HEDDY AND ME

Memoir by Susan Varga, 1994

Heddy and Me (1994) is a collaborative autobiography that literally grew out of a narrative contract between a mother and daughter. Susan Varga had been reluctant to probe their European past, but in early 1990 she found to her surprise that, in fact, her mother, Heddy, wanted to talk about it, indeed had been "waiting for Susan" to help her do so. She wanted to talk not only about her life in hiding with the children during the Holocaust but also about being raped by Russian soldiers and much else. As the conversation proceeded, it became clear that for the daughter the issue of the Holocaust was inseparable from the issue of her relationship with her mother. The Holocaust had heavily shaped that relationship, and the process of exploring the catastrophe together—of seeing it from a relational vantage point—enabled the mother-daughter bond to mature. It allowed them to shed some of the tensions and misunderstandings that had impeded their relationship.

Varga began recording her mother's recollections in March 1990. At that point she was 47, and Heddy was 73. The sessions lasted for six months, after which they met with Gyuszi, Varga's stepfather, and her partner, Anne Coombs, in Hungary. The narrative interleaves four principal time perspectives. First is the period from Heddy's birth in 1916 to 1960, the point at which the narrative ends, bringing Heddy to age 44 and her daughter to age 17. Second is the present of the interview, the account of which includes commentary about the two women's experience of the narrating situation and about the way it impinges on their already complex relationship. Third is the post-interview return to Hungary, with its many probes into the memory of life before, during, and just after the war. Fourth is the writing present, which renders the interview phase and the return to Hungary as parts of the past the women share and provides a perspective from which the various pasts, together with the evolution of the torn but fond mother-daughter relationship , can be accorded a kind of provisional summation.

As Varga's early warning to her mother makes clear, this is not a simple story of the life of a mother-as-survivor: "I've told her it won't be her life story, not properly. It will be filtered through my reactions and thoughts, my second generation eyes." These "second generation eyes" belong to one for whom being a daughter involves a kind of existential doubleness: she is a daughter who seems to ascribe enormous causal power to the mother-daughter bond, but she is also a particular kind of daughter—the daughter of a Holocaust survivor. The book's epilogue provides a final and decisive twist. Varga tells of attending a conference called "Child Survivors of the Holocaust" and of its transformative impact on her. She writes of going to the conference: "I went as a member of the second generation. I came home a member of the first. I was there." She was not just the child of a survivor but a survivor herself, a child survivor. This put her in a dramatically revised relation to herself and to Heddy. Of the baby she was during the war, she says, "I know who she is now. She is a child who survived the War, at the outer edges of the Holocaust. I can trace her through who I am now. She is my fears, my sense of displacement, my omnipresent sense of threat. She is also my resilience and accommodation, my will to find meaning and to make things work." After the trip to Hungary, Varga writes, "Only recently have I started to think of Heddy and myself as part of something bigger." That something, of course, is the Holocaust. Toward the end of the return trip she senses "a new ease, born of something shared, between Mother and me." The book's title is Heddy and Me, but the newfound sense of internal coherence and the commonality that has emerged through narrative collaboration occasion a change in Varga's use of the first-person pronoun. The last line of the book is "We have things in common, Heddy and I."

Heddy and Me is a distinguished, intense, somber, and carefully researched and structured work of personal and historical inquiry. Its concern with the Holocaust extends to such issues as the Jewish migrant experience in Australia, gender relations, and the nature of memory.

—Richard Freadman