โ Scribed by Louis Begley
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The "lies" in this haunting, powerful Holocaust novel are not just the Nazis' monstrous racialist myths, but also the personal fictions adopted by their victims in order to survive. Two such survivors are orphaned nine-year-old Maciek and his sharp-tongued aunt, Tania. Posing as Catholic Poles to hide their Jewish identity, constantly on the move, they witness slaughter in the Warsaw Ghetto from a nearby rooftop and, later, break ranks on a march to cattle cars destined for Auschwitz. As narrator, Maciek speaks in a voice much more mature than his years alone suggest, yet his simple matter-of-factness lends a keen moral edge to his observations on the bestiality and irrationality around him. Just as the war ends, Poles carry out a bloody pogrom, and both nephew and aunt assume new surnames, living under new lies. Scattered italicized passages summoning up Dante and Virgil suggest the enormity of evil, a superfluous device in this searing story of the quest for an authentic self in an insane world.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The teller of this tale reveres the Aeneid because "that is where he first found civil expression for his own shame at being alive, skin intact and virgin of tattoo, when his kinsmen and almost all the others, so many surely more deserving than he, perished in the conflagration." Indeed, this seems a very real attempt on the part of the author to expurgate, or at least come to terms with, a sense of guilt that has haunted him throughout his life and to reflect on the lingering impact of evil on individual lives. Survival in wartime often requires compromise, but for a young Jewish boy and his aunt, survival in wartime Poland requires a total suspension of identity. It is the ultimate act of theater, requiring a careful and constant denial of one's heritage. For the child, the tragedy is that suspension becomes loss: "He became an embarrassment and slowly died. A man who bears one of the names Maciek used has replaced him. . . . Our man has no childhood he can bear to remember." A moving addition to Holocaust literature and one well recommended.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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