My Holocaust: A Novel
by Tova Reich
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Description
Maurice and Norman Messer, father-and-son business partners, know a good product when they see it. That product is the Holocaust, and Maurice, a Holocaust survivor with an inflated personal history, and Norman, enjoying vicarious victimhood as a participant in the second-generation movement, proceed to market it enthusiastically. Not even the disappearance of Nechama, Norman's daughter and Maurice's granddaughter, into the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, where she is transformed into a nun, show more Sister Consolatia of the Cross, deters them from pushing their agenda. Father and son embark on a tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, which Maurice--now the driving force behind the most powerful Holocaust memorialization institution in America--organizes to soften up a potential major donor, and which Norman takes advantage of to embark on a surrealistic search for his daughter. At the death camp they run into assorted groups and individuals all clamoring for a piece of the Holocaust, including Buddhist New Agers on a retreat, Israeli schoolchildren on a required heritage pilgrimage, a Holocaust artifact hustler, filmmakers, and an astonishing collection of others. All hell breaks loose when Maurice's museum is taken over by a coalition of self-styled victims seeking Holocaust status, bringing together a vivid cast of all-too-human characters, from Holocaust professionals to Holocaust wannabees of every persuasion, in the fevered competition to win the grand prize of owning the Holocaust. An inspiringly courageous and shockingly original tour-de-force, My Holocaust dares to penetrate territory until now considered sacrosanct in its brilliantly provocative and darkly comic exploration of the uses and abuses of memory and the meaning of human suffering. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
If Norman G. Finkelstein, the author of the groundbreaking book The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, had written a novel instead of his well-researched historical analysis ... then Tova Reich’s My Holocaust: A Novel might well have been the result. It was with the clarity of Finkelstein kicking around in the back of my head that I made my way through Reich’s strangely compelling and highly entertaining novel. That said, although I have never met Finkelstein, I doubt he would have been able to nail the absurdity of holocaust worship with Reich’s comic timing.
Read more of this review here:
http://www.thetruthasiseeit.com/2008/08/if-norman-finkelstein.html
Read more of this review here:
http://www.thetruthasiseeit.com/2008/08/if-norman-finkelstein.html
Repulsed after 1 chapter. Not for me!
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