Glorious People – Sasha Salzmann

[Pushkin Press; 2024]

Tr. from the German by Imogen Taylor

Once I lived in a Romanian city called Cluj-Napoca. “Napoca” was the name of the Roman fort that had occupied the site; “Cluj” was the Romanian name. The combination was intended to stress the antiquity of the settlement. The Hungarian population of the city, about one eighth of the total, called the city “Kolozsvar,” which is also the name you will find on old Austro-Hungarian maps of the region. Germans, residents of the city since medieval times, called it “Klausenburg.” Names proliferate. Tides of political ferment, migration, and economic change sweep over cities and countries. The names accrue rather than replace one another. None of these names are quite current, none are quite dead.

I like this tacit acknowledgement of the city’s changeability. Cities are more than political subdivisions. They are natural monuments in their own right, as solid and physically imposing as mountains. A city bereft of its name would still be a city. Likewise, people are more than their present selves. Like cities, they endure tides of political ferment, migration, economic change. And like cities, their names, size, and composition changes over time. A person is only ever a snapshot within the timeframe of their history.

In Glorious People, Sasha Salzmann methodically unpacks the history of one of these snapshots. As a Russian-Jewish emigré to Germany, Salzmann has a personal connection to this history. Salzmann has made the study of immigration in Germany a focus of their career, publishing essays on the topic in widely circulated newspapers like Die Zeit and the Suddeutsche Zeitung. As an immigrant who is also Jewish, they have commented extensively on the rise of the far-right in Germany. This broad historical perspective is apparent in the scope of Glorious People.

The novel begins as a young woman, Edi, gets beaten up in the street of a German city after leaving a party. Nina, a close friend who Edi considers a cousin, finds her. Both of their mothers appear. Why this has happened is explicable only by understanding the histories of all involved. This is true of all moments described in the novel, but especially so for this one.

Salzmann unfurls the story from a point in time nearly fifty years before the opening incident. The book incorporates four main narrative voices from four different characters, two from fifty years ago and two from the more-or-less present day. The two narrators from the earlier timeline detail their experiences growing up in Soviet-controlled Ukraine; the others describe young adulthood as emigrés in contemporary Germany.

Edi’s mother, Lena, was born in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The name of the city, Horlivka, may now be familiar to American readers from news stories about the current Russian invasion of Ukraine. This aspect of history, the history of global events and textbook-ready turning points, is also part of Salzmann’s approach—moments from the past pass through the novel like giant tankers, overturning smaller vessels but never appearing head-on.

The novel details the lives of younger and older versions of many of the characters. Young Lena has a difficult relationship with her mother, Rita, who is authoritarian and imperious, guiding Lena to a career in medicine and packing her off to a Soviet camp for children of the elite. Young Lena often prefers the company of her less forthright father, or her grandmother, who cultivates hazelnuts in the south Russian region of Sochi. She brings her unwilling grandmother to live with them in Horlivka, where the grandmother dislikes being stuck in a city apartment far from her groves. Rita is certain, however, that she knows best.

Older Lena emigrates to Germany. Her daughter, Edi, sees her as authoritarian and imperious. Older Lena attempts to guide her daughter into a successful career as a journalist, unaided by her less forthright husband, Daniel. Edi prefers her life in Berlin, away from the city where her mother lives, where she can be open about her queer identity and free from her mother’s judgment. Older Lena brings her unwilling father from Horlivka to live in Jena with her, though he misses his life in Ukraine. Older Lena is certain, however, that she knows best.

In Glorious People, patterns occur and reoccur. History, even personal history, is tidal. Whether we know or don’t know our own histories, we repeat them. Feelings, relationships, and identities recede and advance across generations. There are tragedies, too, and world-historical moments that repeat with numb predictability. Lena grows up hearing stories about the genocidal famine that gripped Ukraine in the 1930s. Edi and Nina, members of the same younger generation, hear stories of the violent biznissmeni, the mafiosi that proliferated in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union. The present-day section of the narrative coincides with Russia’s occupation of the Donets Basin in Eastern Ukraine. Violence and misunderstanding are constants; memory is spotty.

This delicate chain of history—from mother to daughter to mother to daughter—is presented as a dream that one of the characters, Nina, has. She describes an image of women, standing in a line, each touching the one in front of them, but none of them able to see eye to eye.

All I know is that they’re mothers and daughters, each woman the daughter of the woman in front and the mother of the woman behind. It isn’t the lines on their skin that tell me this; these women are ageless. Or rather, their ages change depending on the angle you’re looking from, as if they’d put their faces into that app that shows you what you’ll look like when you’re older—the same woman has a grandmother’s face one moment and a little girl’s the next.

History moves generationally, but the patterns are difficult to unearth. The women of Glorious People live their lives unaware of the ways that they are retreading the same ground as their predecessors. There’s no comfort here. By the time these characters discover their connection to the past, those who came before are already gone.

This too-lateness is the melancholic heart of the story, and the spark that ignites the opening vignette. It’s the fate of these women, strong and often similar in many ways, to understand each other too late to save their relationships with each other. They rebel and resent the same pieces of each other that they unearth in themselves. Despite their similarities, there is little intimacy between them.

No one in the novel is able to perceive their own history, much less the history of others. They misunderstand and misinterpret each other. This is the substance of the central metaphor of the novel, a painting by Georgian outsider artist Niko Pirosmani of a giraffe, which appears first and primarily as a tattoo adorning the arm of one of Edi’s casual hook-ups. The painting is of a black and white giraffe, oddly proportioned and patterned. The giraffe is covered in black and white dots, dalmatian-like, with thick haunches and a curiously flat stomach and back. The head sits awkwardly on the too-short neck, its gaze slightly askew of the viewer.

The artist, it is explained, drew the giraffe based on a rather general idea of what a giraffe might look like, without ever having seen one. Having seen the giraffe once as a tattoo, the image looms over Edi’s consciousness of herself and her family. She is never sure if she is perceiving them correctly, or cobbling them together out of distorted half-recollections and prejudices from her past.

Towards the end of the novel, Edi is literally haunted by the image of the giraffe, and the realization that the giraffe represents. The giraffe appears ominously, a distended and misshapen hallucination, outside a community center in which her family is celebrating her mother’s birthday:

[I]t could only be the treetops swaying in the wind, but what she saw looked more like part of an animal, maybe sticking-up ears, rabbit’s ears making a victory sign, waving at her. Edi blinked. She hadn’t drunk a thing and it was a while since her last joint. She squeezed her eyes till they hurt, squeezed them until crystals of light flew at her; then she peeled the lids apart and saw a slanting oval eye, about half the size of her face. The eyeball was very white and the pupil very black; it looked at her through the closed window, questioning, almost alarmed. It had no eyelashes . . . She looked out of the window again, but the white giraffe had gone.

The giraffe prompts a catastrophic re-appraisal of Edi’s relationships with her family members. She longs, suddenly, to take them away, to articulate her affection for them, to have deep conversations and even get high with them. She sees that all her judgments of others, loves and hates, irritations and avoidances, are not only hopelessly trivial, but cruel and crude and probably wrong. This realization leads to a terrible sense of loss.

This sense is doubly terrible because the window—life—that we are allotted to get to know each other is so small. The opportunity is short and the regret lasts as long as we do. Lena mourns her indifference to her grandmother when she finally dies, after Lena has become a successful doctor. She receives the notice of the death and immediately vomits; the realization that she has lost someone without really knowing them grows over time, and continuously unsettles her.

Not long afterwards, another telegram came from Sochi, telling [her] that Grandmother had died. It had languished at the post office all weekend before reaching Father, and when he rang Lena early in the morning before she left for the clinic she had only a day until the funeral. She felt as if she’d been doused in hot oil. For a moment she thought burn blisters were popping all over her body; then her flesh ran cold. She vomited in the kitchen sink, wiped her mouth, called the clinic to arrange a stand-in, left a message for her boss telling him she’d be back at the end of the week, tossed clothes into a bag and dashed to the station without getting changed.

She goes back to her grandmother’s town after her death and sees her grandmother, and herself, with new eyes. Similarly, Edi has a moment of destabilizing panic when she realizes that Tatyana, the mother of her friend Nina, has a history just as textured and painful as her own. As she is speaking to Tatyana, she is struck by her own failure to piece together the narrative, symbolized once again by the image of the oddly mal-proportioned giraffe:

Then she saw Pirosmani’s giraffe on palely gleaming skin—that strange, haphazard creature born of the belief that it wasn’t worth trying to see the world as it was, that it wasn’t even possible. How could she explain to Tatyana that her perception of everything around her had, until now, resembled that picture; she would hear about things that had happened, pick up snatches of information here and there, and then do her best, using guesswork and intuition, to assemble it into a whole.

This panic causes her to rush out into the street, where she encounters a group of unruly teens, bringing us back to the novel’s introductory vignette. The story ends exactly where it begins.

Many of the landmark doorstop novels of the last three-hundred years, from Buddenbrooks to The Corrections, have addressed the historical aspect of families. Glorious People gives a twist to the genre, emphasizing the opacity of generational connections and the tidal push and pull of familial connections, the perpendicular necessities of knowing oneself and differentiating oneself, and the mess that can often be found where they cross.

By the end of the book, the mystery behind the introductory incident has been elucidated, as much as it can be. The mothers and daughters meet each other, in the dark, in a moment of recognition. This recognition is necessarily brief, traumatic, and partial—each of them are only seeing part of the giraffe, leaving the rest garish and misshapen. Edi recalls, shortly after this moment, a kind of mantra that several characters enunciate throughout the book: “‘take me’ always means ‘take me together with my childhood’.” People are their histories, and, like Pirosmani’s giraffe, only ever partially known in any given moment.

Eamonn Gallagher is a writer and researcher living in Minnesota.