Berlin Atomized
By Julia Kornberg
Translated from the Spanish by Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg
Astra House, 2021; (translation 2024); 240 pp.
Julia Kornberg’s debut novel, Berlin Atomized, is an unrelentingly sad story in which three teenage siblings—Jeremias, Mateo and Nina Goldstein of Buenos Aires—are physically and emotionally abandoned by their parents. In the ensuing years, which extend past the present day to 2034 in the novel, the siblings search for love and creativity in Argentina, Uruguay, France, Israel, Germany and Belgium. Each place affords them some meaningful friendships but also a staggering amount of drugs, self-harm and depression. As the kids drift down, they drift apart: Jeremias tries to be a rock star, Mateo contends with an aneurysm, and Nina moves from one abusive boyfriend to another. Meanwhile, Buenos Aires drowns, and Paris and Brussels burn. The characters in this novel regularly and soberly refer to enduring the end of the world.
The author clearly intends the book to deal with not just dystopian but also Jewish themes. And this goes beyond naming the protagonists the Goldsteins. Nina alludes to Jewishness four times in the first eight pages. There are scattered references throughout the book to aristocratic “bubbies,” Mateo’s “goyish” girlfriend, Jeremias’s bearded “rebbefication” and Nina’s inability to become a nun because “I’m ‘Jewish’…as far as I know.” In an even more particularist vein, Mateo spends a poignant chapter in Israel, patrolling for the IDF on the Gazan border. And the book’s jacket, on which the letters of the book title and of Kornberg’s name are adorned with little spikes, evokes the calligraphed “crowns” that sit atop letters in a Torah scroll.
And yet, it would be too simple to say the Goldsteins’ decline is attributable to antisemitism or other discrimination. The siblings live in the exclusive part of Buenos Aires, even after their parents leave. Their friends, of various other religions and ethnicities, seem as lost as they are. The lawlessness the Goldsteins encounter is endemic, not targeted; and the catastrophes they escape, from rock-concert stampedes to anti-capitalist political violence, are indiscriminate mass disasters. In fact, for all the strong sense of place that characterizes the Buenos Aires chapters in the beginning of the novel, there is no mention at all of the history of antisemitic violence there, notably the bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the Argentine-Israelite Mutual Association in 1994, two of the worst antisemitic terror attacks in modern history. In the novel, this would have been roughly the time Jeremias, Mateo and Nina were in elementary school.
“I couldn’t help but feel that the post-apocalyptic universe in Berlin Atomized is—if not anti-Jewish—notably non-Jewish.”
And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that the post-apocalyptic universe in Berlin Atomized is—if not anti-Jewish—notably non-Jewish. In Kornberg’s dystopia, there are no parents, even officious ones; there are no traditions, even outdated or burdensome ones; there is not even any reliable, if worrisome, future. Even when Mateo tries praying by himself, Nina calls it evidence of his “Messiah complex [and] a maniacal interest in Jesus.” The kids have no ritual to fall back on, no sacredness to aspire to. They wander from continent to continent unguided and unaided by either authority or community. Indeed, the archetypal Jewish narrative of this book is so inside-out that the Goldsteins leave the Americas and Israel to search for home in, of all places, Berlin.
All of this disjointed Jewishness in Berlin Atomized made me wonder: Is this book a Jewish take on dystopian fiction, or is it a dystopian take on Jewish decline? In other words, has Kornberg written a sort of Jewish delegate to the dystopia canon—a Hebrew Hunger Games, as it were, in which there’s a global apocalypse but the protagonists have bubbies and take detours to Israel—or has she actually written something from deep inside the Jewish tradition, a sort of 21st-century jeremiad, a prophetic warning about what can happen when parents abandon children, society abandons law, and youth abandon hope?
That this tension is unresolved is one sign (among many) that Kornberg, not yet 30, is a burgeoning talent. Her flickering, unflinching prose, which she herself helped translate from the original Spanish, makes you feel the siblings’ despair on every page. Her shifting narrators, who alternate without warning, mirror the instability of the Goldsteins’ existence. The universe inside this book is not one any of us would want to spend time in—but Kornberg constructs and inhabits it with care and command.
Families, cities and planets are “atomized,” seemingly beyond redemption, in this hellscape of a novel. But it is up to the reader to decide if Kornberg is implying that such apocalyptic breakdown is not only what happens when individual Jews’ worlds collapse, but when frameworks do, Judaism among them.
E. Kinney Zalesne coauthored the 2007 book Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes.
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