Soul House

“[P]eople like the word refuge, but they don’t like the refugees”: Elie Wiesel’s words, quoted in Mireille Gansel’s Soul House, bluntly state what her book so delicately conveys: that solace is more fondly remembered than extended. Yet Gansel, a French Jew born in 1947 to a family starkly affected by the Holocaust, understands that the devastation of exile or banishment is universal. She recounts her own experience of finding, in the time of the Prague Spring:

A hospitality that welcomed. Without counting. And offered you a writing space as in a large house of thought where you can put your share of hope and struggle for solidarity and beauty something brought from afar to the threatened human being—

 

yes the crazy risk of hospitality

This book passionately advocates for honoring past loss not through memorials but present actions, with what Fanny Howe, in her introduction, calls “the unsentimental intelligence of an Arendt.” In 21st-century central Europe, the poet finds:

that night, while I was coming down the street, there were under the stars, stronger than the glacial wind blowing in from the river, these migrant poems from all languages, these smuggled words no border can stop—
below, at the edge of the Danube, stationed in the parking lot of the little hotel, three cars
rented from tourist companies by the border police—

 

on the other shore, Austria—

Joan Seliger Sidney’s translation is beautifully modulated to capture the poet’s varying tempos, from deliberate to pell-mell. A glacial clarity gusts through these prose poems. Gansel sets down the “silences of too much pain” and “the silence of the ruins”; she notes that “waiting is a secret country a country of silence and that absence is a manner of hoping.” Emotion softens her language, as when she describes ethnographer Eugénie Goldstern and her “love for the house and through it the inhabitants of your valleys […] She who had no house she saved the memory of your houses.”

Indeed, the lost home haunts this book, beginning with her own family’s lovely lost house. Near the end, such dwellings are erected in an instant by language: “suddenly in the full noon sun there was this space to say with your own words your roads of exile your words like a shared house—.”