Mirjam Pressler: Let sleeping dogs lie
Mirjam Pressler is an established author who has won awards for her ‘young adult’ fiction. Also, in association with Otto Frank, she has worked on Anne Frank’s diary.
The central character in “Let sleeping dogs lie”, Joanna Riemenschneider is a senior secondary school student whose family owns Riemenschneider’s, the prestigious clothing store. A disturbing, if never mentioned historical detail is that the store was once named Heimann Compagnie, and had been the property of a Jewish family forced to sell up during the Nazi Party’s aryanization regime. Author, Mirjam Pressler’s presentation of this deeply troubling history is more complex and profound than intending readers might suspect. She manages to underscore the significant, if generally neglected point that for families living in the Nazi era the relationship with the law was little different to that of citizens in any other governed and policed society. Laws were made and enforced by the authorities, and daily life involved the usual, essentially normal patterns of getting by while, of course, hoping to do a lot better than that. So, the Riemenschneider grandfather’s 1930s act of purchasing the store was the result of a simple business decision. How could he have anticipated that down the generations knowledge of the transaction would cause grief.
As often happens with families engaged in retailing, for as long as she can remember Joanna’s life had centered around this substantial business: they live nearby, it’s their work, their principal focus. But when her history class group visits Israel, while meeting women who had once been students in the German private school she attends, she faces a particular ugly reality: these people were all forced to leave their hometown, were dispossessed, suffered terribly, but one of them claims a family relationship to the rightful owners of the Riemenschneider’s. Worse. She goes on to explain that her grandparents had committed suicide after losing everything.
Joanna generates an emotional problem for herself, maybe for all the family, when she confronts the question: what kind of people were these who had once owned our store? Why would her family have come to be in possession of it and then not talked about the circumstances of the time? Emotional complications for the schoolgirl involve more than the store’s ownership. It turns out that her grandfather was an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party. The family never mentioned that. How can a teenager manage such a terrible historical connection in her own mind, or resolve with her parents the withholding of such significant information?
At this point we confront the the convoluted reality of the effects terrible historical moments have on descendants of those involved. Where and when might responsibility end? Does it ever? Is it altogether unintentional that Pressler leads imaginative readers beyond the Nazi era and into a nightmare of genocide and displacement going back over centuries, on all continents, involving many disparate groups of people.
Joanna broods on the question of responsibility, and on a related question of the possibility of setting things right.
History may bite both ways, either side of whatever arbitrary social divide might be established. We learn that Joanna’s grandmother had also committed suicide. That was years ago but remains one more part of a family history that nobody wants to think, let alone talk about.
The knowledge this schoolgirl is acquiring is upsetting her equilibrium at the same time as a sexual self awareness is developing. A second, intertwined story concerning her relationship with a boyfriend is established as an acerbic counterpoint. This may be a novel written for teenagers but it’s a read for people of all ages. Few novels presenting themselves to adult travellers at international airport bookshops attempt to connect with troubling histories in such an affecting manner.
The Book
Pressler, Mirjam: Let sleeping dogs lie / translated by Erik J. Macki – Front Street, 2007. - 208 pages ISBN: 1-932425-84-5 Original title: Die Zeit der schlafenden Hunde (German)
