Can there be a more likeable hero in a novel than this man with a rudimentary first name? Hardly likely. The Amsterdam psychiatrist Kadoke is an all-round lovable person: sensitive, compassionate and at the same time a witty free spirit that picks up all ideologies.
At the same time he maintains an “eternal” distance, which he reproaches himself for. He doesn’t like his first name Otto after Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank and friend of the Kadoke family. That’s why he lets himself be called Oscar or O., but preferably just Kadoke: “The emphasis is on the ‘e’ as in ‘ade’ or ‘juchhe’, not on the penultimate syllable, Kadóke. Some people persist in mispronouncing it. Unteachable. “
The author’s mother survived four concentration camps
Arnon Grünberg’s readership already knows the protagonist Kadoke from the novel “Moles” from 2016. It was about the touching concern of the only child “Oskar” Kadoke for his mother, who was the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust.
Parallel to “Muttermarks”, the memories of Hannelore Grünberg-Klein, the author’s mother, appeared with “I often think of war, because I used to have no time for it” (from the Dutch by Marianne Holberg). Born in Berlin in 1927, she was the only one in her family to survive four concentration camps. Shortly after her death in 2015, her admirably unsentimental life story was published with an afterword by her son.
However, reading “Mutterzeichen” is not a mandatory requirement in order to enjoy Grünberg’s new novel “Occupied Territories”. Rainer Kersten again excellently translated his original Dutch author into German. Nevertheless, grammatical fluctuations occur to him, for example when the use of “because” alternates between the correct genitive and the crude colloquial dative (“because of the climate, because of the accommodation and the terrorism”). Unfortunately, Dutch only knows the genitive as a historical reminiscence.
Kadoke, who is divorced in his mid-forties, takes care of his very old, ambivalent father in a caring and humorous way. After the death of his wife, he assumed her identity by means of clothes and a wig and defiantly claims to be the “mother”. As an employee of the Amsterdam Crisis Service, Kadoke is also there for his suicidal patients around the clock, true to the conviction: “Healing is a merciless activity, whether healing succeeds or not.”
At the beginning of the novel, Kadoke put his mother-father in a boarding house on the North Sea coast called “The Mermaid”, a functional building that does not do justice to its romantic name. This is the home of Kadoke’s long-term patient Michette. He saved her from ending her life by drinking cleaning products and hired her to look after her father.
But the impulsive Michette, whose advances he stubbornly ignores out of his professional ethos, does not thank him for the unorthodox therapy. Apparently out of revenge, she enters into a liaison with a windy sensational writer. Grünberg puts it on as a caricature of his profession: “This man fills him with disgust and a slight fear because he has the power of words, that of fame, the power to destroy the other as carelessly as a hunter shoots a pheasant. “
The author promptly publishes a novel about a psychiatrist who forces an unstable patient into a sexually dependent relationship. The book “Walvisch and the Therapy” triggers tremendous media coverage and is even nominated for a literature prize. A storm of indignation breaks out when Michette drops the innocent Kadoke’s name on a talk show.
Kadoke tries to correct the hair-raising suspicion, in which anti-Semitic undertones are mixed, through a newspaper article, among other things. But all attempts at defense fail and he loses his medical license. Using the “human sacrifice” Kadoke, Grünberg caricatures the excesses of the me-too and identity debates. Kadoke admonishes his father not to assume the identity of an albino when the old man refuses to leave the climatically temperate Holland.
Grünberg’s sister lives in a Zionist settlement
In his deep existential crisis, a distant relative from Israel appears to the agnostic protagonist as a saving, albeit rather intrusive, angel. The red-blonde mathematician Anat is an ardent Zionist who lives with her mother in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
He cautiously points out that she and her family lived in an area that does not belong to them: “You shouldn’t be surprised if the original residents take tough measures to express their protest, even more so than they do Negotiations have so far achieved little. ”The novelist and journalist, born in Amsterdam in 1971, who commutes between his hometown and New York, knows exactly what he is writing about, after all, his own sister lives in a Zionist settlement.
As if out of his mind, Kadoke follows Anat, the reluctant father in tow, into the Occupied Territories: “He, Kadoke, who had seen the only true view of life in stoicism, first had to fall, fall deep, in order to hope to be able to long. He hoped for Anat, for goodbye, for the disappearance of capital letters from their emails, something in which he could see a proof of love. In his mind, Anat was also more beautiful: she has more wrinkles, her skin is rougher, her hair is thinner than he remembers, but maybe that will be more when he has been with her for a while. “
The desert as a culture shock for Europeans
His desire for a change in life causes Kadoke to put on blinders himself. He denies his analytical mind and beliefs. How long can this go well? That is the central question of the novel, from which it also draws a large part of its tragicomic. Because in the desert, the two Europeans experience a violent culture shock, which the author enthusiastically embellishes with all kinds of grotesque details.
In anticipation of paradise on earth, the Orthodox do not necessarily stick with cleanliness, as Kadoke soberly finds out. How far away is civilized Europe when you live in a camper van and have to eat half-cooked chicken thighs from plastic plates in the neon light! To the delight of the village community, Kadoke marries the “late girl” Anat. Lammfromm allows himself to be tyrannized by her bigoted mother, who wants to check his potency. After all, having children is the most important thing for the Orthodox settlers. The infinitely tolerant hero of the novel thus becomes a kind of occupied territory for the wishes and projections of his – especially female – fellow human beings. Apparently it is the “temptation to self-destruct” that he diagnosed in Michette that now allows him to persevere in the wilderness.
Even the most enlightened and modern-thinking individual cannot live without community, is one of the findings of this screamingly funny and deeply humane book, which, especially against the background of the recent Gaza-Israel conflict, represents a moving appeal to humor and tolerance.
At some point, Kadoke secretly breaks out of his regulated marriage – into the arms of a Palestinian. At this point, at the latest, the novel takes on such a rapid, criminalist development that you can no longer put it down. It will continue with Kadoke, assures Arnon Grünberg – fortunately.
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