[I just felt incredibly sad. I saw a spontaneous expression of unassuageable yearning on the young woman's part, not an attempt to ham it up so she could get her photo in the paper. However, I certainly recognize the legitimacy of the issue you raise. There are few phenomena more problematic than the manipulation of grief into kitsch. Speaking of which, the book reviewed below definitely qualifies for that much-overused term "savage satire."]
May 27, 2007 Happy Campers By DAVID MARGOLICK
Review of MY HOLOCAUST By Tova Reich
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 Zyclon 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.
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/27/books/review/Margolick-t.html>
Carl
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