My Holocaust Tova Reich Books Review

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."

Skip to next paragraph Enlarge This Image John Hersey

MY HOLOCAUST

By Tova Reich.

326 pp. HarperCollins Publishers. .95.

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.

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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."

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