Novel imagines Anne Frank is still alive
There is an admirable fearlessness to Shalom Auslander’s writing. Auslander does not so much try to tell stories as he flings open windows and shouts those stories at passersby in the tradition of some mad-as-hell Howard Beale in the movie Network.
The 2007 memoir Foreskin’s Lament found Auslander railing in outrageous and sometimes uproarious fashion against his Orthodox Jewish upbringing. Auslander’s first novel, Hope: A Tragedy, will probably provoke further ire as the author questions some of the foundations of contemporary Jewish culture, in particular, the assumptions made and lessons drawn from the Holocaust.
Solomon Kugel is mired in a fairly glum existence as a salesman. He lives in Stockton, N.Y., with his wife, Bree; their young son, Jonah, and Solomon’s mother. Stockton is a little burg where nothing noteworthy has ever happened – at least until Solomon discovers strange odours and noises emanating from his attic, where it turns out that a certain Holocaust survivor named Anne Frank has been hiding for years.
In Auslander’s imagination, since miraculously surviving Bergen-belsen, Frank has morphed into a foulmouthed harridan with unkempt hair and talon-like fingernails. As Solomon veers back and forth between wanting to placate the woman or throw the “old bag” out, Frank herself works incessantly on a follow-up to her famed diary, and angrily decries what she sees as the cult of worship that has sprouted up around her memory. She is worth more dead to the Jewish people than she would ever have been had she survived, she says.
“I’m the sufferer. I’m the dead girl. I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945,” Frank declares. “Jesus was a Jew ... but I’m the Jewish Jesus.”
Undoubtedly, many readers will take offence at Auslander’s irreverent characterization of Anne Frank, probably a good deal more than were offended by The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth’s short 1979 novel that also speculated on an alternate history for Frank. But it’s hard to feel too offended by a writer who is trying so deliberately to incite.
At their most provocative, Auslander’s ruminations and his clever inversions of conventional wisdom can challenge readers to re-examine opinions they probably take for granted, particularly regarding how the history of the Holocaust is remembered and taught. For Auslander, the mantra “Never forget” is a particularly vexing one.
“What’s the harm in forgetting? What does remembering do?” the author by way of Solomon Kugel asks. “If you don’t learn from the past, said someone, you are condemned to repeat it. But what if the only thing we learn is that we are condemned to repeat it regardless?”
A fair amount of this can inspire lively discussion. But, even at Auslander’s breakneck pace, his level of rage is difficult for him to maintain and for the reader to ultimately countenance, and the characters here are too thinly drawn for the reader to fully engage with the ideas they propound or represent.
Hope: A Tragedy winds up succeeding less as a powerful, unified and philosophically rigorous work of art than it does as a series of sporadically effective comic sketches. It brings to mind a line from the film Stardust Memories when a space alien provides some sound advice to Woody Allen’s alter ego, a filmmaker who yearns to do serious work but tragically learns that his greatest gift is being a comedian.
“You want to do mankind a real service?” the alien asks. “Tell funnier jokes.”