Far From Brooklyn

Skeletons at the Feast, by Chris Bohjalian

This was recommended to me by my father.  “It reminded me of your career,“ he said.

Here’s why the book reminded him of my career: It’s about a Prussian family at the end of World War II, running west, away from the advancing Russian army, through Nazi controlled German territory, toward the enemy lines of the allied forces.

So you see, that is not unlike the situation a media guy faces these days.

Anyway, “Skeletons” is a pretty well-constructed tale, and it’s perfectly well-written, but there’s something stomach-turning about its inevitable use of the extermination of the Jews as a plot point, and really I could never get past the idea that I was reading an entertainment largely based on that fact.

Now, I’ve read dozens of entertaining books that were set during WWII – military thrillers, usually – and TV shows (Hogan’s Heroes!) and movies of course.  So I’m not sure why this book bothered me.  I suppose it was the earnest discussions of the death camps, and the descriptions of the suffering of the prisoners, all presented as if it were somehow new and unknown to the reader.  It just bugged the hell out of me.

I don’t think Bohjalian’s motives were suspect – he was just trying to tell a romance/adventure story set in the thickets of the closing days of the war, but bringing an escaped Jewish prisoner into the mix (and giving him apparent knowledge of Tantric sexual practices) was just… yeccchh.

I haven’t seen “Inglourious Basterds,” by the way.