I just received a review copy of Tova Reich’s forthcoming novel My Holocaust, and it looks intense, to say the least. Here’s the first paragraph of the description from the HarperCollins website:
Maurice and Norman Messer, father-and-son business partners, know a good product when they see it. That product is the Holocaust, and Maurice, a Holocaust survivor with an inflated personal history, and Norman, enjoying vicarious victimhood as a participant in the second-generation movement, proceed to market it enthusiastically. Not even the disappearance of Nechama, Norman’s daughter and Maurice’s granddaughter, into the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz, where she is transformed into a nun, Sister Consolatia of the Cross, deters them from pushing their agenda.
The back cover of the book is comprised of a two paragraph blurb from Cynthia Ozick, which includes the following high praise:
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.
That’s serious hype, and from the description, the book sounds like it’s ripe for controversy. We’ll know soon enough. It’s due out on April 3rd.
