displayed when milled to present 58 facets. Sosnowski adopts this motif as her floor plan because it pairs the personal—she has an image of the diamonds ‘my grandfather would have brought, cut and sold after he arrived in Melbourne in 1947’—with the poetic, her idea that the past offers ‘puzzles like a beautifully cut jewel’. This is a pretty union, but it is not certain that the conceit holds. At another point, Sosnoski contends the past is a ‘river flowing out behind us with a main channel but also with smaller streams and tributaries’. These very different metaphors of multifaceted puzzles and a single main flow of history are in tension with each other (as are the orientations of this book).
On the one hand, much of the text is vigorously reflexive. For example, as a preface to identifying the role that one of her uncles played in oppressing Palestinians, the author quotes Hannah Arendt’s description of Nazi Germany as ‘a closed system run by gangsters, aimed at dismantling the human personality of its victims’. She then writes: ‘I am in a tangle of emotions, I am contemplating my own complicity, I am an isthmus, the line that separates the sun and the shadow.’ At other moments, very different registers are summoned—for example, when the reader is prompted to interrogate the idea of knowing, or to appreciate the both-and nature of wonder. Worrying about structure in such an expansive, almost centrifugal, exercise would be to miss the point. Yet it is not unfair to say that the text presents an uneven account of its core business: to work the loop between law, violence and revolution. What is the main current in this account?
Law and violence are well interrogated. This is occasioned by the introduction of evocative first-person accounts and a mosaic of sources to unpack the semiotics of camps and checkpoints. I am mindful that a little more ‘legal anthropology’ might have heightened this success. Why does the author, just as in conventional use, refer to ‘the law’ but not to ‘the medicine’, for example? Very likely, this practice speaks to our most revered constructions, like ‘the heavens’. Unlike law and, to a lesser extent, violence, revolution receives almost an en passant attention. For example, the reader is left unsure what Sosnowski means by an ‘individual revolution’. Is it to resist, defy, subvert or, more subjectively, nothing more than internally reframing one’s relationship with the (Syrian) regime?
Sosnowski’s book has an obvious connection with Phillipe Sands’ much heftier East-West Street. Both are written by Jewish authors who weave telling accounts of the atrocities that the Nazis inflicted on their families. Both take on the task of articulating the power of registration systems and the legal structures they enact to administer life and death. Both books also offer difficult-to-bear updates on the torturous cartwheeling legacy of Jewish history. If the weaponisation of the Holocaust is eschewed, this heritage remains especially compelling for, but is not the exclusive province of, its Jewish descendants.
This noted, some will find the book self-indulgent, given the place it accords to argument by assertion and mature life-stage reflection: see, in particular, the concluding eight chapters bundled under the rubric ‘Flight’. Others will revel in its cadence and density of suggestion. The book definitely presents an exploding diagram of ideas and, especially later, its flow assumes a neat rhythm.