Mark Baker The Fiftieth Gates Analysis

Mark Baker’s novel, The Fiftieth Gate is not merely a novel, evident in its structure and in its contents. The gates, rather than serving as an indicator of plot or character progression, manifest the maturity of Mark Baker’s understanding of his parents’ Holocaust narrative. The spectrum of texts range from documents to poetry with Baker’s personas voicing them which in turn trespasses the barriers of traditional narratives by incorporating a variety of voices that transcend the captivity of time–a feat documents alone are unable to accomplish. Baker describes the gates as a metaphor that ‘resonated’ with him, “A celestial palace surrounded by forty-nine gates, at whose heart is the original gate—one that is closed to us, yet contains all

”I hand him the family tree I have constructed from archives in Poland… A tailor born in 1815, he married…” The family tree in Gate VI is one of the many historical documents that Baker used to extract memories out of his parents. Whilst archives are used to validate and reinforce memory, it had blinded him from the fruits of memory. Moreover, Baker’s primitive understanding had originated from his role as a historian—bent over facts and overriding emotion with his matter-of-fact demeanour until he came to the realisation projected in his personal reflection in Gate XXIV, "Does history remember more than memory? Why am I calling her? Won't she recognise the shameful truth, that I doubted her, that I never believed her, that I only recognise suffering in numbers and lists and not in the laments and pleas of a human being, of a mother, screaming for acknowledgement?" It was at this juncture of his journey that he realised that truth is futile without emotion and memory is lost without

Baker embodies the imagined voice of his grandmother, Hinda. He dresses the narrative with palpable verisimilitude and poetic flair, immersing readers in the final moments of his grandmother’s life–simultaneously establishing historical details that drove Hinda’s narrative forward. An excerpt reads, “Shadowy figures grope in the dark, forming a sea of human pillars held upright in a wooden cage”. The shadowy figures are personified whereas the humans are objectified suggesting the dehumanising atrocities inflicted on the victims. Baker asserts that he, “made a leap into fiction–not fiction as fabrication, but as an act of empathy, so I could recreate for my parents the last journey of their murdered families.” It is only through the imagined voiced that Baker was able to comprehend the burden of his parents’, therefore a present voice narrating the past surpasses the ‘limitations of language’ which allowed Baker to ‘portray the terror of their journey’. Gate XLII was the culmination of Baker’s journey as well as the introduction of a new outlook, one that does not confine him to the present—a view that challenges the precognition that history writes the past, rather than the past writes history. It is with this concept that Mark Baker had created his own answers to the world’s