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True to the Text
| Article
# : |
18765 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1991 |
3,040 Words |
| Author
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Albert Wilhelm
Albert Wilhelm is professor of English at Tennessee
Technological University and a former Fulbright lecturer in
Seoul, Korea. |
THE TRANSLATOR
Ward Just
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991
313 pp., $21.95
At the age of twenty-one, Sydney van Damm arrives on a day train from Hamburg at the Paris Gare du Nord. As he steps from the still-moving train, the young expatriate tosses his unread German newspaper into a trash can, lights a Gauloise, and extends a hand to greet his new American friend. This simple but revealing sequence of actions suggests that Sydney is casting off his painful German heritage, tasting the freedom of French culture, and establishing a tentative connection with America that will in time control his fate.
Van Damm is the main character in Ward Just's new novel The Translator. Born in the German village of Ilsensee, Sydney emerges from childhood as Allied bombs destroy his homeland and Nazi officers arrest his father. In 1956, as Soviet troops suppress Hungarian freedom fighters, he abandons his country and his disapproving mother to travel to France. Sydney meets his American wife as the Vietcong capture Saigon in 1975, and while the Berlin Wall crumbles in 1989, he becomes enmeshed in a dangerously illegal arms deal in East Germany. Although Sydney is certainly not a major actor in the grand historical events that punctuate his life he cannot escape their consequences. Such events propel Sydney into a cosmopolitan but troubled life and allow Just to explore the theme of personal identity and its connections with one's family, homeland, and history.
For Ward Just this practice of placing a fictional character in the arena of national or international politics is hardly new. Just grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, and worked briefly as a reporter for the family-owned Waukegan News-Sun. Chafing under the control of his publisher father Just secured a job with Newsweek that sent him to report on the civil strife in Cyprus. Later assigned to the magazine's Washington bureau Just became a close associate of Benjamin Bardlee and eventually moved with him to the Washington Post. From this unique vantage point Just observed the political intrigues and personal tragedies that would later became the foundation for much of his fiction. An assignment in Vietnam in 1966 provided even more dramatic experiences (including severe injuries from shrapnel during a firefight near Dak Tho) and led Just to write two highly praised works of nonfiction--To What End: Report from Vietnam and Military Men.
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