I have now read, with an
accelerating sense of astonishment, every stupefying word of Tova
Reich's My Holocaust, and have been mentally rehearsing
how best to express my conviction that this is a novel before
which one ought to fall on one's knees. Put it that Philip Roth's
merited status as our most acerbic contemporary American satirist
melts away in the blaze of Tova Reich's burning brand. In My
Holocaust (aha, the title alone!), she is ten times wickeder
than Roth, a hundred times wilder, and his sharpest jabs seem
in comparison no more than the irritable umbrella-pokes of a meek
little old lady in a lace cap, faintheartedly peering into her
reticule to pluck out a complaint. In Tova Reich's unafraid boldness,
in her heroic recklessness, there is something to offend everyone
and everything, every preening and every piety. Nothing and no
one 'scapes whipping-not even the institutions and persons one
might most wish, for fear of public opprobrium, to spare.
Here is a novel that cuts, cuts, cuts: it is satire, caricature,
comedy, farce; it makes you laugh and wince, often simultaneously;
it judges and condemns; but it also clears away cant and pomposity
and fakery. And much more than merely cant and pomposity and fakery:
it accuses the prevailing tone of American society, a cultishness
cultivated from the top down-the cult of rivalrous victimization,
celebrated among the humanities in all American universities,
from women's studies to black studies to postcolonial studies,
from literature departments to history departments to Middle Eastern
departments, all those braggart elitist realms where grievance
and suffering are crowned with laurel.
Tova Reich's verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly,
all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly
savage. All the same, she doesn't lecture or scold; her language
is not that of a moralizing jeremiad. It is (seemingly) as detached
as any of the natural disasters our planet has lately endured:
with the force of a tsunami, a flood, an earthquake, it rolls
over what human hands and minds have made of civilization. She
is Dean Swift's Jewish sister; but poor deprived Swift had only
human nature to deal with. Reich has what Swift, that unlucky
goy, lacked, and (even with all his mammoth pessimism) could not
have imagined: Reich has the Holocaust-or, better yet, the Holocausts,
since, as she elucidates, everyone covets his or her own supremely
desirable Holocaust. Her deadpan riffs and ironies, those long
cresting waves of shocking wit, wash over egotism, greed, envy,
falsehood, corruption, exposing their bones and stones without
mercy. And still we laugh. There is no cranny of American crank
culture ( or couture) that is invulnerable to Reich's skewer.
Her several fantastically imagined rosters of all the possible
copycat Holocausts that our competitive American spirit has devised
are outdone only by reality.
Tova Reich's My Holocaust is a ferocious work of serious
satiric genius. I believe it to be one of the most penetrating
social and political novels of the early twenty-first century
next to which the last century's Animal Farm is a mere
bleat. Its publication is certain to raise a howling hullabaloo;
but if there was ever a hullabaloo worth raising, this is the
one. Yet this extraordinary writer's intent is the very opposite
of destructive. She shows us how the temple of Holocaust memory
has been defiled. She means to cleanse the temple.
Tova Reich, My holocaust
HarperCollins, 2007 ISBN 978-0-06-117345-5
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