"My Holocaust" / Harsh book review

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/Margolick-t.html

  "My Holocaust" By Tova Reich.  326 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

Review by DAVID MARGOLICK / May 27, 2007

David Margolick is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and the 
author, most recently, of "Beyond Glory: Joe Louis vs. Max 
Schmeling, and a World on the Brink."

Whether or not a book can be judged by its cover, that's sometimes 
where it begins. The cover of "My Holocaust" resembles a child's 
board game, like Chutes and Ladders but with sprigs of barbed wire 
and playful figurines in striped prisoner's garb. A cattle car sits 
near an ice cream truck. Hanging from colorful striped poles are the 
words "Auschwitz" and "Birkenau." The concentration camp gate,  where 
the "Arbeit Macht Frei" always went, now says "A Novel."

A send-up of Holocaust commemoration is an inherently dicey 
proposition. Even Mel Brooks made fun only of Hitler; he didn't joke 
about gas chambers and crematories. But wait! On the back cover 
there's a blurb from Cynthia Ozick, the novelist and literary 
conscience of the Jewish community, who compares Reich to Jonathan 
Swift. Those Humvees in Iraq should only have been so well fortified.

At a time when morons and bigots say the Holocaust never happened, or 
that it wasn't such a big deal if it did, the business of 
publicizing and exploiting the mass murder of European Jewry for 
political, financial or institutional gain is something we Jews would 
rather not discuss, except among ourselves. Reich has taken this 
taboo and built an entire novel - wickedly clever and shocking, 
tasteless and tedious, infuriating and maybe even marginally 
constructive - on it.

The story revolves around the barely disguised United States 
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the fictional character 
Maurice Messer, a Holocaust survivor and the presidentially appointed 
poobah in charge. The elderly Messer has gotten rich off Hitler's 
genocide with a company called Holocaust Connections Inc., which 
certifies businesses as suitably Holocaust-respectful. As the 
museum's chairman, Messer is on a mission to use the legacy of the 
six million to manipulate the world, induce guilt, raise money, 
noodge wayward Jews back into the fold and feed his own ego. For a 
donation of a million dollars or more you get your name carved on the 
museum wall; for a cool five, you can get a sterling silver urn with 
genuine human ashes, or maybe even your own inscribed cattle car.

That Messer's family was incinerated in the camps catches him no 
break from Reich. Instead, she turns him into a Stürmer's worth of 
stereotypes. He is a liar - having embellished his own partisan 
credentials - and a thief, a cynic and a boor. His English is 
mangled, Eastern European style - "I'm here to debunk the myt'  that 
the Jews went like sheep to the shlaughter" - and full of 
malapropisms, as we are reminded in an unending fusillade of cheap 
shots. He is obsessed mit (get it?) anything rectal, and sprays spit 
when he talks. Reich has him doing just about everything except 
picking his hooked Jewish nose.

It is nauseating to read about him, but given all the other 
unpalatable characters, you sort of miss him when he's gone. Take his 
nebbishy, neurotic son, Norman, whose daughter has joined the 
Carmelite convent at Auschwitz; or his deputy and heir apparent, 
Monty Pincus, a fraudulent mail-order rabbi, whose own wife attempts 
suicide, perhaps with the souvenir canisters of Zyklon B he keeps in 
his garage in Arlington, Va.; or the stupefyingly dimwitted mother- 
and-daughter would-be donors, Gloria Lieb and Bunny Bacon, whom the 
three sweet-talk and strong-arm for cash. It all takes place at 
today's Auschwitz, which with its snack stands and souvenir shops is 
jarring enough. But making hectoring cellphone calls to your wife in 
front of a Zyklon B display, tooling around the crematories in a 
chauffeur-driven Mercedes, scheming for dollars by the ovens as 
Messer and his entourage do - well, I know it's all to make a  point, 
but with every word I winced, and seethed. Hawking trinkets is  not 
the only way to desecrate a sacred site.

As if to insulate herself from such criticism (and, presumably, 
remind us of her seriousness and sincerity), Reich awkwardly throws 
in Auschwitz factoids. Did you know, for instance, that Jews were 
burned in open pits when the four working crematoria, designed to 
process 132,000 corpses a month, could no longer handle the load? 
Under any other circumstances, I'd welcome such information; the 
world needs to know it. But sandwiching it between satire so crude is 
repugnant. Ditto for gratuitously naming a few of Auschwitz's child 
victims. It would have been more respectful to let theirs and a 
million other Jewish souls rest in peace below Auschwitz's ashen 
muck than to resurrect them for such frivolous purposes.

Mercifully, the action eventually leaves Auschwitz for the Holocaust 
Museum itself. Now, Reich explicitly confronts what's evidently 
eating at her: the apparent belief that this government-financed 
institution, on the most valuable real estate in Washington no less, 
was conceived in sin - a sop to powerful Jews determined to harangue 
the world with their own tragedy - and has been a political football 
ever since, befouling and trivializing the memory of Hitler's victims.

Messer himself articulates her first proposition with characteristic 
uncouthness, calling the museum "a Jewish-power testicle" hanging 
from the Washington Mall. To maintain its funding, to prove it's a 
national institution more than a parochial Jewish one, he happily 
bends to any outside political pressure, squiring around whichever 
mass murderer needs instant expiation, or whomever the State 
Department happens to be cultivating. Following the Jews' poor 
example, Reich suggests, every other historically victimized group is 
now demanding equal time. There is the African-American Holocaust, 
the Women's Holocaust, the Palestinian and Native-American and 
Japanese Holocausts, the Gay and Lesbian and Muslim and Tibetan 
Holocausts. In long and excruciatingly unfunny scenes at Auschwitz, 
she depicts various New Age charlatans expropriating and twisting 
Jewish suffering for their own vacuous purposes. These characters, 
too, move en masse to Washington; an organization calling itself 
United Holocausts seizes control of the museum, promising to occupy 
it "until equal representation is given to all Holocausts, public 
and private, personal and global, animal, vegetable and mineral."

Although the book's lawyerly, cover-your-tuchis disclaimer says 
references to real people, events and organizations are intended "to 
provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously,"  there's 
one thing not on the book jacket: Reich's husband was once  the 
director of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and he resigned  in 
protest. The facts are easily exhumed; The Forward has already 
matched Reich's characters with possible real-world counterparts. 
Throwing vengeance into the mix could help explain how someone so 
sophisticated and undoubtedly committed to Jewish memory could write 
something so rancid and so primitive.

Apart from our righteous and very learned narrator, no one here comes 
off as anything but a scoundrel, fool, lecher or slob. The bile 
extends, inexplicably, to Holocaust survivors. Every one of them here 
is grotesque, obsessed with sexual organs, bodily fluids and 
digestion. One woman, who weighed 80 pounds when liberated, hasn't 
stopped noshing since - ballooning to 220 pounds. The chutzpah! 
These grubby manipulators even know how to extort preferential 
treatment at the Holocaust Museum: just wave their arms - yes, the 
ones with the numbers tattooed on them - at the guards.

Sure, it can seem that ghoulish Holocaust commemoration has become 
the core of Jewish observance nowadays. Sure, some of those 
commemorators can be crass. Sure, some Jews have paraded their 
suffering before the world, insisting it is unique. Sure, much of it 
is ripe for ridicule, and ridicule can purify. But when the near 
annihilation of a culture is at issue, it's hard to pull off; even 
Cynthia Ozick hasn't tried. And if you manage to, so what? 
Ultimately, Reich's obsessions are not just unseemly but picayune, 
and "My Holocaust" is far more likely to infuriate or distract  than 
to cleanse.