My Holocaust
With MY HOLOCAUST, Tova Reich creates a dark satire about the way the Holocaust has been manipulated to unethical ends, bringing up issues that have been circulating in the Jewish community for some time. In 2000, Norman Finkelstein, the son of Jewish concentration camp survivors, published THE HOLOCAUST INDUSTRY, an extremely controversial indictment of the way Jewish conservative leaders exploited the history of the holocaust to advance their political and financial goals. Similar issues were raised in 2002 with the divisive Mirroring Evil exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York. Conceptual artists in the show suggested that the Holocaust had become a means by which certain factions create an aura of piety and victimization that is used to, ironically, push forward a militaristic and potentially fascistic agenda. One of the artworks from the Mirroring Evil exhibit was Zbigniew Libera`s LEGO Concentration Camp, and the work is clearly referenced in the hardback cover art for MY HOLOCAUST which depicts a barbwire-enclosed theme park filled with plasticine action figures. Inside, the novel tells the story of Maurice Messer, a camp survivor who has parlayed his occasionally exaggerated claims into a position as the head of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum--a lucrative and powerful organization. His son Norman wants to take the Shoah business a step further by marketing the Holocaust brand to other groups seeking to increase awareness of their particular cultural or ethnic strife. Along the way, they meet a veritable horde of characters--New Age Buddhists, fake Holocaust survivors, egotistical filmmakers--all seeking to profit from the cachet of atrocity. It is a sign of the generational shifts in the understanding of historical meaning that a Jewish novelist (Reich`s fiction has appeared in Harper`s and the Atlantic Monthly) would dare to write a comedy about the Holocaust. It will certainly offend some readers, but it also provides disturbing in Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.
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