Carol Jacobs

Reading, Writing, Hatching

A is for Austerlitz. We need to start at the beginning. A is for Austerlitz and so many other names besides:02 for Agata Austerlizova his mother, and for Tereza03 Ambrosova, the archivist who brings him back to her, almost. A is for the family name of Maximilian Aychenwald, his father. We need to start at the beginning of an alphabet in which it is established that B follows A, as assuredly as beta its alpha, and as certainly as Buchenwald follows Aychenwald.04 We need to take as our point of departure those signs on which we depend to read, an alphabet that phonetically encodes and recapitulates the spoken word and promises other far-reaching powers of ordering as well. We need to relearn our A, B, C’s, to return to childhood, to bring it back from the shadows, to relive even the earliest moments in which speaking began, or at least to the time of an originary mother tongue, however squirrely that grasp of language might be. Isn’t this the point of W.G. Sebald’s book, as some of his readers insist: an account of “recovered memory” that retells the life story of Jacques Austerlitz?05