So Well Remembered

By John Skow

ANYA

by SUSAN FROMBERG SCHAEFFER 489 pages. Macmillan. $8.95.

The overwhelming impression left by this rich and brooding novel of wartime Poland is of an actual life agonizingly remembered, not of events and characters cut and fitted to the pattern of a story. Although the obliteration of Polish Jews is the horrifying central fact of the book, the central mystery is that of memory and the flow of time. If Anya Savikin, the heroine, had lived in a peaceful age, her memories in middle years would not have been so filled with blood and broken buildings. But her slow sifting of them would probably stir the same feelings of bewilderment and loss.

There seems to be little connection between Anya Savikin, a brilliant, laughing young medical student who lived in Vilno, Poland, in the late thirties, and Anya Meyers, a sour 52-year-old housewife glumly sitting out a marriage in New York in 1973. Each day-to-day progression in three decades has made perfect sense, but at some unnoticed point the time traveler has passed through a looking glass and become unrecognizable to her past selves.

Looking backward, Anya is determined to make sense of time's frightening discontinuity. To establish a solid starting point, she rebuilds almost brick by brick the Savikin family's opulent apartment in Vilno. Here is her room, gaudy with color; here is the austere chamber of Sister Vera, who thinks only of her piano; here is Zoshia, the youngest maid, skating about with a brush on each foot, polishing the parquetry.

Gentle father. Her father is a warm gentle businessman who spends all of his time reading. Her mother says, "Boris, are you going to read in this kitchen? We will have Lermontov in the sauerkraut ... Mamma glowered. Sauerkraut was no joking matter. This was the creation of the world going on here. There was no time to lose; she might forget a continent; she might leave out a sea. Such seriousness!" In the basement, barrels, vats and bins were filled with enough food for three winters, and then the poor of the neighborhood were invited to come in and take what they wanted.

Time sweeps past this domestic fortress. Anya marries and bears a daughter named Ninka. Then comes the war. Solidity is undermined, cracked, carried away. Anya and her husband are fenced within a newly decreed ghetto in Vilno. Her father is killed by the Germans, her husband is arrested and disappears. But her mother hides in a large oven and escapes the periodic searches by which the old and the sick are weeded out.

Rumors circulate: children are to be liquidated next. Anya manages to spirit Ninka out of the ghetto and place her with a Christian family. Then it is the entire ghetto that is to be emptied of people. Vilno's Jews are herded from their pen and divided into two groups, one for extermination, the other made up of people strong enough to work.

The author's account of Anya's war years is detailed and obsessive, a daily rediscovery of the same devouring pain. Anya survives because she is strong, because she is attractive, because of her medical skill, and finally again and again, for no logical reason. At the war's end she finds her daughter Ninka. After a tune she emigrates to the U.S., remarries, works, eats, flows with the years. Her daughter wants to marry a Gentile. Anya weeps and takes to her bed. The girl marries anyway and moves away. Anya is diminished, but by what? Present time loses its hold. She searches back through her life for solidity. Patiently she begins with pen and paper to rebuild the great warm apartment in Vilno. Author Schaeffer, whose 1973 novel Falling won praise, has achieved something remarkable; time's flow circles back, and Anya's bricks, for a while, stand firm.

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