The Teacher

No one knew the story of Elsa Weiss’s life. She was a respected English teacher at a Tel Aviv high school, but she remained aloof and never tried to be friendly with her students. She concentrated on teaching her students, but refused to educate them, or try to affect their futures, or to shape their consciences or their consciousness. No one ever encountered her outside of school hours.  She was a riddle, and yet the students sensed that they were all she had. When Elsa killed herself by jumping off the roof of her apartment building, she remained as unknown as she had been during her life.

Thirty years later, the narrator of the novel, one of her students, decides to solve the riddle of Elsa Weiss. In retrospect, she realizes that she had learned a fateful lesson from her, a lesson for life. But what was that lesson? What had her teacher taught her? This is where the dizzying journey at the heart of Ben-Naftali’s novel begins. Expertly dovetailing explosive historical material with flights of imagination, the novel traces the footprints of a Holocaust survivor who did her utmost to leave no footprints. The lesson she taught is revealed to be an intricate code, and by gradually deciphering it the narrator comes to some of the most tumultuous junctions in the history of the twentieth century.

The narrator invents a fictional biography for Elsa. She describes her childhood in Hungary, her journey to Paris, her marriage, her experiences after the German invasion of Hungary, how she was taken on the highly controversial “rescue train,” first to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and then to Switzerland; how she decided to remain silent and to leave no trace of who she had been. But the narrator hears her teacher’s wordless scream and creates a life for her. Writing it down is a way to save her from oblivion.