Book Review — The Memory Chalet (Tony Judt)
A memoir of Tony Judt, The Memory Chalet moves from his previous academic style writings into a warmer personal focus. These autobiographical essays chart past remembrances of his youth in London, life as a student in King’s College, and fragments of global endeavors across Europe and the United States. Well-read and eloquent with the training of a historian, the author crafts compelling reflections on public civility and comparisons of world cities — embellished with literary citations, statistics, and personal anecdotes. The Memory Chalet broadens the cultural, philosophical, and literary horizons of readers through his autobiographical fragments.
Tony Judt suffered from the decline of ALS, a disease of which patients becomes confined to bed in the end of their days. “Gone are the refreshing walks where ideas and sequences fall into place, gone too are the productive exchanges with friends — even at the midpoint of ALS decline, the victim is usually thinking faster than he can form words, so that conversations become partial, frustrating, and ultimately self-defeating.” His solution? Tony Judt scrolls through the past remembrances of life — the chanced upon events, people, or narratives that “he can employ to divert his mind from the body in which it is encased.”
I particularly enjoyed his narratives on world cities, his Czech learning trajectory, and analysis of French intellectuals. These narratives were an enjoyable as we connect his multicultural identity with his foundations in literature, philosophy, and history. Tony Judt does not shy away from flaunting obscure French texts, citing literary masterpieces, and adding analytical detail to such personal reflections. Reading this memoir is a delight, and a good introduction to his well-known work, Postwar.
Childhood memories
The author has a love of railways, enjoying his time in solitude riding from one station to the next, observing the peculiarities of station layouts, and fascinated by the technology and architecture of railways. “Solitude was a bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful — wherever I was there was something to do, someone to please, a duty to be completed, a role inadequately fulfilled: something amiss. Becoming, on the other hand, was relief. I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven.”
Middle Age Crisis and learning Czech
German language learning stands out as one of the author’s profound memories from school, with the language taught from an extremely strict teacher. “I spent two years having the German language driven mercilessly into me. He was the best teacher I ever had; and being well taught is the only thing worth remembering from school.” Another significant language immersion of his came around middle age. He makes an interesting linkage between his Czech endeavors and his way of learning German back in his school days. “Other men change wives. Some change cars. Some change gender. The point of a midlife crisis is to demonstrate continuity with one’s youth by doing something strikingly different. I was going to learn Czech. And so, beginning in the early 1980s, I learned a new language. I began by purchasing Teach Yourself Czech. Its method was old-fashioned and thus reassuringly familiar: page upon page of grammar, with the emphasis on the complicated conjugations and declensions of the Slavonic family of languages, in short, just the way I had been taught German.”
The Czech language immersion introduced unprecedented perspectives and connections to his research in European history. Through immersions in Poland, Tony Judt connected with his East European Jewish past, and delved into Czech literature. “Learning Czech, in other words, made me a very different sort of scholar, historian, and person. I prefer the distinctively Czech qualities of doubt, cultural insecurity, and skeptical self-mockery.” According to the author, his Czech adventures made him a more credible public intellectual and ultimately gave birth to his masterpiece, Postwar. A rare immersion of the pasts of Eastern and Western Europe, Postwar is an immersion of integrated research of two halves into a common history. Czech language granted him cultural fluency in Eastern Europe, and this personal pursuit opened doors to his professional endeavors.
Endeavors in the United States
Tony Judt explores his multi-cultural identity thorough his global endeavors across Europe and the United States. “America is not everyone’s destination of choice. America was thus intensely familiar — and completely unknown. Before coming here, I had read Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and some of the extraordinary short-story writers of the South. Moreover, born like most Europeans in a country I could cross on foot in a matter of days, I had absolutely no grasp of the sheer scale and variety of the place.” The scale of landscapes and the greatness of American universities — facilities, resources, and ambitions — were allures that are filed with contradictions and curiosities. “For a long time, I toyed with the option of returning to teach in Europe — but it was in America that I felt most European. I was hyphenated: two decades after landing in Boston, I had become an American.”
Multicultural identity and world cities
In the end of the memoir, the author shares a few sentimental reflections on world cities, public civility, and personal identity. He enjoys the diversity of New York — its distinctive appeal lies precisely in its cantankerous relationship to the metropolitan territory beyond.
“Home, they say, is where the heart is. I’m not so sure. I’ve had lots of homes and I don’t consider my heart to be attached very firmly to any of them. What is meant, of course, is that home is wherever you choose to place it — in which case I suppose I’ve always been homeless: many decades ago I left my heart somewhere on a Swiss mountainside, but the rest of me has foolishly failed to follow.”
For me, it is the author’s mosaic of global experiences that made reading his worldview interesting. “The memory Chalet” is a mélange of cultural immersion, literary foundations, and historical understanding pieced together in short retrospections of different life stages. For Ton Judt, most places hold mixed memories, “I cannot think of Cambridge or Paris or Oxford or New York without recalling a kaleidoscope of encounters and experiences.”
