The expatriates

The German writer F. J. Zypald tells us in "The Expatriates" ("Dar Al-Tanweer" — translated by Amani Lazaar) various stories about the loss of places and belonging, which made his novel an elaborate and neutral description of the fates of cities and their inhabitants. The author distributes the forced migrations of Jews into four separate stories, written with a deep sense of melancholy, filled with abandonment, alienation, and terrifying sorrow. The novel takes the form of a long and continuous narration of pains that do not lose their sparkle even until the last page. The first story revolves around the idea that it is impossible to escape the pains caused by places after alienation from them, as Dr. Henry Sloane's complex will be defined in his memory. The man who left Lithuania at the age of seven to America, according to what expatriates with him believed, only to discover that the ship would land in England, where he studied then entered the field of medicine. But his ambition for study waned, so he left with a tour guide to the mountains, where the loss of that guide on a snowy slope will form an crisis similar to losing his homeland. Henry will be unable to express himself in both cases; it is the hardest moments of his life ever. He had bought a hunting rifle when he was young during his trip to India to work in medicine, and the first time he used it was with the intention of killing himself, when he sat on the edge of the bed and leaned the rifle on the ground, then shot himself. After living his life giving care to ideas, which whenever they became clearer, their mystery doubled; the retreat of love and passion for horses, the dead who return, and the living who go to their days, bringing back the past life of Dr. Sloane was a reason for impact, and the author made his death scene the climax of that life. Similarly, the second story proceeds about teacher Paul Berrater. The man who did not wear his coat for forty years, finally wore it and stretched on the train tracks, committing suicide in that violent manner. He imagined that trains headed toward death, after they were a means of deporting Jews from Vienna, as happened with his beloved Hélène, coinciding with his being prevented from teaching despite his desire to educate children at any cost. Berrater was known for the "practical lessons" he offered, to the extent that he asked the narrator when he was a student in his class to remove his wool sweater so he could draw the confident deer depicted on it, and he boiled a dead fox, causing terror among his neighbors to gather its skeleton with his students, and took them on scientific trips to laboratories, workshops, and archaeological cemeteries. Paul, who despises hypocrisy and Catholic piety and leaves the village on Sundays, will build a good relationship with plants, cats, and roosters. He spent his days in enchanting solitude, contemplating the mountains from the windows and suffering from claustrophobia. But his life deteriorated from happiness to misery until he devoted himself to reading the works of suicidal writers. His striking joy regarding others actually made him "depression itself." The writer includes images from albums of real people during the narration, using those images to make the scenes of the characters appear realistic in the novel. In the third story, which revolves around his maternal uncle Ambrose Adelfart, the narrator pushed Adelfart to travel to America due to an urgent need to explore the lives of the people in the photos, his family from his mother. Adelfart arrived in America before World War I and worked in its best houses before becoming the head servant in the Solomon family, forming a tragic sense of relationship with the wealthy family’s son, who suffered from a destructive mental illness. After many years and journeys that included Japan, Europe, and Jerusalem, during which they played in casinos or explored places, the uncle himself underwent psychotherapy that led to a complete and definitive loss of his ability to remember and think. While longing to tell his life story, he will lose the ability to express himself, sitting at his desk and looking at the ground, before dying of a stroke while reading the newspaper. The fourth story is consistent with the previous ones about painter Max Ferber, who alternates with the narrator in recounting his life and his mother's life through her memoirs. Max's residence was divided between Manchester, Switzerland, and London, between compulsory service and artistic work, moving from one abyss to another. He works diligently to the point of tears, hiding his Jewish origins like the rest of the characters in most of the novel, while suffering with his family from deportation trains that made them a long lineage of faces inherited from him, robbed of belonging. The narrator notes the insistence of Jews on their names, which are linked with intense intimacy to the country that has never ceased to expel them and strip them of their properties. Ferber will end up in a hospital after a lung disease, like many characters who leave behind their sorrows on the pages. The narrator traces that grief, adding one story to another to create a literature that advocates for the subject and gives birth to a narrative form of treatment. Thus, Zypald wove his novel from pure longing and burning pain, saturated with an invincible will to defeat. And just as "expatriates seek their doppelgängers," Zypald narrated similar lives that only differ in details of loss.