This blog will twist and turn because I have too much mentation floating about with regard to trains. Several commentators have observed that the Holocaust is synonymous with the scheduling of trains during the Nazi era. Cattle cars shuffling along track for hundreds of miles and depositing Jews into death camps was a daily fact. In fact, if I have my history correct, Hitler gave these cars rail priority over the shipment of armaments.
Recently, after some consideration, I’ve decided to change the cover of The i Tetralogy. I discussed this with my son who is a graphic designer and artist as well as my fiance, Jane, who wrote the introduction to my book of short stories. At the moment I thought a photo of railroad tracks which my son took some time back, with the help of photoshop and all that jazz, might serve as a new cover. We would change the color of the cover, perhaps brown, and “skeletonize” the tracks so that they appear to be lethal, mysterious, if not deadly, an abstraction. Jordan will cogitate over all this and surely come up with an original cover; it is becoming a family tradition for him to do the covers of my book.
In the Tetralogy I spend not an inconsiderable time describing the train set that Gunther, the Nazi guard and tormentor, sets up in his home. The train set is a layout of a Nazi camp he once ruled sway in. The trains are HO scale and are Marklin. Marklin trains are a world-class train company based in Germany. They are the American Lionel, if you will. I remember ordering the Marklin catalog in which they described at least five historical periods in which Marklins were produced, the cars, the scenery, the tenders, and all the rest. I teased out what locomotives and what cattle cars –or freight, would be used to carry Jews and other victims to the camps. I found it “amusing” that the years 1939 to 1945 were either not discussed or described. Orwellian, to say the least. Having operated trains as a kid in addition to doing this research for accuracy, I then created a narrative about the trains Gunther used in his dank and despicable train set, a grotesque remembrance of things past. The description of the train set has several pages to it and becomes part and parcel of Gunther’s sons childhoods. No one knew in the family what the real intent of the layout was as he went about disguising it; in short he got off on it.
Looking back at it now, I realize on several levels I was digging as hard as I could, using imagination, whatever skills I had as a writer, to dwell in his heart of darkness. The Marklins allowed me in. As i said at the start, I will twist and turn as this goes along. When I was about to be bar mitzvahed, my mother cooked all the food for the event as we were not well to do and catering was out of the question. Parallel to this is that I had a Lionel train set, the three rail track which always looked unrealistic, the classic figure eight layout with a locomotive and tender and, I believe, it is 54 years ago! three pullman cars. It was the kind of set that you placed a pellet into the smokestack and it did emit an acrid, still sweet to my memory, smoke from the stack. I had some kind of tower with a plastic globe about it, when turned on and warmed up, consquently turned casting its glow across the tracks. It was a shared train set as my two uncles, Bernie and Seymour, made it a tradition to purchase a new car or freight each holiday season, which in those days for Jews was Christmas. Jews only got their bonuses on Christmas. You had to experience this set with the lights off. If memory serves me right, certain accessories like station crossings, long gone from memory now, alas, had red bulbs that glowed in the dark, bells and whistles, no pun intended. It was thrilling.
Realizing that the cost of the bar mitzvah was shy necessary funds, my father took me aside and asked if would I mind if he sold the set to raise money for the ceremony. It was the 50s, a time of repressed feelings and little straight talk. I acquiesced without a word, so passive was I. As I wrote elsewhere I gave up something that I cared for so much for something else that I did not care for that much. In retrospect my father should have dug ditches to Newark from Brooklyn to raise the cash. Oh, the historic ache. My son Jordan has shared with me how upset he was when his mother disposed of his Hans Solo Millenium Falcon that he had admired as a young boy. Not quite the same thing. The train set of that time, of my time, had signifcant emotions attached to it. I most likely would have kept it until this day and passed it down to my son or daughter, for I am that kind of person. Not nostalgia, not sentimentality, but remembrance, for I was a child who noted the changing of the days by the objects in my environment, the seasons, the unique or not so unique toys, the Spaldeen, the Rawlings mitt and the Raleigh three-speed English racer — I got that for my bar mitzvah.
And now to recrudescence, that which is latent now becomes manifest. Since 2001 when I came upon the n scale American Orient Express train set put out by the European Arnold/Rivarossi firm, I have been feeling the need to get back into trains once more. In the last month the infection has spread as I am surfing the net about n-scale trains, manufacturers, articles, what are the best trains, what are the best books to read. Decisions and decisions. The funny thing about getting into train sets is that you need to hold your breath and not rush in — very difficult to do. Given my Art Deco and Art Nouveau sensibility, I am taking my time and enjoying the evaluating of this train versus that one; I live on ebay as a break from writing. When I see it, I’ll buy it. In any case, what are we to make of all this — Holocaust and trains, trains of my childhood and now trains of my final childhood? What is the compelling, almost gravitational pull that these moving trinkets hold on me, down through the years. It is not by accident that I write about trains in the Tetralogy, for I describe these demented layouts with a passion. Is it displacement? No psychspeak, please.
It is just curious, oh is it curious, what time, latitudinal time, time that circumnavigates ourselves as we choo choo to our end and here would be the appropriate place to cite a poem, a Nazi poem! that appears in the book.
Page 221 from Gunther’s Lament
When I hear in mind the choo choo, I call out Jew Jew . . .
Choo-Jew. Choo-Jew. Choo-Jew.
When I see in mind the cattle doors unlock, I hear again
in mind — Moo-Jew. Moo-Jew.
Moo-Jew. Moo-Jew.
As the train wheels clackety-clack away, the fraught engineer
takes a swig of his whiskey, for the trip is filled
with Jew offal and the keening of Jewesses.
I hear once more the sweet mechanics of repetition.
Trains ran on time, trains were time, the mechanical
marvels that rode on rail and gave us all time not on
a dial, but the latitudes and longitudes fo tracks
piercing time, clocking it off station by station.
Choo-choo Jew. Choo-choo Jew.
Time brings everything.
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