The Maris Review, vol 26
"Books that craft Jewish characters to embody the endurance of the human spirit in all its nobility are, in fact, denying these characters’ humanity." --Ilana Masad on Holocaust Beach Reads
What I read this week
You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue, trans by Natasha Wimmer
It’s 1519 and the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his smelly gang of aspiring colonizers have entered Tenochtitlan (current day Mexico City), an Aztec kingdom full of an exotic delicacy called chocolate, as well as ample hallucinogens and painted warriors. What follows is hilarious and disturbing in equal measures. You Dreamed of Empires is the strangest and funniest and most vivid work of historical fiction I’ve read in a minute, a great big paranoid enactment of Who’s On First with an empire at stake.
Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker
Since I read her her debut novel I’ve been a big fan of Chelsea Bieker’s fiction, so much of which deals with the fallout of violence against women. Her latest is a fast-paced but emotionally intelligent exploration of motherhood and trauma and the cult of self-care. How tempting it is for the unwell to make wellness a primary survival strategy, as if consuming the right herbs and roots and Erewhon-esque smoothies is enough to save anyone.
Guest post: Ilana Masad on Holocaust Beach Reads
The piece below was commissioned by Maris and then written and reported over the course of 2021 and 2022. It was killed by the publication after a long editorial process and did not find another home. Since I wrote it, some of the details (specifically, where some of my sources are employed) might have changed, but the fundamental frustration at its core hasn’t. The recent war on Gaza—which was started nominally as a response to the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, but which is in many ways merely a continuation of the illegal Israeli Occupation and the widespread oppression of Palestinians practiced by the Israeli government for decades—has brought irreparable devastation and caused thousands upon thousands of deaths to Palestinians in Gaza as well as the Occupied West Bank. In the ensuing days, American discourse did what it so often does: it turned the pain and suffering of real people into a political football to be kicked around between politicians and Twitter main characters alike. And as so often happens when the Israeli government does something horrific, American Jews’ Jewishness was put to the test, our loyalties—to any number of ideologies and affiliations—questioned, our history used and abused by both the well-meaning and the very much not.
Long before the war on Gaza, Maris and I commiserated over how tired we were of seeing Jewish pain being used for profit. It’s now again (still?) being used for profit but of a different kind; American military aid to Israel is, among other things, a set of business decisions.
—Ilana Masad
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. She is the author of the novel All My Mother's Lovers and the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Here For All the Reasons: #BachelorNation’s Franchise Fascination.
The Shallow Insights of the Holocaust Beach Read
What happens when we sell real-life suffering for light entertainment?
A woman in a heavy coat stands in the middle of an empty road. Or on train tracks. Or, inexplicably, in a field. In one hand, she carries a small suitcase. In the other, she clutches the hand of a child. Sometimes she only has one of these things, and sometimes she has an arm around another be-coated adult. Most importantly, the woman has her back to you. She’s looking at the vista ahead of her, as empty of meaning as she is of life. This is the vague art that accompanies almost every “Holocaust beach read” I’ve ever seen.
Hear me out: If a beach read is, "a book you can take on holiday, which is good enough to keep you engaged but not so serious it will spoil your holiday," then a Holocaust beach read (HBR) is a book that takes place in and around the Holocaust that similarly keeps a reader engaged without being serious enough to put a damper on their good vibes. These books tend to center a defying-the-odds romance, and/or non-Jewish (nor Romani, disabled, or queer) characters saving Jewish characters (usually no other Nazi target). There’s often a message or a moral, something about “redemption and hope” or “redemption and forgiveness” about “what we endure to survive”, “the resilience of the human spirit” or the “belief that the human spirit can triumph”, about “courage and humanity” or “courage, betrayal and survival in the hardest of circumstances.” It boils down to how, as gentiles’ favorite Anne Frank quote goes, “people are truly good at heart.”
I wondered, what kind of care is going into the design and publication of these books? Who are they for?
Not Jews, as I can attest, and as several people in publishing told me. Some expressed not only discomfort with the premise but disgust for the way real Jewish people’s lives and deaths have been cheapened into inspirational characters.
Armed with this knowledge, I dove in. I started with an urtext of this genre, The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris. Released in 2018, it spent 96 consecutive weeks on the NYT Best Seller List, and with its sequel had sold eight million copies internationally by July 2021.
I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, a necessity when you are a Jewish person in the US trying to live out your politics and commitment to equality, social justice, and tikkun olam. My nervous system is quick to react, trained by millennia of diasporic persecution and more recently by my grandparents’ narrow and lonely survival of a genocide. I’ve found it important to parse through my body’s knee-jerk reactions, to understand what is fueled by unhelpful and at times unsubstantiated grievance, and what is fueled by grief. In other words, I often question whether I am witnessing actual antisemitism or experiencing the discomfort of living in a Christian overculture. The rise of very public and overt antisemitism recently (as opposed to the normalized covert antisemitic rhetoric), has shown me I’m not crazy. Still, we’re so diverse, so diffuse, a diasporic folk now gathered most prominently in two oppressive nations that afford many of us great privileges. Our reactions to these places, where many of us are to varying degrees quite safe, are complex and often the subject of great debate conducted both among us and about us.
All of which is to say that, for once, I felt immediately justified in my fury when the main character in Tattooist—the one with the titular role in the titular death camp—tells his girlfriend and her friend: “That the two of you have chosen to survive is a type of resistance to these Nazi bastards. Choosing to live is an act of defiance, an act of heroism.”
The idea that people chose to survive the Holocaust in general and Auschwitz in particular is both abhorrent and ahistorical. The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp held some 1.3 million people between 1940 and 1945, and 1.1 million people, approximately 85%, were murdered. Of those, nearly one million were Jewish. In reality, survival was based largely on luck.
But luck doesn’t make for a satisfying story, at least according to the standards of mainstream English-language publishing. As novelist and essayist Dara Horn writes in her 2021 book People Love Dead Jews, “We expect the good guys to be ‘saved.’ If that doesn’t happen, we at least expect the main character to have an ‘epiphany.’ And if that doesn’t happen, then at least the author ought to give us a ‘moment of grace.’” Those Christian terms are embedded in the way we think Western literature, especially Anglo literature, is supposed to work.
Look, I get it. The world is messy enough already—why would we want to read fiction filled with unsatisfying arc-lessness? We prefer clear plot lines and active main characters. For the purposes of narrative, it’s impossible to fully recount the slow, torturous nature of surviving inhumane circumstances. So HBRs prioritize our readerly comfort and shallow empathy. We want their protagonists, if they are Jewish, to be courageous, quick-thinking, and clever, to survive by their wits; we want to know they earned it. “Dead Jews,” Horn writes, “are supposed to teach us about the beauty of the world and the wonders of redemption—otherwise, what was the point of killing them in the first place?”
Unlike Jesus, however, the Jews murdered during World War II didn’t die for anyone else’s sins, only because of them.
Yes, I know The Tattooist of Auschwitz is fiction, and that the protagonist talking about heroism and choice is a character. But HBRs go so hard on the “based on a true story” angle that many readers believe that they’ve read a bit of biographical history in novel form. And despite all the controversies that followed Heather Morris’s first and second books—including a detailed accounting of their inaccuracies by the Auschwitz Memorial Museum in Poland—novels like hers abound.
Author John Boyne pointed out one aspect of the problem in a since-deleted tweet. Noting the newly trendy “X of Auschwitz” title format, he wrote that he “can’t help but feel that [...] publishers & writers are effectively building a genre that sells well, when in reality the subject matter, & their titles, should be treated with a little more thought & consideration.” The Auschwitz Museum responded rather scathingly due to Boyne’s own incredibly successful (11 million copies and counting!) ahistorical Holocaust novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
Boyne’s tweet—if not his book—is spot on. Real titles from Big 5 publishers and their subsidiaries (including the digital and commercial imprint Bookouture, which was purchased by Hachette UK in 2017) include: Auschwitz Lullaby; The Violinist of Auschwitz; The Girl who Escaped from Auschwitz; The Midwife of Auschwitz, The Brothers of Auschwitz… And that’s not even counting self-published books (such as The Auschwitz Twins series) and all the “inspirational” novels published by Christian presses (such as the Nazi-Jewish romance For Such a Time, which takes place in Dachau rather than Auschwitz but adheres to the tropes of the genre and was nominated for a Rita Award for romance fiction).
Of course, not all Holocaust books are made the same. Jordan Rodman, Senior Director of Publicity at Vintage & Anchor Books, who self-describes as “a major Jew”, has worked on Holocaust-related books her whole career. “You have to be very careful and very respectful in your language,” Rodman says when I ask her about publicizing such books. “There are some books where you can be light and funny and playful, but with Holocaust books it's just never the case.”
Yet there’s something rote to how HBRs are publicized. Even the books that try to accurately represent the Shoah are often marketed like the others. Back cover copy and blurbs include phrases like “vivid, harrowing, but ultimately hopeful” or “a powerful testament to the triumph of the human will” or “unforgettable, devastating, and inspired by a real-life hero of the Holocaust." Words like “heroism”, “sacrifice”, “hope”, and “unsung” abound. “Based on a true story” will often be printed somewhere prominent, lending an air of authenticity to what is, inevitably, a fictional story that unapologetically takes artistic license like a sledgehammer to the nuances of real people.
“I'm aware of those books,” Rodman told me when I asked her about HBRs specifically, “but I don't normally read them. I usually tend to read more non-fiction, or very, very literary [fiction].” She’s frustrated by the softcore Holocaust denialism out there—the idea that sure, yes, it happened, but it wasn’t that bad—and wishes that readers of the more commercial fiction would go the extra mile and read survivor memoirs or more difficult nonfiction. “I'm finding that the books that are on the bestseller list are these sort of instant gratification tragedy books.”
Rachel Feinmark, a freelance consultant with a PhD in American history, has done sensitivity reads on about 15 books in the past year, including a few HBRs. I asked what she tends to look for when doing this kind of work. “I might be commenting on whether the details of a concentration camp are correct,” she told me. “I’ll be correcting Hebrew and Yiddish phrases that are used and talking about whether [the books are] accidentally using offensive stereotypes.” Another major concern for her, when the protagonists are gentiles, is whether the Jewish characters are “just tokens, or are they actually written as people?”
“I don't think any of the authors are doing it on purpose,” she added. I tend to agree with her. I suspect Heather Morris genuinely believes that she’s merely honoring the stories of the dead people she’s fictionalizing.
Similarly, I don’t think the instinct to write about so-called righteous gentiles—those who saved Jews during the Holocaust—is automatically bad. But the issue is that many, many of these HBRs focus on or heavily feature ordinary (and innocent!) Christians in the thick of World War II who, maybe, save some Jews, or are at least nice to them, on the way to an epiphany, redemption, or a moment of grace. As of January 2021, the number of said righteous gentiles officially recognized at Yad Vashem was 27,921, which, Horn reminds us, is “out of a European population at the time of nearly 300 million—or 0.01 percent.” The truth is Jews in the Holocaust were rarely saved by anyone, at all.
Jennifer Young, Education Program Manager at the National Yiddish Book Center, has also fact-checked several books in this genre. She worries about these books “reifying the idea of Jews as victims who are passive and are only redeemed if they’re rescued by non-Jews.” While Jews may not have had a choice about whether they’d be allowed to live another day—or whether their bodies would give out from starvation and hard labor—they certainly made choices even in the most inhumane circumstances: to share a crust of bread, to yell at a weeper in the bunk above, to think of home for comfort or to block it out entirely.
Young has compassion for readers who love historical fiction in general and find something compelling in the sub-genre. “Besides going to museums,” she tells me, “one of the most important ways that people engage with history is through historical fiction. The publishing industry has an obligation to make sure that the history that is being represented in these books accurately reflects contemporary scholarship on these issues.”
Yet the covers certainly tend to stuff Holocaust stories into a digestible silhouette. Take Cilka’s Journey, Heather Morris’s second novel, based on a real woman, Cilka Klein, whose stepson heavily objected to the book’s publication. While the novel’s Cilka Klein is yet another heroic victim who survives horrifying abuse from the Nazis and, later, the Soviet regime, the real Cecilia “Cilka” Klein wasn’t the accommodating sex-slave of the book. Instead, as journalist Christine Kenneally wrote for The Australian, she was remembered by many survivors as cruel, violent, even sadistic, raging “unrestrainedly against her companions in misfortune.” Others remembered her kindnesses, and her future husband, Ivan, said she saved his life. “Part of the extreme cruelty of the camp,” Kenneally reminds us, “was the impossible choices inmates had to make and how corrosive those choices were.”
The novel doesn’t deal in these complexities. Instead, according to its marketing copy, it is simply “based on a riveting true story of love and resilience.” The cover of Cilka’s Journey features the classic woman with the suitcase with her back to us. On the hardcover, she’s overlain with stripes reminiscent of either train tracks or a sideways version of the infamous Auschwitz prisoner uniform. The paperback has her on the tracks themselves, a pinkish sky above, perhaps a vista of hope.
The Creative Director at St. Martin’s Press, who designed both of Morris’s covers, told me over email that the “designer has a challenging job creating a cover that not only looks beautiful and eye-catching but also appeals to the marketplace.” “Essentially,” he said, “the cover is a book’s best marketing tool.”
He told me that he’s “amazed at the triumph of the human spirit, to undergo such tragedy and to be able to pick yourself up and keep living. I have so much admiration for these characters, their courage, their endurance, their hope and their compassion for others even after experiencing such horror and devastation.” He’s not wrong—the characters in these books are certainly courageous, hopeful, compassionate. But the people and circumstances these characters are supposed to speak for—sometimes literally, as in many of the “based on” or “inspired by” a true story novels—were likely far more complex. Readers want saved Jews to be good. Because then the moral of the story is that if you too are good, you will survive. But that’s just not how people act under inhumane conditions. Of course people helped each other, but people also did horrible things in order to survive. Usually, people did some of both.
The desire to read about the past in a way that is more accessible than dense history books or deeply upsetting memoirs is understandable. But the trouble is the pervasive urge to make sense of the Holocaust, to give it a neat little narrative, complete with closure. Without that narrative, people just die, senselessly.
But that’s exactly what happened. They were killed, and there was no good reason for it. No moral. No lesson. They just fucking died. Refusing to look at the way real victims of the Holocaust had to make hard choices, amoral as well as moral choices, is a way of flattening them, as is the creation of a sellable genre that is dedicated entirely to a certain group of people and their saviors. These books that craft Jewish characters to embody the endurance of the human spirit in all its nobility are, in fact, denying these characters’ humanity. They’re reduced to paper cutouts—figures without faces, their backs to us—so that they are beautiful, romantic, impossibly tragic. Neatly wrapped up in a novelistic entertainment that won’t spoil your holiday.
New releases, 10/15
Q&A by Adriane Tomine
The Plains by Federico Falco, trans by Jennifer Croft
Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love by Julie Sedivy
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
Blood Test by Charles Baxter
Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do It More, and How It Could Burn Down Our Democracy by Bill Adair
Forest of Noise: Poems by Mosab Abu Toha
Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America by Talia Lavin
Women’s Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery
Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans by Sophie Hughes
Thanks for publishing this. I've long felt this way about a lot of Holocaust fiction and have a hard time articulating it as well. I used to work in synagogue libraries and as a non-Jew immersed in Jewish books I've noticed that many if not most non-Jews have almost no interest in Jewish books that don't involve the Holocaust and that many people lean towards books like this as unchallenging, books that reassure them about their own superiority, moral and otherwise. The books often infantilize the Jewish characters and turn them into holy martyrs, which as you point out, is not the case- they were people like anyone else, complex and flawed and either lucky or not. It's hilarious that John Boyne pointed this out considering how hugely his career has benefited from use of those same tropes. Try to talk about Boy in the Striped Pajamas with anything but glowing praise to many readers and watch what happens. It's a maddening subject. Thank you Ilana and Maris for discussing and focusing on this topic.
This essay on the "Holocaust Beach Read" is essential. I wish I'd had it a few years ago, when I tried to explain to my daughter why The Boy in the Striped Pajamas made me queasy!