Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep

Sunny S. Yudkoff reviews “Gretel and the Great War," Adam Ehrlich Sachs’s new abecedarian WWI novel.

By Sunny S. YudkoffAugust 5, 2024

• Fiction

IF YOU’RE THE PARENT of a young child, you’re likely familiar with the abecedarian form. It’s the technical name for a poem in which the first word of each successive line runs from A to Z; in Dr. Seuss’s ABC (1963), for instance, the primer starts by introducing an “alligator” and a “barber” and ends with the “yawning yellow yak” and the pink-and-white-checkered “Zizzer-Zazzer-Zuzz.” Though the form is perhaps most popular with the under-six crowd, its constraints and mnemonic possibilities have long intrigued writers, from medieval Hebrew poets and Geoffrey Chaucer to Randall Mann and Elizabeth Kolbert.

Lately, there appears to be a renewed interest among prose writers. This February, Sheila Heti published Alphabetical Diaries to widespread acclaim. With touches of mania and wit, the book culls selections from Heti’s personal writing to create a narrative driven forward by the first letter of each sentence. It’s a mode of life-writing that belies chronology and intrigues through juxtaposition: “Don’t end up in Paris, end up somewhere cheap. Don’t evoke by magic, but do the thinking, do the work.” And, several don’ts later—“Don’t forget that although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.” 

In Heti’s hands, that readerly experience is enhanced by the particulars of her chosen form, the simultaneity of its predictability and the possibility of its absurdity, its signature childishness as well as its classificatory function. The abecedarian form allows authors to grapple with ethical, philosophical, and aesthetic issues, all in a space of organized mischief.

This is the genre in which Adam Ehrlich Sachs positions his most recent novel, Gretel and the Great War, published this June. Unlike Heti, Sachs does not draw material from his diaries. Instead, he takes his cues from his bookshelf. This fabulously, disturbingly smart work offers us a glimpse into Sachs’s reading habits—the works he zealously venerates and the authors he admiringly rivals.

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Gretel and the Great War opens in 1919, when a young woman, the eponymous Gretel, is found wandering Vienna alone. Unable to speak, she is taken into the care of a doctor. The first thing the doctor does is work to discover who the young girl is. “Since she could not say who she was or what had happened to her,” the narrator explains, “he welcomed correspondence from anyone with information about her past.” The sole person to respond is a man who claims to be her father. At the time of his writing, this man is confined to a Carinthian sanatorium under the care of one “Dr. Krakauer.” The father-claimant writes to Gretel’s doctor and requests that he read the girl a bedtime story each night. To facilitate the process, he sends 26 tales that come to comprise Sachs’s novel. The first to arrive is “The Architect of an Advanced Age at Last Builds an Abode …”; the last, “The Zionist Zigzags …”

Each droll, alphabetically organized tale centers on a character striving for creative genius in art, politics, or science (see, for example, the 12th tale: “The Lighting Technician Illuminates the Lieutenant’s Daughter …”). Yet none of these characters stands alone. Individuals reappear in subsequent chapters, their narratives expanded and brought into focus by the stories of others. After all, this is the interconnected world of the late Habsburg Empire, where stories about prima ballerinas, talented toy makers, and bomb-making obstetricians dovetail with anecdotes about the exploits of European nobility, the allure of political radicalism, and the callous dismissal of Eastern European and Balkan culture. Sachs’s novel opens onto a time and place where quests for artistic greatness exist alongside the violence of nationalism, the casual discourse of colonial racism, and the antisemitism of polite society. Where Dr. Seuss wrote about a “yawning yellow yak,” Sachs’s penultimate tale “The Yid’s Daughter Was No Longer Young …” hinges on a slur. Here, Gretel’s father is the demeaned individual, Gretel his grown child—and both of their lives overdetermined by prejudice.

Gretel’s home life holds traumas of its own. Consider the tale of her mother, who, it seems, finds herself unsatisfied by motherhood. In “The Mother Misses Music …” we learn that Gretel’s mother, following her daughter’s birth, slowly commits herself to music lessons and to the dream of performing onstage. As we’re repeatedly told, this goal is preposterous and incommensurate with her skill set. Yet the novel eventually reveals that she abandons her daughter to pursue her dream. The story evinces one of the arguments of the book—that cruelty, specifically parental cruelty, makes space for creativity.

What keeps the reader enthralled in such an unnerving text is Sachs’s tone. He has a disarming ability to interrupt a tragic tale with a well-placed wink. Consider the side narrative of the taxidermist in “The Neurologist Knows that the Naturalist Must Have Reduced His Daughter to Nothing …” Distracted by caring for his daughter, the titular naturalist fails to imbue his avian carcasses with the illusion of life. Only once he demands that his child be quiet does the heron he is stuffing achieve an animated luminosity, and it’s his sole work to be acquired by the Natural History Museum. For her part, the naturalist’s daughter is rendered permanently mute—not unlike Gretel. In this way, Sachs’s novel suggests that creative expression necessitates the suppression of competing voices, particularly those of children. As one of the many fathers in the novel deadpans, “it is exhausting […] to have a child.”

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The vexed nature of parent-child relationships is a hallmark of Sachs’s writing. His phenomenal Inherited Disorders: Stories, Parables & Problems (2016) presents 117 absurd vignettes that each explore a different son’s attempt to navigate the legacy of his respective father. There’s the Austrian nature poet whose writing is consistently read as meditation on the murderous acts of his Nazi father. (His solution is to write a poem about a massacre—which is then lauded as “an elegant evocation of a fern.”) Elsewhere in the collection, a British philosophy professor is unable to shake the urge to think like a chimney sweep, the job of his father and his father’s father before him. (Eventually, he sweeps himself to death; his body is found in a narrow flue.) Sachs’s second book, The Organs of Sense (2019)—also meticulously crafted and thoroughly comical—follows a blind astronomer who predicts a solar eclipse. Again, the larger concerns of the novel are various filial rebellions. (One of the astronomer’s first goals in life is to prove that his own father, the Imperial Sculptor, is a fool.) “I think family relationships are the only philosophical ones,” Sachs has said, “the only metaphysical ones.” The assertion plays out across his first two books as son after son tries to outdo, outsmart, or outperform his father.

In a seemingly slight but actually significant shift, Gretel and the Great War moves beyond father-son relations by engaging parent-daughter dynamics. What’s so compelling, even charming, about the text is that none of the novel’s many fathers fall into the trap of discovering tenderness simply because they raise girls. Similarly, Sachs’s mother figures avoid reduction to models of domestic bliss. In one of the tensest stories, a duchess goes on a hunting rampage after the birth of each of her seven children. (At one point, the book evokes genuine fear that this mother may aim her rifle at unsuspecting kindergarteners who run into a clearing—mercifully, she does not.)

What persistently gnaws at readers, what simultaneously frightens and enchants, is the idea—still largely transgressive—that having children renders a parent both insane and creatively stifled. Most of the parents in Sachs’s novel eventually find themselves confined to the same Austrian sanatorium from which Gretel’s father writes. And most of the parents, from Gretel’s mother to the taxidermist and the aristocratic hunter, find their artistic capacity limited. They yearn to express themselves, to find an outlet for their creativity and voice, but struggle—and often fail—to do so.

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Somewhat ironically, Sachs appears obsessed with asserting his own authorial voice. He demonstrates deep investment in the control that comes with the telling of a bedtime story, in meticulously building out an imaginary world where the stories of his various characters eventually intertwine. Gretel’s mother, for example, gets a starring role in the theater after the bomb set by the Duchess’s obstetrician explodes, wounding the main actress and the first three understudies. Occasionally, reading Sachs’s novel feels like undergoing an eye exam: as the narrator clicks through the lenses, present and previous texts appear anew. These shifts in focus can be clarifying; they can also be jarring. This dissonance feels anchored in the backdrop of World War I, the struggles of marginalized populations, and the rise of modernist art. The novel is set in a historical and aesthetic moment that radiates with anxiety and possibility alike.

Such tension ramifies in the abecedarian form. Alongside the characters, readers are caught in a literary space subject to the unbending rules of alphabetical order. Sachs’s brilliant genre choice traps his audience in a system that seems childlike and comfortable but also contains the building blocks of warfare. There’s no way to open Gretel and the Great War without anticipating the redolent violence of Grimms’ Fairy Tales. When one of the novel’s stories centers on a young girl who finds herself alone in a house with someone who may be a witch, it is impossible not to fear that she may be pushed into an oven and eaten.

But in “The Waif Wanders Through the World …” she isn’t. The older woman feared to be a witch is actually a nurturing figure who believes she was traumatized and set against her family by a “clever doctor.” Of course, Sachs is obviously alluding to—and pushing back on the expectations set by—“Hansel and Gretel.” Yet the move is more than a straightforward inversion. It’s a gesture to the power of doctors to manipulate patients’ narratives. Avatars of Freud constantly peek out from the text, sometimes to be criticized but more often to undermine any sense of security the reader takes in believing one story to be truer than the next.

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Alongside Freud, the novel boils over with allusions to figures of German-language prose, medical science, cultural theory, and Jewish history. Recall that Sachs’s subjects are committed to the care of a Dr. Krakauer, whose Weimar predecessor—Siegfried Kracauer, with a C—lurks in the background whenever characters enter a hotel or a theater. And where the book pushes reason to its limits, Gretel and the Great War echoes the work of Thomas Bernhard, whose “deranged conceptual analysis” Sachs cites as inspiration.

The most obvious literary forefather of Sachs’s novel, though, is Kafka. “Herr K.” is named as the factory owner in “The Revolutionary Reveals Herself to Be a Revisionist in Her Own Right …” And Sachs begins “The Father, a Former Physiologist, Finds Fellow Feeling—If Only Fleetingly—with the Former Physicist …” by extending the alliteration into the opening line: “Father Franz occupies the room beside mine.” Kafka’s evident paternal influence extends to Sachs’s precise diction and the judiciously incongruous plot points that move the novel forward. Readers familiar with the Prague novelist’s work will find many moments where they cannot help feeling that they’ve heard the voice of Gretel and the Great War before.

This is where Sachs demonstrates the full force of the novel’s abecedarian form. For as an author fixated on his authorial voice, Sachs must find his own way of speaking. He does so in two steps. First, he makes it clear that his writing has been heavily affected by his literary predecessors. Then, he works to manage and contain those influences. The chapter headings are one of his tools. The alphabetically arranged, alliterative titles ensure a constant awareness that we are in Sachs’s literary universe. These titles are sometimes mellifluous (“The Duchess Is Divided”) and sometimes clunky (see “The Father,” above). Both modes are purposeful. When a title hiccups, readers see Sachs engaged in the push-and-pull act of molding stories saturated by his literary antecedents to fit his scrupulously assembled system. In this way, we never forget that this work of 21st-century American literature, however referential, is not epigonic but, rather, uncannily at home in the tradition of German-language literature. In Sachs’s novel, Kafka meets Grimm, and together, they are prodded, lauded, and overtaken by Gretel.

Sachs transforms German and Austrian modernism, psychoanalysis, and criticism into a series of bedtime stories. As a result, Gretel’s readers become the children who, mute or otherwise, must keep quiet and listen. Yet if readers are the children, then Sachs is a kind of parent who now faces the same risks his characters do—that he will be stuck in the artistic labyrinth of his own making, that he will drown himself in the words of others, and that his texts will become the stuff of bedtime reading, recited only to induce sleep. Sachs confronts this dreaded possibility directly as he arrives at the end of the alphabet, reaching the story “The Zionist Zigzags …”

In a novel so carefully constructed, one that looks back to pre-Holocaust Europe with the knowledge of postwar history, there’s no such thing as “spoiling” the ending. But as the title of the final tale suggests, fairy tales can always become nightmares.