Despite the poor condition of the booklets and the gaps in the text, it was still possible to extract a coherent and more or less complete narrative, spanning Arthur Propp’s life from his birth in Königsberg in 1890 to his move to Canada in 1950; a life marked in particular by his participation in WWI, his imprisonment in 1938, his escape to England in 1939 and his life as a refugee in Bolivia in the decade 1940-1950. In the downtime, so to speak, between one and another of these major events, Arthur’s life unfolds in the seeming banality of the everyday; yet even there he can find something to philosophize about and experiences from time to time discrimination based on his being Jewish, which does not stop him, however, from achieving great successes in his professional life and becoming considerably wealthy. The keen gaze of this European, always willing and able to adapt to whatever circumstances in which he found himself and to any country he emigrated, was the first thing to catch my attention while I was perusing the manuscript.
Arthur’s life stands out in another respect: his resilience, the fact that he always ends up “landing on his feet”, even as a foreigner and immigrant. One may say that he was, in fact, a foreigner all his life, although he and his family strongly felt that they were Germans and East Prussia was their home, and although Arthur himself displays a deep acquaintance with German literature and culture. The reader can recognize almost at every turn that, in truth, he never did “belong” but was a Jew, a stranger, “other” even in his native Königsberg. And yet he does not omit to point out all the cases in which people helped him, first by giving him contracts and positions that made him a successful lumberman, then by enabling him to escape from Germany and later to move to Bolivia. This kindness in the middle of absolute horror is what gives him, and should give the reader, hope that human life can make sense and human communities can be made to be humane and just after all.
Before and after Arthur’s text you will find a few passages and a poem written by Dan himself. As Dan has inherited his father’s literary skill, he has written a great deal about being the child of two Holocaust survivors. So he decided to task me with choosing passages from one of his books (specifically, Through the Sunshine, which was later republished in expanded form as Landing on my Feet) in order to provide the son’s perspective. This part of the volume is particularly important since it shows the long shadow cast by Hitlerism and the Holocaust even on people who did not directly experience it, to wit, the children of the survivors. Dan’s parts are therefore the most appropriate frame for his father’s narrative.
Domingo Aviles