Joshua Gruen's Coma

Joshua Gruen's Coma is the medical and emotional crisis at the heart of the novel's late movement, the state into which the elderly Holocaust survivor and former Kovno Ghetto council runner falls after being brutally beaten in Vilnius, and the condition that draws his daughter Sarah Blumenthal and Thomas Pemberton across the Atlantic. The coma is not merely a plot device but the culmination of Joshua's lifelong entanglement with the ghetto past he carried inside him, and it becomes the occasion for the recovery of the Barbanel archive, the revelation of forbidden photographs, and Sarah's most profound confrontation with inherited trauma.

The Injury and the Medical Crisis

When Sarah and Pem arrived in Vilnius, Joshua Gruen was still alive but catastrophically injured: his skull was fractured, both arms and several ribs were broken, one lung had collapsed, and he had developed pneumonia. The American chargé d'affaires met them at the airport and rushed them to the hospital. Sarah immediately questioned the adequacy of the medical care but had to agree finally that Joshua's condition made it too dangerous to fly him out. He was in a coma. Permission was asked to trepan him to relieve pressure on the brain, a procedure that would require opening the skull to ease the swelling that threatened his life. Pem sat with Sarah Blumenthal in the corridor outside the operating room, and he observed that she did not cry or speak but simply stared at the floor. They had flown from Kennedy to Frankfurt, waited two hours for the connecting flight, and had come straight to the hospital, a journey that compressed the vast distance between New York and the Lithuanian capital into a single harrowing sequence of airports, waiting rooms, and the sterile corridor where Sarah's silence became its own kind of testimony.

The Runner's Past and the Weight of the Ghetto

The coma carries the full weight of Joshua's childhood in the Kovno Ghetto, a history that Sarah herself narrates in the novel's layered testimony. As a boy of only ten, Joshua was one of seven runners for the Kovno Ghetto Council, boys who wore special caps like police caps with a military brim and stars sewn on their jackets. He carried news and instructions from the council to families in their houses, or messages from one council member to another, or stood watch by the square at the entrance to the bridge to warn if the open car was coming with the half-track filled with soldiers just behind it, which meant the next bad thing was about to occur. He would run like the wind through the back alleys and side streets to give warning, and he felt privileged that the star on his tunic was not like all the other stars but some indication of rank. Mr. Barbanel, the chief assistant to the community leader Dr. Koenig, said Joshua was his best runner, and for the most important matters he chose him. Even as he lived inside this illusion, sometimes secretly admiring the uniforms of the enemies, Joshua knew full well what was happening. The runner's cap that gave him his sense of specialness was also, Sarah later reflected, what saved his life in more ways than one, and the memory of that boyhood runs beneath the image of the man lying unconscious in a Vilnius hospital bed.

The Archive and the Photographs

The coma sets in motion the recovery of the Barbanel archive, the ghetto archive chest that arrives in New York and is opened in a small office in the International Arrivals Building. Sarah, Pem, a young woman from the U.S. Attorney's office in New York, and various customs people watch as an inspector takes up a hammer and chisel and goes to work. The chest sits on a steel table, larger than Sarah had understood from Pem's description; she had imagined it as the size of a footlocker, but it is larger, deeper, hammered together with big heavy nails and metallic corner pieces, painted white where the paint has flaked off to reveal raw lumber. The customs man finds the rusted locks impervious and asks if he can pry off the hasps, which will splinter the wood, and Sarah nods her approval without quite realizing the proprietorship she has been granted. The sound of the splitting wood makes her wince, as if her father's history is seeping into the room. Inside are packages of various sizes wrapped in oilskin, with an oilskin lining against the inner sides of the chest, and the fierce preservation of these materials is itself an urgent message that brings a sob to her throat. The inspectors unwrap sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes of various sizes, each labeled in a small, neat Yiddish script, and finding nothing of interest to them, they replace everything and excuse themselves. Pem and the attorney dive in, discovering a diary in one increasingly familiar hand covering three years, 1941 to the date in 1944 when the ghetto is dismantled and the survivors are marched to the railroad station, along with reams of documentation, rules and regulations issued by the Germans, and innumerable orders with the signature of Commandant Schmitz, confiscating all domestic animals, then all wagons.

Sarah has in her hands typed lists of those who have died in the ghetto and those who were taken from the ghetto and never again seen, each name with a date and place of birth next to it, not infrequently the names of entire families. There is no time or distance in Sarah's apprehension of these pages; they are not historical but, in their simple exact notation, a curve of the universe's light flashing through her, lasing her consciousness into these leaves of paper, letter by letter, as if the newly dead are being written down as she reads, with the thunderings of jets and the drone of passing traffic in her ears. And now Pem hands her an envelope of forbidden little black-and-white photos: a line of men and women marching to work behind barbed wire, a husband and wife and their child on a bench having their picture taken with cloth stars sewn to their coats, simple pictures with calm, expressionless faces, a woman on her knees in the vegetable garden, the members of the council posing in business suits with stars, a body in a business suit hanging from a gallows with the head awry staring heavenward, winter with snow on the ground, and here, seven little boys in front of a wood cabin standing at their idea of attention on the steps, wearing military-school caps and stars on their breasts that might possibly be imagined as insignia of their office as runners for the council, unsmiling little boys, one with shoulders hunched up in the instinctive posture of self-protection or perhaps just cold, all underdressed with short pants and sweaters and jackets they have outgrown, each of them at attention, feet together, arms pressed against his sides, looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death. Sarah finds her father in the first row.

The Silence and the Witness

The coma also becomes the occasion for Pem's most acute observation of Sarah's grief. In the corridor outside the operating room, she does not cry or speak but simply stares at the floor, a silence that carries the accumulated weight of the ghetto lists, the forbidden photographs, and the boy in the first row who grew up to be the man now lying unconscious. Pem, who suspects that if he confides in Sarah she will turn and flash upon him the implacable judgment from her anguished blue eyes that he is beyond redemption, takes the chair next to her and is quiet. The coma thus functions as a kind of negative space around which the novel's deepest themes gather: the transmission of trauma across generations, the inadequacy of language before atrocity, and the strange privilege of the runner's cap that marked a child for death even as it saved his life. Joshua's unconscious body becomes the still center of a story that keeps returning to the boy who ran through the back alleys of the Kovno Ghetto, the boy whose official runner's cap came only toward the end, and whose life was saved by that office in more ways than one.