What lies behind that most mysterious of gates

“Memory is circular,” Mark Baker wrote, in the introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of The Fiftieth Gate, “and in its circularity, connects to other stories that have unfolded in the past two decades since the publication of this book. It is up to us – he continued - to find ways of bringing light into the dark places of the world – be it Cambodia, Rwanda, Srebrenica, Darfur or Syria – and to find new understandings of what lies behind that most mysterious of gates where all of us inhabit the one room”.

I am here to talk about fact and fiction in The Fiftieth Gate, and it’s a testament to that book’s enduring greatness that everything that can be said on that specific topic applies equally to the universal human experience of meaning-making.

It is also a testament to the book that it defies genre. Like its author, its concerns are too universal, its hard-won insights too personal, and the form of their expression too authentic and original, to fit into the oversimplified demands of a pre-determined, one-size-fits-all, externally-policed identity.

At the same time, it’s true that our vocation is also a trade, and in the book industry genre matters. So I’ll say a few words to locate this book in the publishing landscape.

The Fiftieth Gate can be variously described as memoir, biography, autobiography and history.  All are forms of non-fiction.

When factual material – for example, archival sources, quantitative data, qualitative data like interviews and direct observation – is presented using the techniques traditionally identified with fiction – like, dialogue, dramatic scenes, changes of authorial perspective – we call that form of factual writing narrative non-fiction or creative non-fiction.

It does not mean you are creative with the facts but rather that you are creative with the form of their expression or communication.

As writers of creative non-fiction, the contract we uphold with our readers is this: Everything I tell you is true. However, some of us reserve the right to go off the path of strict verification - and even into the realm of imagination - at the service of truth, but we will do so honestly, signalling to you when that is happening.

And yet. There are critics and authors who will tell you that, regardless of your candour, your frankness - this is unacceptable. These are people who say that if you even change a single name to protect someone’s privacy you have departed forever from the realm of non-fiction. My personal and professional opinion is that such a militant stance infantilises the reader and impoverishes the genre. 

I believe that Mark – who made the genre deeper and richer, and whose honesty, integrity, meticulousness and respect for the reader are evident on every page of this book – would agree.

The Fiftieth Gate is a factual book. It is one concerned with history as truth, and truth as a conversation between generations, and between oneself and others, but - as a matter of first principles – as a conversation we have with ourselves.

As in the work of Martin Buber, it is this form of encounter with “the other” – the other person, the other idea, the other part of us yearning for things to be different – which moves The Fiftieth Gate’s narrative. Mark talking to each of his parents, Mark talking to the reader, Mark talking to himself.

This is conversation as excavation, confrontation, negotiation and always, connection. It is conversation as the means of transcending opposing forces – like fact and fiction – to create something new, and better.

The facts aid our search for accurate, truthful stories, but facts alone are simply the particulate components which comprise an undifferentiated mountain of information about the past.

In the fields of law and psychology, history and biography, we accept the fundamental difference between the facts and the possible stories we can make from them, as well as the ineradicable presence of absence, in the form of agreed and unresolvable unknowns. In this way, no matter how diligent the writer, ALL non-fiction is inescapably partial and selective.

In The Fiftieth Gate Mark is always present, reminding us of the filter through which the information is being run (that is, his mind and his heart). By personalising the story in this way, he universalises its concerns.

It is a lie to say that being honest about – and, more so, making use of – our inherent subjectivity pollutes the veracity of factual narrative when such candour only increases an author’s reliability. And it does so by unlocking the gate – to use Mark’s metaphor – to other ways of knowing; those interior dimensions of human experience which breathe life into cold facts.

“Does history remember more than memory?” Mark, the historian, asks himself mid-way through the book, berating himself for questioning his mother, Genia, once again in an effort at verifying a part of her story. “Why am I calling her? Won’t she recognise the shameful truth, that I doubted her, that I never believed her, that I only recognise suffering in numbers and lists and not in the laments and pleas of a human being, of a mother, screaming for acknowledgment?”

Objective rationality – to the extent that it exists – is not the historian’s only tool. The interior world of personal memory is its own emotional and psychological truth. So too, empathetic imagination – that ability we each have to discern the contours of another’s devastating experience. As Genia says at one point in response to his unrelenting quest for certainty: “You read, you read. Books, books, everywhere. But do you know how it feels?”

Through the medium of its author wondering and reporting from the library of Yad Vashem, the library of his family, the library of himself, The Fiftieth Gate draws on the unique powers of both fact and fiction by getting as close as humanly possible to that experience of feeling.

Mark achieves that at many different points but perhaps most strikingly by imagining himself into his grandmother’s final moments – on the train to Treblinka, with two of her children, and what happened to them in their final moments of life before they were murdered.

“Once I had imagined myself on the train with my grandmother and her two daughters,” he later explained, “I was struck by the limitations of language to portray the terror of their journey.” Reading those passages, you feel the limitations of language but also their opposite. You see, by calling on every intellectual and emotional resource he possessed, Mark created so many finely-rendered moments which evoke the weight and depth of those private – and forever lost- horrors.

This may be the highest form of history writing because it shows us why it matters. And Mark achieved that by nobly – and wisely – refusing to reflexively privilege the sterile facts that filmmaker Werner Herzog derisively referred to as “the truth of accountants” over the lived experiences of emotional reality.

In Mark’s words, again from the 2017 introduction:

“As a son and as a historian, I wanted to record my parents’ memories, while also giving expression to the wider context of murder that can be obscured by survivor narratives. And so I turned not only to their testimonies, but also to archival documents, historical monographs and eyewitness accounts. I wrote alternative endings to highlight the randomness of life and death. I reconfigured ancient tales of hell. But eventually I hit a dead end—the place where memory ends. That is the point at which I made the leap into fiction—not fiction as fabrication, but as an act of empathy, so that I could recreate for my parents the last journey of their murdered families.”

He did so in a way that paid tribute to the discomfiting limits of where one person ends and another begins. In that way, the book illuminates the contours of the mystery that will remain forever locked inside each unique life and especially those impacted, or lost to, horror.

By drawing on all forms of human knowing, Mark crafted a text as spacious as the past itself – a room large enough for song lyrics and testimony, poetry and gas chambers, accounting and dreaming, trauma and redemption, and stories told in many voices, many registers.

This is a book which asks us to look again at what we consider to be fact and what we consider to be fiction – an invitation to be curious about our protective assumptions and defences.

Returning to the book for this session, I was struck by its enduring freshness and relevance. And by that sense of its narrative as an ongoing conversation – one that enacts the idea that that Fiftieth Gate is not a perfect place but rather a messy and difficult perpetual process – one which requires us to struggle towards a better accommodation with the past, the present, and a shared future. That idea is quintessentially Jewish, in my opinion it is true Torah, and it is also universally human. It is an idea that has infinite potential to connect us – rather than alienate us from each other.

In this book, and across his output, Mark led by example about what it will take to reach those “new understandings of what lies behind that most mysterious of gates where all of us inhabit the one room”.

And the fact that we here in this room today because of him is just one of many indications that he was not wrong.

This article is a reprint of the speech given at Melbourne Jewish Book Week.