FORGOTTEN NIGHT, Rebecca Goodman. Spuyten Duyvil, 223 Bedford Ave. PMB #725, Brooklyn, NY 11211, 2023, 300 pages, $20 paper, www.spuytenduyvil.net.
Each space a contemplation of the illusionary night. Dusk must meet night and night must meet dawn. The space between night and dawn may seem still, forgotten, suspended, but nothing about night can be forgotten once darkness meets light. Rebecca Goodman’s Forgotten Night embarks on a journey of remembrance.
The narrator, whose name we never learn, is on a journey, one that is propelled by retracing the path of her grandfather’s World War I diary through France where villages, once at war, remain, resonant. The intangible spaces of time reflect a place where the presence of memory [is] shifting inside [her] in order to meaningfully construct the realities of the past, the present, and the future. Her journey, time fractured, is existential as much as it is physical.
Driven by the deep desire to understand her grandfather, the narrator’s experiences throughout the work encompass broader themes as they relate to war and the Holocaust, identity, relationships, violence and society and their expression in art. What moves us to understand the things we do not and cannot understand? the narrator asks. We attempt to answer her question by identifying these themes throughout the work depicted in sobering scenes. The narrator befriends an artist whose work explores the liminal space between the human and the animal; she is at the Museum of Torture trapped in a medieval torture room, where, in a surreal reenactment, an inquisitor tries to force her to confess to the “crime” of being Jewish; she visits the Isenheim Altarpiece depicting the Crucifixion of Christ; she attends a village festival that abruptly becomes so violent, grotesque, intolerant, and antisemitic that she flees.
We enter memory in a space of suspension between the narrator and her memory, between the narrator and history’s memory, between the narrator and the memory of the present. In the absen[ce] of time and space memory floats, returning wave-like. Each encounter turns to reflect that which is no longer there. Motivated to understand her past, history, and her present (personal, social, cultural, and in art) she explores how they connect to her sense of self, her place, and the role of others. In so vividly opening the past we see what had become invisible. The reader is introduced to the invaluable space of bearing witness from unstable points of view: blurred moments that erased the space we stood in moments where [she] was ensconced in a language [she] could not understand—but feel. Words breaking apart mid-air. Fractured into letters, consonants, vowels. Symbols, punctuation marks. Broken into images, sounds, birdcalls, wind. The reader’s struggle parallels the narrators. We must arrive to discover.
What moves us to understand the things we do not and cannot understand?
Goodman provides us with a space to contemplate how we connect to those that came before us, their sacrifices, how we connect to those around us, and how we connect to those who yet do not exist. As the narrator recaptures thought in the nuances of wine and recaptures emotion in the notes of Mendelssohn’s piano concerto No.1, they culminate seamlessly in one of her final conversations with a filmmaker who echoes the sentiment of her journey in his own creative work: I’ve recorded a moment in history, a moment in time. My memory. My landscape. I’ve been working toward this my whole life.
The significance of experience in what exists, what used to be and what will take its place becomes transparent. What remains? Goodman takes us through a feeling of space, of time, the essence one can’t explain but feels, in order to value the human experience and the interrelation of understanding each other. Forgotten Night is the process of memory that wakes up to the light in order not to be forgotten.
Linda Kalaj was born to parents who emigrated from Montenegro and was raised in both the United States and in Arona in northern Italy. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from Chapman University and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in government with a focus in international relations and a minor in creative writing from St. John’s University. Her stories, translations, poetry, and essays have been published in such journals as: Mantis (Stanford University), Aldus, a Journal of Translation (Brown University), The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review (Johns Hopkins University), and pacific REVIEW (San Diego State University).