The Clothes on Their Backs

The Clothes on Their Backs By Linda Grant Scribner 2008, $14, pp. 304

The Oxford English Dictionary contains the noun Rachmanism, which it defines as “the exploitation and intimidation of tenants by unscrupulous landlords.” The word pays a sort of homage to its namesake, Peter Rachman. A Polish Jew who made his way to England after surviving World War II as a slave laborer in Siberia, Rachman earned both his fortune and his notoriety buying up housing in the Notting Hill section of London, ousting longtime white tenants and installing West Indian immigrants at exorbitant rents.

Now, in the form of Linda Grant’s fine novel The Clothes on Their Backs, the late Peter Rachman (1919-1962) has inspired more than an insulting adjective. Grant has transmuted Rachman into the fictional Sandor Kovacs and switched his nationality from Polish to Hungarian, but otherwise hews closely to the historical record. Like the real thing, her Kovacs is a reviled slumlord inclined to extravagant parties and black lovers. And he is, not coincidentally, a Jew, a certain kind of Jew who appears to ratify the anti-Semitic stereotype of a rapacious businessman.

One of the many achievements of this novel, with its mixture of toughness and generosity, is its ability to inhabit and roundly humanize Kovacs without exculpating or falsely ennobling him. Kovacs embodies the will to survive, and he reminds us that survival isn’t about being nice or idealistic, as so much of the art and popular culture about the Holocaust would have us believe.

“People who like to hear the truth don’t know nothing about the truth,” Kovacs says at one point. “Truth would make them sick if they knew it.” Later in the book, he declares, “Do you understand why your ideas about what is decent, and respect, and equality are for babies?”

Kovacs delivers these outbursts to his niece, Vivien, though he does not initially know she is his niece. In an uncharacteristically clunky bit of literary machinery, Grant has Vivien pretend to be an aspiring writer Sandor hires to write down his autobiography. Ultimately, he realizes that his Boswell is actually the daughter of his estranged brother, who had cut off virtually all contact during Vivien’s girlhood when Sandor went to prison.

Despite the contrived plotting, Grant renders the emotional dynamics of the family with unforced incision. While Sandor has chosen to live large—Vivien as a child was transfixed by the sight of her uncle in a mohair suit, suede shoes and diamond bracelet, accompanied by a black girlfriend in a leopard-skin coat—his brother has tried to fit into England by making himself small. He occupies an inconspicuous apartment and holds an inconsequential job. He changes the spelling of his surname to Kovaks to avoid being tied to Sandor, and he has Vivien baptized. But Vivien’s father can never shake the sense of himself as an outsider.

His timidity only succeeds in driving Vivien toward her rogue relative. The most significant passages of the novel have Sandor recounting his life to Vivien, and the saga becomes an object lesson in Jewish identity and a kind of pride. Early in the 20th century, Sandor’s father had hoped to secure the family’s place in Hungarian society by changing its surname from Klein to Kovacs and going to work for a German company in Budapest. He ends up fired when the fascist regime comes to power in the late 1930s. And while Sandor’s brother is fortunate enough to have immigrated to England by then, Sandor remains in Hungary to fend for himself as a slave laborer. Sandor uses his guile to traffic in black market goods while detailed to dig trenches and clear minefields. He is even able to trade coveted ration books to peasants for the deeds to their homes.

The installation of the Communist regime after the war puts Sandor out of this capitalist line of work, but when he flees across the border to Vienna in the late 1950s and is resettled as a refugee in London, he quickly puts the practiced muscles back to use. He portrays himself to Vivien as the best friend of England’s postwar tide of Jamaican immigrants, the one who understands firsthand their disorienting sense of displacement, the one who will actually rent to them. “Everyone knew my name,” he boasts to Vivien, “the name of Sandor Kovacs was as familiar to them in those days as Duke Ellington or Sonny Liston.”

Grant’s point is not that Vivien should see Sandor as valorous, only that she see him as valid, as complicated and unapologetic. He, the shtarker, restores her to some kind of Jewishness. “A week ago, I too was a person without a history,” Vivien says after her first meetings with Sandor, “but my uncle had changed all that.”

Samuel Freedman teaches journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of six nonfiction books, including Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry.