REFLECTIONS ON MY LIFE

As I write this autobiographical essay, I am aware of two opposed principles that guide my pen. One of those two extremes is chance; the other is the order that gives shape to life. Can all the factors that were responsible for my coming into the world and enabled me, although threatened by death many times, to survive unscathed in order finally to become a writer — moreover, one who ceaselessly strives to reconcile contradictory elements of realism and fantasy — be regarded only as the result of long chains of chance? Or was there some specific predetermination involved, not in the form of some supernatural moira. not quite crystallized into fate when I was in my cradle but in a budding form laid down in me — that is to say, in my genetic inheritance was there a kind of predestiny befitting an agnostic and empiricist?

That chance played a role in my life is undeniable. In the First World War, when the fortress of Przemysl fell, in 1915, my father, Samuel Lem, a physician in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was taken prisoner by the Russians, and was able to return to Lemberg (now Lvov), his native city, only after nearly five years, in the wake of the chaos of the Russian Revolution. I know from the stories he told us that on at least one occasion he was to be shot by the Reds on the spot for being an officer (and therefore a class enemy). He owed his life to the fact that when he was being led to his execution in a small Ukrainian city he was noticed and recognized from the sidewalk by a Jewish barber from Lemberg who used to shave the military commander in that city and for this reason had free access to him. The barber interceded for my father (who was then not yet my father), and he was allowed to go free, and was able to return to Lemberg and to his fiancée. (This story, made more complex for aesthetic reasons, is to be found in one of the fictitious reviews — of "De Impossibilitate Vitae," by Cezar Kouska — in my book A Perfect Vacuum.) In this instance, chance was fate incarnate, for if the barber had happened to pass through that street a minute later my father would have been irrevocably doomed. I heard the tale from him when I was a little boy, at a time when I was unable to think in abstract terms (I may have been ten), and was thus unable to consider the respective merits of the categories of chance and fate.

My father went on to become a respected and rather wealthy physician (a laryngologist) in Lvov. I was born there in 1921. In the rather poor country that Poland was before the Second World War, I lacked nothing. I had a French governess and no end of toys, and for me the world I grew into was something final and stable. But, if that was the case, why did I as a child delight in solitude, and make up the rather curious game that I have described in another book — the novel The High Castle, a book about my early childhood. My game was to transport myself into fictitious worlds, but I did not invent or imagine them in a direct way. Rather, I fabricated masses of important documents when I was in high school in Lvov: certificates; passports; diplomas that conferred upon me riches, high social standing, and secret power, or "full power of authority," without any limit whatsoever; and permits and coded proofs and cryptograms testifying to the highest rank — all in some other place, in a country not to be found on any map. Did I feel insecure in some way? Threatened? Did this game perhaps spring from some unconscious feeling of danger? I know nothing of any such cause.

I was a good student. Some years after the war, I learned from an older man who had held some position or other in the prewar Polish educational system that when the IQs of all high-school students were tested — it must have been around 1936 or 1937 — mine was over 180, and I was said to have been, in the words of that man, the most intelligent child in southern Poland. (I myself suspected nothing of this sort at the time of the test, for the results were not made known to us.) But this high IQ certainly was of no help in surviving the occupation of the Generalgouvernement (to which administrative unit Poland had been reduced by the Germans). During that period, I learned in a very personal, practical way that I was no "Aryan." I knew that my ancestors were Jews, but I knew nothing of the Mosaic faith and, regrettably, nothing at all of Jewish culture. So it was, strictly speaking, only the Nazi legislation that brought home to me the realization that I had Jewish blood in my veins. We succeeded in evading imprisonment in the ghetto, however. With false papers, my parents and I survived that ordeal.

But, to return to my childhood in prewar Poland, my first reading matter was of a rather curious nature. It was my father's anatomy books and medical texts, in which I browsed when I was still hardly able to read, and I understood them all the less since my father's professional books were in German or in French. Only the fiction in his library was in Polish. Pictures of skeletons, of neatly dissected human skulls, of human brains precisely sketched in many colors, of intestines in preserved condition and embellished with magic-sounding Latin names provided my earliest contacts with the world of books. Hunting through my father's library was, of course, strictly forbidden to me, and it attracted me precisely because it was forbidden and mysterious. I must not forget to mention the actual human bone that was kept behind the glass doors of my father's bookcase. It was a skull bone — os temporale — that had been removed during a trepanation; perhaps it was a relic from the time when my father was studying medicine. I held this bone, without any particular feelings, several times in my hands. (I had to steal my father's key to be able to do this.) I knew what it was, but I wasn't frightened by it. I only wondered about it in a certain way. Its surroundings — the rows of big tomes of medical textbooks — appeared quite natural to me, for a child, lacking any real yardstick, is unable to differentiate between the banal or commonplace and the unusual. That bone — or, rather, its fictional counterpart — is to be found in another novel of mine, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. In this book, the bone became a whole skull, cleanly dissected from a corpse, that was kept by a doctor in a ward — one of the many stations in the hero's odyssey through a labyrinthine building. A complete skull like this was owned by my uncle, my mother's brother, who was also a physician. He was murdered two days after the Wehrmacht...