Art as Resistance in Anna Seghers’ “Transit”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reading multiple books set in Marseille. Specifically, I have read two novels detailing the movement of refugees during World War II to the port city in hopes of escaping the Nazi advance. Before leaving for Marseille, I read Julie Orringer’s The Flight Portfolio, a fictionalized account of Varian Frye’s work the Emergency Rescue Committee (ERC) in Marseille during the war. In her review of Orringer’s novel, Cynthia Ozick asks us to think about the “war between history and imagination” that Orringer creates within the novel between the real life Frye and his fictive depiction in The Flight Portfolio. This “war” exists in countless classical texts, as Ozick points out, but in Orringer’s case the war between reality and fiction has real consequences because, as Ozcik writes, “we do have a stake in whatever touches on the historical integrity of the Holocaust, now increasingly denied, diminished, demoted, misapplied, perverted, derided; or else utterly erased.”

Ozick’s points about the tensions between the historical fact and the fictive imagination make me think about her novel The Messiah of Stockholm and the use of Polish writer Bruno Schulz within the narrative. While Schulz appears in the minds of the characters within Ozick’s novel, he serves as the fulcrum for Lars Andemening dealing with his own identity and the aftermath of the…