Reading Guide for Mohr: A Novel by Frederick Reuss
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About Mohr: A Novel
In Mohr: A Novel, history is alive and ongoing, exalted and spotlighted as a parallel universe coexisting with the present, and in that transcends being a mere lesson and becomes an alluring mystery. Author Frederick Reuss had long been drawn to his family’s intricate, Holocaust-shadowed past. He studied pictures and teased out stories and ultimately focused his research and imagination on his uncle Max Mohr, a German writer and physician.
The book’s chapters, interspersed with old photos, draw a story of one family’s existence through quiet and unquiet times. Mohr lives a privileged life with his wife Kathe and little daughter Eva when the surge of pre-war anti-Semitism leads to the burning and denunciation of his literary works. With professed plans to eventually send for his family, he boards a ship to Shanghai. In China he finds a world as tormented as his own. And here Reuss conveys a poignant portrait of Shanghai in the 30s and grants the reader a close-up experience of its exciting and disturbing landscape of suffering and violence. Passage after passage captures the Third World’s strange knack for combining adventure with tragedy.
The doctor exile toils long hours in primitive conditions to help patients who suffer and die with ailments preventable and treatable in wealthier nations. Amidst the chaos, Mohr, an ambivalent husband to a loyal wife, becomes attracted to a Eurasian nurse.
Back in Germany his family lives with the preliminary spray propaganda and discrimination of the would-be exterminators. Kathe tries to feign normalcy and calmly move about with her little daughter. Yet she is being psychologically cornered by a gathering of swastikas everywhere she looks. She wonders, anxiously, when will her husband send for them?
Mohr feels guilty about delaying, but he has his own compelling situation there in Shanghai. Though he intended to travel ideologically incognito, he gets inadvertently identified with one of the region’s dangerous political factions. Adding to the tension, he finds he has not completely escaped the Third Reich. After all, Nazis travel, too.
Mohr: A Novel navigates down-to-earth issues—survival, love, fidelity, and estrangement— with a philosophically sophisticated compass. And Frederick Reuss reveals another hidden storyline in the broad, densely threaded fabric that is World War II. The book’s unique perspective, settings, and narrative give the reader the invigorating sense, that like Max Mohr, she is traveling someplace new.
Meet the Author
As a rule, I prefer not to comment on my own work. A novel – any piece of imaginative writing – speaks for itself; and as far as the author goes, the less said the better. What I can offer are a few thoughts on the manner in which I chose to tell this family story. The decision to write the story of Max Mohr as a novel was not difficult. The further I delved into Mohr’s life and times, the more I came to understand that history is narrative, an imaginative act in which the past is inscribed onto the present and given meaning. In writing the book, I had privileged access to rich and diverse materials – newspapers, books, films, private correspondence, oral histories and, finally, photographs. It was these last objects that focused my attention and concentrated my imagination most fully. More than anything else, they seemed at once to narrow and to increase the distance between me and those real people who once lived – _smaller and clearer as the years go by_, to quote Phillip Larkin. The opaqueness was lessened somewhat by research, but in the end it was clear to me that it could never be lifted. Paradoxically, I feel that in creating Max and Käthe and Eva Mohr as fictional characters, I have come to know them more intimately than had I “stuck to the facts.” Although I have taken the liberties of a novelist, I have tried not to intrude upon or offer facile explanations for those aspects of character that are hidden and unknowable. The story is, essentially, a true one, although I have chosen not to present it as factual truth. The past is _felt_ in the imagination, which doesn’t bother with facts. Rather than attempt to find answers, I have tried to imagine questions; and the central question – why Max Mohr left his wife and child behind – is one that can never be fully explained.
I don’t know when I first heard about Max Mohr. My grandfather spoke occasionally about his beloved “Onkel Max,” who had been a hero of his boyhood; but only in the context of faded German memory – his old Bavarian farmhouse, the World War One hero, wounded, taken prisoner by the English, decorated with the Iron Cross, uncle Max the mountain climber, uncle Max the champion skier. When, as a teenager, I mentioned my desire to become a writer, my grandfather became suddenly serious. “A writer! Vell, vell. Ve have a writer in the family, you know. Your great Onkel Max. He was a writer, a famous writer.” He would grin at me and rub his ever-aching knee. “Famous, your great Onkel Max.” After some more idle rubbing, and as if returning from some very private, distant place, he would add, “Luckily, he had a medical degree to fall back on.”
My grandfather only narrowly managed to get out of Germany with his wife and son in 1938. His mother (Mohr’s sister) and his father were killed in Theresienstadt in 1943.
Shortly before he left Germany for Shanghai, Max Mohr wrote to a friend: “Don’t trouble yourself about it, I have been totally forgotten; which is just fine with me. In fifty years maybe I’ll be re-discovered; but until then I’ll be hanging up in storage, quietly wiggling my ears.”
I am happy to have tried, in my own way, to make his premonition come true.
Questions
- If this book has a theme, what is it?
- Is this book primarily about the life of a complicated man, or is it about one person’s experience during the Holocaust?
- Were you surprised that the Jewish experience during the Holocaust extended to the shores of China? Why or why not?
- How does this book portray Shanghai in the 30s?
- How does it portray the Chinese of that time and their predicament?
- What impression does the story give of the Chinese communists? What impression does it give of their opponents?
- Do you find novels set in the Holocaust depressing? Why or why not?
- Morally, how would you judge Mohr? He provides free and low-cost medical help crucially needed by the poor, and he opens his home to war refugees. Yet he has an affair and fails to send for his wife and child even though they are in danger in Nazi Germany.
- Does the fact that Mohr has a heart attack explain his seemingly selfish actions? Does it perhaps indicate how crushed he was by Nazi persecution and his subsequent difficult exile? Does it make his transgressions more forgivable?
- It seems this is a book partly about the complexity of marriage. Why does Mohr have an affair with Agnes despite Kathe’s loyalty and devotion to him?
- Mohr believes that love cannot coexist with understanding. Does he mean passion and compassion do not mix when it comes to relationships between men and women? If so, do you think this belief has merit?
- Was Agnes’ and Mohr’s relationship a matter of casual sex or did he truly need to be with her?
- Do you believe that Mohr, as he states, no longer cares about politics? Why or why not?
- Does it seem that Kathe knows of his affair with Agnes? Why or why not?
- This book seems as much about Mohr's identity as a writer and a Jew as his being a father and husband. Discuss.
- Did reading this book feel like you were reading a novel or a biography? Does it matter?
- What part do you think the author’s family photographs play in the quality of the book and your being able to imagine the story? Do the pictures add to your experience. If so, why? If not, why not?
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