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BURNING OR DEVOURING: WHOSE HOLOCAUST IS IT? MY HOLOCAUST by Tova Reich

MY HOLOCAUST by Tova Reich (Harper Collins, 2007)

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com,
www.nyhwriter.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515

            In the endless lists of misunderstood writers, the satirist wins hands down. Writing from a conservative point-of-view but speaking in a radical idiom, the satirist courts angry reactions from right and left.  Whether misanthropic like Juvenal or Swift’s diatribes or gently remonstrating like Horace’s verse, satire requires culturally ironic double-vision lacking in our society. The impulse to satire is ostensibly moral. Aggressively corrective, it criticizes stances or behavior failing the satirist’s standards.

           Tova Reich’s MY HOLOCAUST exemplifies the satirist’s dilemma. Heatedly, she attacks what she believes is modern marketing of Jewish victimization. Tragedy by association, says she, minimizes. It dumps every survivor of brutality into the caldron with Jewish sufferers of the Nazi Holocaust. Scorning current museums and memorials as trivializers reaching for tourist dollars, Reich depicts this selling as sham tears, long overdue and meaningless.

           Although true satire stabs with a rapier, never bludgeons with an axe, Reich wields a club with the personal axe she grinds.  In the interest of full disclosure, Reich’s husband, Walter, had to leave his directorship of the Holocaust Museum in Washington.  Whether she models her labored stereotypes on Board members who may have forced Walter out is unclear. But it’s worth a guess.

          For despite Reich’s apparent outrage at the twentieth-century culture of victimization, her satire doesn’t ring true. Her singularly unlovable characters (what a euphemism, that!) are mostly Shylockian Jews trying to squeeze a buck from evidence of brutality that nearly destroyed their people forever.

          Maurice Messer, he of the symbolic name, is a Holocaust survivor, who has made his firm, Holocaust Connections, Inc (don’t forget the Inc) into a big consulting business. For money, lots of it, Maurice née Moses, escorts rich donors through the promised lands of concentration camps.  Business is good. Five million dollars will buy a donor’s plaque for a railroad car installed at the gateway to a new museum.  What better legacy can his richly indifferent clients find?

          His neurotic son, Norman learned the business well from his father. But not well enough. Norman can’t accept his daughter Nechama’s  conversion to Catholicism. In Reich's ironic in-joke, her Nechama’s name means “soul,” the loveliest name Jewish parents can give a daughter. Now, Nechama is a silent nun in the controversial cloister overlooking the ovens of Auschwitz. 
       
           Reich’s clangingly offensive title, MY HOLOCAUST shows she hasn’t done her homework. Since when is the Holocaust hers? If so, what does she mean by that? Does she even know what “holocaust” means or where it came from?
       
           For the record, the word "holocaust" comes from the Greek holokauston, which originally meant “sacrifice completely burned by fire” and first appeared in I Samuel 7:9.  After World War II, “Holocaust” slid furtively into the eminent domain describing the Nazis' terrifying genocide of Jews. "Sho'ah, the Hebrew word for "Holocaust," shows how the Nazis nearly succeeded in annihilating every Jew on the planet.

        If you “Google” the word “Holocaust,” you’ll find nearly two million (1,920,000!) definitions with almost as many points of view about its usage today. That other peoples join their suffering to the fate of Jews under the Nazis is obviously one of Reich’s cause célèbres.

        Whatever your view, it’s chutzpah to believe that Jews have cornered the market on victimization. Gypsies, also devastated by the Nazis, call their plague the Porajmos, meaning “devouring.” Porajmos seems even more expressive of the Nazis’ bestiality than Holocaust. Still, it was the deeds, not the words, that killed.

        One of the best satirists of our time, librettist-mathematician-physicist Tom Lehrer, quit the satire gig in the sixties. “You can't satirize real evil,” said Lehrer: "You can make fun with Saddam Hussein jokes ... but you can't make fun of, say, the concentration camps (italics mine)… my target was not so much evil, but benign stupidity. People doing stupid things without realizing or, instead, thinking they were doing good." I wonder what Tova Reich is thinking she is doing with “her” Holocaust.

          I’m with Tom Lehrer, not Tova Reich. Hers is not so much "benign stupidity" as a malignant tin ear.  Her episodic ranting is not true satire in any sense of the genre. MY HOLOCAUST is a tediously misanthropic indictment of Jews and non-Jews alike who try to recapture Holocaust horrors to further their own ends.

          Read MY HOLOCAUST if you have nothing better to do. Better yet, read Mark Twain’s THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER, the bitter chronicle of mankind’s brutality to its own through the ages. Twain’s is a better window on what we facetiously refer to as “human nature” than Reich’s pseudo-satire can ever be.

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NO PLACE TO GO: FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES by Min Jin Lee and THE TRAP: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America by Daniel Brook

FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES (Warner, July, 2007) by Min Jin Lee.
THE TRAP: SELLING OUT TO STAY AFLOAT IN WINNER
TAKE-ALL  AMERICA (Times Books/Henry Holt, June, 2007) by Daniel Brook.

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com,
www.nyhwriter.com, nywriter@rochester.rr.com, 585-385-1515

     “Competence can be a curse,” announces the first line of Min Jin Lee’s unwieldy debut novel, FREE FOOD FOR MILLIONAIRES (Warner, July, 2007). This could be its epigraph—and even its epitaph.

      In Lee’s possibly autobiographical novel, the episodic tale of newly-minted Princeton graduate Casey Han demonstrates that mere competence is not enough to shore it up. For poorly defined characterization and wavering centers that will not hold overwhelm what might have been an important new fiction.

        Early on, sitting in her Korean immigrant  parents’ claustrophobic kitchen, Casey learns you can’t go home again—if ever this small Queens flat was actually home.  Repeatedly, Casey’s inchoate bildungsroman asks implicitly—and explicitly—whether an elitist education for young women—and for their immigrant parents who sacrifice so bitterly for their children’s education—is worth the price.

         For Casey, home is nowhere. When Casey’s father beats her and throws her out because she has deferred her Columbia Law School acceptance, she seeks a haven with her white fiancé, Jay Currie. But Jay is otherwise engaged. Finding him in flagrante delicto in a jerrybuilt and gerrymandered ménage a trois, Casey flees his apartment for the expensively welcoming arms of the Hotel Carlyle.

          Caught between worlds she never made and worlds she doesn’t want to settle for, Casey doesn’t seem to know which end is up—or which end she wants to be up. A direct lineal descendant of  Dreiser’s SISTER CARRIE, (whose story she keeps on her bedside table) she maxes her credit card on expensive clothes and the Carlyle suite. With her less rebellious, pre-med sister Tina, her rich friends Ella and Sabine, she is a money-borrower and a friendship-user--but not a returner.

         Addicted to money, men, cigarettes, and having her own way, she yearns for independence yet must hunker down in other people’s guest bedrooms to have a roof over her head. An omnivorous reader with her nose in the same books (another key to her  character) at the bus stop, she befriends an old bookseller, buys a first edition she can ill afford, and ignores him when he is dying of heart disease.

        FREE FOOD’s ostensible focus on the Be-It-Ever-Thus Generation Gap and the battle between old-country mores and contemporary searches for meaning is not new.  That the protagonists are Korean immigrants lends a new twist to old themes. Despite insights into the marginal ambivalences of Korean society, Korean striving for a place in a moneyed American landscape resembles Jewish-American wrestling with the blandishments and corruptions of the American Success Story.

           These Jewish novels deplored the wall between the promise of “America Medina” (“America, the Golden Mean”) and the reality of  “America Goniff”  (“America, Thief”).  The same boulders block Lee’s Korean characters, whether parents or offspring.

            Despite their Princeton and MIT educations, the Han daughters are expected to cleave to the Korean world.  Casey’s parents want her to marry a Korean, never anyone white. Yet Lee’s ambivalences towards her Korean roots comes through. For, many of her white characters (even the unfaithful Jay Currie) seem stronger, more capable of love, more generous-spirited than do the Koreans.

           Strangely, Yalie Lee sends Casey to Princeton, not New Haven. Casey screams at her father: “Do you know what it’s like to ace my courses and to make and keep friends when they think you’re nothing because you’re from nowhere?” Is she indicting Yale, Princeton, her father, or herself?

           FREE FOOD reads more like fast food. The title comes from an ironic moment when rich Wall Street traders crowd out Casey as they gang up for a free buffet lunch. The buffet groans with tempting morsels—but only for millionaires who know how to elbow their way to the table. While Casey is picking and choosing, the staff clears and she must look again for nourishment. Her career choices, her friends, the men in her life, her sacrificing parents are non-sustaining hors d’oeuvres that last only a moment.

           Despite Casey’s conflicts and contradictions, many reviewers were unaccountably smitten by her essential callowness. Stunned by a central character who is actually a reader, reviewers have likened FREE FOOD to  the fictions of Anthony Trollope, Henry James, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, and even Philip Roth (!).

          More to the point, Casey embodies the plight of non-fictional young Americans depicted in Daniel Brook’s excellent analysis, THE TRAP: SELLING OUT TO STAY AFLOAT IN WINNER-TAKE-ALL AMERICA (Times Books/Henry Holt, June, 2007). While Lee focuses on Casey’s endless string of  personal soap operas and affairs,  Brook (like Lee, a Yale graduate) describes the vicissitudes of a group, newly graduated Generation Y-ers. Programmed for high performance and high achievement (whatever their ethnic origin), they find themselves with pie on their faces in the “real” world. Overworked, debt-burdened 20-and-30-somethings eke out a “living,” trying to find meaning, to “get a life,” as the injunction goes. Brook’s “Echo Boomers” can find neither the echo nor the boom for their Ivy-nurtured high aspirations.

         “Competent” though they may be, Brook’s sterling graduates of America’s elitest schools disappoint their sacrificing parents—and worse yet, themselves, You don’t have to be an Ivy League, Korean A-student to be unable to find what’s the next step after graduation. Nonprofits, social work, public service, teaching, and yes, journalism for sure (especially book reviewing) don’t cover rent and food, let alone a movie, a babysitter—or a baby. The ends just won’t meet. Like Casey Han, the denizens of Generation Y want the world to “give us a break.” But no break is forthcoming. Consumption, whether necessary or conspicuous, beckons. Money dries up. Plans for the future fade.

         FREE FOOD is, as the reviewers admit, “beach reading,” which is damning with faint praise.  THE TRAP is a far more important book than FF to read, digest, and think about, in airports, on subways, and in the dark night of the soul. The world is changing. It has changed. We need to protect and polish one of our most precious resources: educated young people of every ethnic background. 

         “Educated” comes from the Latin “e duco,” to lead toward. We need to lead them—and them to lead us--to making the world a better place with a home for educated brains and cogent, constructive goals.

WHAT SHOULD WE DO? Responsibilities of Ordinary People: Eugene Drucker's THE SAVIOR

THE SAVIOR by Eugene Drucker (Simon & Schuster, July 17, 2007)
By Nancy Yanes Hoffman, www.writingdoctor.typepad.com

        The Nazi Holocaust  has spawned a enormous subgenre of books fictional and nonfictional. Holocaust survivors, analysts, revisionists, and even apologists (!) have written about their take on the Nazi destruction of six million Jews and how it affected them. Now, the next generation of survivors, haunted by the ghosts that destroyed their parents, grandparents, their futures, and talents, offers its own interpretations, which may differ from such perennial Holocaust tales as Elie Wiesel's NIGHT. This new generation sometimes writes pseudo-“memoirs” of their perspectives: what they think it might have been like for them, what they might have done in their parents’ circumstances.

         So it is with Eugene Drucker’s THE SAVIOR.  But Drucker is special. The eminent concert violinist and founder of the Emerson String Quartet, Drucker and his Stradiverius have enriched the world of classical music, have made his listeners’ lives better. But recently, Drucker has concerned himself with the interactions between musician and listener. The impact of performing for audiences distracted by abnormal situations, hospital patients, psychiatric sufferers, wounded and  traumatized soldiers, recovering addicts and alcoholics, have become his focus.

         As Drucker performed for audiences who needed more from music than the music itself could afford, he began wondering about “the dynamic between a performer and an audience pushed to extremes.” Examining how audiences act upon the musician as well as how –if and why--the music affected listeners in certain ways has become a kind of obsession.

         From this was born the impulse to write Drucker’s stunning debut novel, THE SAVIOR. The novel begins with Gottfried Keller’s first-person remembrance, “I used to play for the wounded and dying. The Army sent me; it was supposed to help the war effort.” But Keller and his music fail. The soldiers are mocking and hostile, preferring bar-room ballads to classical music.

         Here, the novel shifts to the third-person story of the indwelling, self-involved violinist, Gottfried.  Exempted from military service because of a symbolically weak heart, his record in the Germany of the 40s is ostensibly clean. He “had never made any trouble, never said anything that could be held against him.”

          Apparently hearing of Keller’s musical talents, the Kommandant of a nearby concentration camp transfers him from the soldiers’ hospital to a concentration camp. His mission?  Performing violin solos for four days before a hand-picked group of 30 Jewish prisoners.  His violin will conduct an experiment, says the Kommandant, ordering. “You must be an Orpheus to them, and thaw their frozen souls.” But tellingly, the Kommandant adds with viciously manipulative power-hunger: “The scientific possibilities offered by camps like this are what interest me the most…Imagine how outmoded animal experimentation seems now.”

          When Keller arrives at the camp, the inmates all ask him the same questions: “Why are you here? Why did you come? Have you come to heal us? Can you make us whole again? “ They want to know if his music contains magical power: “Can it bring back the dead?” Keller never really answers, hiding behind half-truths about music’s therapeutic effects, praising the spiritual power of Bach’s Chaconne without looking deeper as his questioners demand.

          Keller’s ordinariness, his willingness to compromise with the Nazis’ bestiality to the Jews so long as the Germans will leave him alone, is what give his story its particular resonance—and relevance. In a final confrontation, the Kommandant makes the protesting Gottfriend face the truth about himself as a musician and as a human being: “You were ready to obey orders no matter what you thought. A good pawn, the kind the Reich needs…You really present no threat to the Third Reich. In your heart…you’re an accomplice.” When Gottfried runs away from the camp, the word “accomplice” rings in his ears, bedeviling him as he stumbles in the snow.

          If Gottfried is supposed to be a “Savior,” he has flunked the test. He would rather be safe than sorry. He can lose himself in his music despite the horrors of the camp—as his listeners cannot. The stench and appearance of the emaciated Jews revolt him. Rejecting his Jewish lover, his Jewish friend, and the music-loving German guard who saves him, he just wants to isolate himself in the seeming security of his small apartment.  The ironically named Gottfried is neither freed by God nor, when last we see him, freed by himself.

         On the one hand, THE SAVIOR asks—without answering—what is the responsibility, the culpability, of the ordinary person towards evil in his world. On the other, Gottfried’s violin, his talent, set him apart from the ordinary. In an interview with the ASPEN TIMES, Drucker said, “I tried to imagine a conflict between his desires as a musician and the thought that he should be helping people in his audience.” The conflict is in THE SAVIOR. The resolution is not.

         For most of us are not gifted musicians like Drucker—or even like Keller. Most of us are pretty ordinary (present company, of course, excluded). But Drucker’s brilliant Tour de Force forces us to think about what we would do were we in Gottfried’s shoes.

       Closing this complex little book, I wish I knew what I would do. One thing I do know. I’d  reread it, listen to Drucker’s DVDs,  and try to face myself in the mirror.

Nobody Gets Out of Here Alive--Jessie Gruman's AFTERSHOCK

Review by Nancy Yanes Hoffman, the Writing Doctor and Would-be Philosopher,
www.writingdoctor.typepad.com//nywriter@rochester.rr.com
585-385-1515/ 16 San Rafael Dr, Rochester, NY 14618

 
         “Nobody gets out of here alive,” say the sages.  Most Americans bury this advice in their souls’ dark recesses—until that moment when some doctor drops a dread diagnostic bomb. Then, we learn that not getting out of here "alive" means us—not some anonymous “nobody.” 

          We sit there, stunned.  The doctor drones on but we can’t hear. Questions hammer our brains.  What to do? Where to go? What about another opinion? How to tell husbands, wives, lovers, children? How long do we have? Will we suffer?  Suffer much? Who will take care of us?  Is it worth the fight?

        AfterShock: What to Do When the Doctor Gives You—or Someone You Love—a Devastating Diagnosis, Jessie Gruman’s must-read guide “for reluctant consumers,” provides a road map when we know our bodies have betrayed us.   AfterShock is a New Best Friend for figuring out how to put one foot before the other, taking crucial steps after disease terrorists strike.

        Once our passports to the World of the Well are revoked, Gruman leads us through the wilderness.  Outlining every-day reactions, choices, decisions, obstructions, she tracks roads for recognizing symptoms, knowing necessary tests, understanding results, partnering with physicians on treatments.  She walks us through the crap table of risk-benefit ratios on cures, remissions, and side-effects. 

        Tips, little and big, fill AfterShock’s pages: how to find doctors and check their qualifications (no, they’re not all equally competent or communicative); how to get beyond specialists’ Praetorian guards, those secretaries who stall appointments for three months; how to cope with doctors, hospitals, staffs, and institutional rigidity.  Most of all, how to learn what’s essential, learn it fast, assess its accuracy, and use it most effectively.

          Whether we’re getting Social Security or fresh out of school, a “devastating diagnosis” turns us into forlorn wanderers seeking answers. Knowing that a disease we never heard of—or one we always feared—is eating us creates Internet-hunters for information. But seeking isn’t always finding.  Sometimes, a bad case of information-overload results.  Randomly Googling diagnoses may keep us from seeing the forest from the trees. We need Gruman for our guide.

          Doing small day-to-day chores is a tall order.  AfterShock’s rich how-to appendices provide expertise in navigating the patient trail, finding evidence-based treatments, defending privacy, or planning estates. It’s all there: from baby-sitters to health insurance and updating a will to implementing what insurance doesn’t cover (a tough assignment). 

          Finding the best doctor may be the tallest order of all. Second opinions from experts are a must, says Gruman, as she answers crucial “how-to’s.” How to  find and define an expert (not just someone 50 miles from home). Getting an appointment—soon. Questions for the original physician? Questions for the second opinion. Getting doctors to sit down and translate Medspeak and probability words.  Not settling for fast answers while the doctor’s hand is on the doorknob.  Preparing every question beforehand and writing the answer. Recognizing that a pencil and paper are a patient’s best friends. 

          "Remember," warns Gruman, “You are not your disease.” Every step leads to other crossroads and more decisions.  If possible, continue working. Do the math. Even though disease makes demands, working fights the attackers, distracts us--and pays those bills. Despite all the waiting in doctors’ offices, tests, x-rays, clinical trials, pain and weakness, illness should be secondary. Returning to our pre-illness life is the goal. Battling the discouraging awareness of lost control is crucial. Not giving up is key.

          Interestingly, Gruman asserts, “Not everyone who receives a serious diagnosis needs this book.”  But everyone does.  Even the healthiest of us will someday face patient-hood in that lonely, alien land of sickness where we don’t understand the language (who among us knows Medspeak?), and don’t know where to turn.  Everyone, before and after the disease demons strike, needs this handbook for dealing with medical disaster.  Gruman’s guide to the other side of the bedside should be required reading for physicians, medical students, and other healthcare practitioners.

        Gruman brings a unique perspective to her interviews with disaster-survivors and physicians. A pioneering psycho-sociologist and founder of Washington’s MacArthur-sponsored Center for the Advancement of Health, she is a consumer advocate for everyone forced to become a patient.  Gruman knows catastrophic illness on her own flesh.  Three cancers and a cardiac crisis have besieged her. Veteran of countless Intensive Care Units, surgical “suites,” and oncologists’ waiting rooms, Gruman coped with and defeated all of her medical disasters.

        Yet every time she received a “devastating diagnosis,” her expert credentials went up in smoke.  The earth shook beneath her feet.  Stunned by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health,” she acted just like all her interviewees.         

          Decisions and indecisions beset her.   “There is so much uncertainty about what’s wrong, so many options for what to do; no one else seems to be taking charge; and  I need to understand what's going on. The decisions I must make will affect the rest of my life.” 

          How to live the rest of our lives after bad news strikes is AfterShock’s sub-text.  A support group between covers, it helps “manage” the devilish details of catastrophic illness. However tough it may be, advises Gruman, we must pick ourselves up, brush ourselves off, and get going. For time is short.

         AfterShock provides a way to “get out of here alive”  if or when bad news  strikes. It is a necessity for all our bedside tables before and after shocks come to us.