My Holocaust: A Novel

Description

This book is a ribald satire about the establishment and leadership of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The first half of the book is both offensive and outrageously comical as the father-and-son duo of Maurice and Norman Messer shepherd potential donors on a first-class tour of Auschwitz. If that notion was not crazy enough, the personalities of all involved and the things they say will make your jaw drop at times and make you burst out in audible laughter at times. And part of what makes such a crazy story so fabulous is its verisimilitude. As ridiculous as the whole set up is, the reader can't help but wondering if things really did happen even remotely this way as the museum was being set up. This first part of the book also contains some intriguing critical commentary about the entire enterprise of Holocaust commemoration in the United States. The first half of the book deserved 4.5 stars, in my opinion.

However, I agree with so many other reviewers that book goes off the rails in the last 100 pages. Simply put, the last third of the book is not very good. There are so many intersecting plot lines that all sense of verisimilitude is lost. People's lives cross paths in ways that defy logic (and My Holocaust is not magical realism). There are new characters introduced far too late in the novel, and they simply complicate the action without contributing to it in a meaningful way. The main characters' quirks get stranger and stranger. There are numerous random digressions that go nowhere. Sometimes the prose is downright confusing because the author frequently employs interior monologue for multiple characters. It can be interesting, but it is unwieldy here. It is too bad that the book did not end after the trip to Poland or that Tova Reich did not rein in her wilder flights of fancy.