Kluger

Reading Kluger’s Still Alive, I grew to enjoy her style of writing. While it seemed random for some people, it felt like something I would write – a random assortment of thoughts of my past and the life behind me. Also, there were a lot of quotes that just struck me as comedic, like the time when she is talking about the “fat man” she encountered and that she “didn’t want to be friends with the fat man, [she] wanted his food” (125), or truly insightful – when Kluger was talking about her mother and how her delusions had finally caught up with her once the two were in Auschwitz, Kluger poses the question, “If you think that your mind Is the most precious thing you own, you are right, because what have we got that defines us other than reason and love?” (104). All these quotes, among others, along with Kluger’s story is what I truly enjoyed. But on to a literary connection I found one quote.

Here, Kluger is talking of her brother Schorschi, and how she has missed him from her life ever since he left her as a teen to return back to his blood father – “One of my brother’s nephews in my poem, my older son, has George for a middle name-but that didn’t help. People aren’t reborn. They live, or they don’t live, their one inalienable life. Schorschi’s had been taken, and there is no substitute such “living on in memory”. We don’t want to be pious thoughts in the mind of others; we want the robust substance of our own lives” (83). I thought this was interesting because as soon as I read this quote, I thought of Professor Chaturvedi and his writings on the name “Vinayak”. The doctor who had named Chaturvedi as Vinayak, hoped to instill the same revolutionary ways of the Vinayak Savarkar that he had known in his lifetime. However contrary to this lies Kluger’s take. Kluger does not believe in “living on in memory” and that naming someone the name of someone else you once loved would not bring them back. Kluger feels that those given the same name of those who passed before them, is not a way of bringing back the dead. Once they have passed and their bodies have perished, they are not “reborn”. For Kluger, there would never be another Schorschi.