May / June 2006:

The boy who cried holocaust
Is the plethora of books on the Shoah helping or hurting the cause of remembrance?

Essay by Bradford R. Pilcher



One of my favorite quotes has to do with a road to hell being paved and something about good intentions. It is, no doubt, with the best of intentions that so much — books, films, collectible plates — is produced each year on the subject of the Holocaust. I enjoy a good romp through mid-20th century mass murder as much as the next twenty-something Jewish kid, but from time to time, I am compelled to ask: Exactly how much romping is expected here?

Search Amazon.com for books on the subject and you'll find yourself staring at more than 3,900 titles. Every month, a dozen different books on the Holocaust arrive on the doorstep of this magazine hoping for a review.

How do I put this politely? Enough.

This may seem blasphemous or perhaps hypocritical in a magazine featuring a piece of Holocaust short fiction just a few pages away, but I think we could all do with a little less Nazi genocide on our bookshelves. We are faced today with a glut of literature about concentration camps, the failures of foreign governments to stop the atrocities, the children smuggled out of Europe while their parents perished, and on and on.

Holocaust Restitution: Perspectives on the Litigation and Its Legacy is the latest pile of binding and paper to land on my desk. Someone out there must be salivating to read 355 pages on legal maneuvering for restitution, but let me assure you it's not me.

What is perhaps more distressing is that this tome is more appealing than the 49th telling of Kristallnacht staring at me from the other side of my office. I have four books on Kristallnacht. Unless there is something about Kristallnacht of which I was previously unaware, I do not need another book on Kristallnacht, and yet there it is waiting for me to peruse its printed pages. Winston Churchill's biographer wrote it. That's this one's selling point.

If the goal in writing these books is to keep alive the flame of memory, to remind us what happened so that it might never happen again, then it begs questioning whether so many literary forays helps or hurts the cause. Like the boy who cried wolf, all Holocaust all the time has a tendency to tune out the listeners — or in this case, readers.

None of which is to say there aren't genuinely interesting Holocaust books to be read. Take for example The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich. This memoir by Sonia's son Howard explores her late-onset Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which prompted her to literally flee her own home in 2001. Telling everyone someone was trying to kill her, her actions drove Howard to explore the dark — and until then silent — past of his family. The book jacket calls it a "poignant story ... of what may happen when the often repeated admonition to 'never forget' becomes a curse."

This is a fresh and new subject. It is, at the very least, not yet another discussion of how Roosevelt didn't do a very good job saving Jews, like the copy of Roosevelt and the Holocaust that was sent to me just the other day.

What is perhaps the saddest reality of this miserable publishing deluge is that too few readers will find the eloquent prose of Howard Reich. The diamonds in the rough do exist in this little sub-genre, but it's a publisher's job to sift out the rough before the printing presses roll. Amidst this overabundance, that responsibility falls entirely to the readers, but few have the time — or the interest — for that. Most will have long ago banned the subject from their bedtime reading lists, and who can blame them?

If that isn't a crime against the memory of those who perished, to say nothing of the powerful lessons and insights that can still be gained from the Holocaust, then I don't know what is.



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