![Comic with text: What I witnessed in the history of my family is not the major historical events that fill history books such as the Holocaust, but rather the small silent moments when people live with their trauma and memories—the way they order their lives so as to never confront them.
Events like World War II and the Holocaust are present, but never brought into focus, because that is the way people live with their ghosts. It’s a small haunting that happens in the oddest moment, when you can’t think of the word you need in your adopted language—Hebrew or English—but instead the word that comes to mind is the dead language you haven't spoken since you were a child. In order to try to capture the interiority of these characters, I looked to those moments, rather than to what we think of as history.
I was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up knowing very little about my family history before the 1980s. My mother was a double emigree—from Morocco to Israel as a child, and then from Israel to America in her early 20s—who shut down discussions of her or her family’s past, because opening the past could summon forth malignant spirits and invite the evil eye.
My father’s parents came [to America] from Poland—his mother before the Holocaust, his father after—and they could not bring themselves to talk of any past in any way. So, to try to unearth the family stories (I hesitate to call it history, since so much of it exists in silences and contradictions), I took the few stories I knew and started prodding every member of the older generation who would talk. I would get bits and pieces from one person, before they realized what they were saying and stopped talking, and I would use that to get information from another person.
After my grandparents died, I also had access to boxes of old documents and photos and strange souvenirs that were held onto for generations for no apparent reason. I used those to interrogate the stories, sometimes with success, but usually I was just led to more unanswered questions. That is when I realized something: that the more neat and tidy a story was, the more it was false, a manufactured and repeated myth. The true stories were filled with contradictions and impossibilities, no answers or endings, just lives caught in the wind.](https://i0.wp.com/chireviewofbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024_CHIRB_Nothing-Vast_comic_FINAL_p2-smaller.jpg?resize=1170%2C1607&ssl=1)
Moshe Zvi Marvit’s work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, Dissent Magazine, In These Times, the American Prospect, the Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Marvit lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Nothing Vast is his debut novel.
FICTION
Nothing Vast
by Moshe Zvi Marvit
Acre Books
Published October 15th, 2024