I earned my MA at the University of Buffalo in the writing program chaired by Raymond Federman—a name you’ve likely never heard. Federman was born in 1928 in France and at age fourteen his parents hid him in a closet while the German Gestapo rounded up the Jews in Paris and sent them to perish in the Nazi death camps. Federman survived. His parents and siblings did not.
Federman went on to become an academic and a writer of what he called surfiction, more commonly called postmodern fiction. Surfiction abandons realism in favor of metafiction, self‐consciously advertising its own fictional status. A novel written in this style doesn’t pretend to be realistic.
Federman’s work influenced me in my early days as a writer, particularly his novels “Smiles on Washington Square” (reviewed here and also appearing on my list of The Most Important Novels in My Life) and “To Whom It May Concern:,” which I first read about 40 years ago and just re-read.
The postmodernist style didn’t stick with me, and I eventually gravitated toward realism because it felt more natural to me and I wanted to write novels that people might want to read.
But you might want to read “Smiles on Washington Square” which at its heart is a love story, and “To Whom It May Concern:” which centers around two children (cousins) who survived the roundup of Jews and years later plan to reunite. Both are experimental in form but still accessible, readable, and enjoyable by those of us who are not academics or into the arcane frontiers of fiction.
“To Whom It May Concern:” consists of a series of letters from a writer to an unnamed recipient. The writer sets forth his plans to write a novel about two cousins who were separated from their families and each other during World War II and their plans to reunite after decades apart.
The narrative focuses as much on the writer’s attempts to write as the story he’s writing:
In a roundabout way there is a real story, although it may not be the story you expect. Federman fills in details about Sarah, a nine-year-old at the time of the roundup, and her cousin, who is three years older, and invents details about their current lives forty years later as they prepare to reunite. But to take a “realistic” approach to something that seems as impossible as the roundup and extermination of Jews is just not possible for Federman or this book:
Clocking in at 186 pages, this is an easy novel to read and a good introduction to metafiction. Sadly, I hadn’t cracked my copy in so many years that when I did, the binding came unglued and the pages began to fall out. So you’ll have to get your own copy instead of borrowing mine.
4/5 Stars